In my blog immediately before the election, which Labour won by a “landslide”, I spoke about the Conservative’s inability to grasp that, no matter their record, their positioning and electoral “offers”, they just didn’t ‘get it’. I suggested that the electorate had a sort of ‘Conservative fatigue’, that after 14 years of Conservative governments, the electorate just wanted something different – a change.

In the aftermath, and I write this only a week after the election, several former Conservative ministers, some that had retained their seats, have already spoken about the reasons for their defeat. Of course there is already jockeying for position, by those with political ambition to rise through the Conservative ranks, and even to leadership.

However, in their statements, they have demonstrated just how out of touch they really have been. None of them (that I have heard) have looked inwards at their failures, at their record, but instead have pointed to a failure to “deliver”. What they seem to have missed is that, had they “delivered” on their (most recent) manifesto promises, they would still have presided over a deeply divided, polarised, and unequal country which was ready for a change.

It is typical displacement behaviour to point to external influences (like Covid, like the war in Ukraine, like Gaza) rather than address uncomfortable, even painful, truths closer to home. None of them, so far, have called a spade an ‘effing shovel’ and said sleazy, lying, party-over-country, and incompetent politics has undone them. If they don’t have a “road to Damascus” moment, then they are doomed to repeat the same mistakes when next they form an administration, and we are doomed to suffer it all over again.