100 years ago this week, Ramsay MacDonald became Labour’s first Prime Minister. It was a historic moment but an inauspicious start to Labour’s journey as a party of power. For a start, MacDonald’s Labour didn’t have a majority in the House of Commons – they became the Government in part because the Conservative and Liberal parties were at war both with each other and with themselves. But they also found themselves in Government because then Tory leader, Stanley Baldwin, had a cunning plan.
Baldwin felt that the Conservative Party could cement itself as the natural party of Government by helping Labour to finish off the Liberal Party once and for all. If he could demonstrate that Labour was the true and normal opposition in the United Kingdom, so the thinking went, then the British public would (more often than not) choose the Tories over the alternative. Why? Because Baldwin was in the process of turning the Tories into a ‘national party’. So, while Labour would (more often than not) be constrained in their appeal by divisions of class and/or by a natural British suspicion of utopian promises, the Conservatives would present themselves as an essentially classless party of reassuring common sense and common ground. You know what? He was right (more often than not). Killing off the Liberals, by putting Labour temporarily in office, cemented the Tories as the default winners in British politics.
This was the strategic insight that set the Conservative Party up to govern for most of the twentieth century. Yes, Labour sometimes won – under Attlee, under Wilson – but, more often than not, the Conservatives prevailed. And when Labour did win, it didn’t really last. For the most part, the Tory party stuck with Stan’s plan. And, for the most part, it worked.
But today’s Conservative Party isn’t much interested in Stanley Baldwin. It isn’t much interested in being a national party, either. They have become, themselves, the sort of utopian dreamers and fringe fanatics that they spent decades casting (successfully) Labour as – albeit with a different flavour of unachievable dream.