Could a Labour landslide trigger a Tory revival in Wales?

Martin Shipton

This may seem paradoxical, but the Conservative Party’s chance of making a recovery in Wales is almost certainly dependent on getting hammered at the general election later this year.

Having an idiot as leader of the party’s Senedd group doesn’t help, of course, but the likelihood is that whoever was in charge wouldn’t be able to stem the negativity that began with Partygate. Losing the election in – probably – October could be the first step on the road to recovery.

Andrew RT Davies – the aforementioned idiot – has devoted most of his energy recently to attacking the Welsh Government’s 20mph default speed limit.

The badly worded petition that demands the reversal of the policy has attracted a record number of signatories, but polling evidence suggests that the discontent hasn’t translated into a surge of support for the Tories.

The same goes for RT’s other hobby horses like the increase in the number of Senedd Members, the proposed introduction of a tourism tax and – an issue close to his wallet – changes to farming subsidies. (I mention in passing the sheer cheek of Brexiteers like RT who persuaded farmers to vote Leave and give up the advantages of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy for an uncertain and, as it turns out, inferior post-Brexit deal).

At a briefing session with other journalists in the Cardiff office of David TC Davies the other day, I offered the Secretary of State for Wales some gratuitous strategic advice: “Change your Senedd leader!”. Wisely, he ducked out of responding and crossed the room to replenish his cup with more tea.

Austerity

There’s a plausible case for a Tory revival after a Labour election victory. Voters’ expectations of the new UK government will be high, but Keir Starmer and his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves seem keener on reassuring City financiers that neo-liberal policies – aka austerity – won’t be abandoned than with providing ordinary people with a better economic future.

Yet there’s no certainty that a likely scenario of this kind will take the Conservatives in a more sensible – or what not that long ago would have been seen as a more mainstream – direction. Most of the party’s depleted membership is on the hard right, and leadership contenders will try to appease the grassroots with ever more outlandish policies.

Equally, the idea of Nigel Farage somehow engineering a reverse takeover of the Tories by Reform UK – the party he literally owns – cannot be ruled out. Such is the state of British politics in this post-Brexit nirvana.

During the briefing session in David TC Davies’ office, TC insisted he had no inside knowledge about when the general election would take place.

Optimists within the party – notional though they may be – are hoping that the seeds of an economic revival may be apparent later in the year. Not too late, though, as elderly Tory canvassers recall without pleasure the difficulty of delivering leaflets and knocking on doors while wearing mittens to fend off frostbite.

The prospect of the Conservatives snatching victory from the jaws of defeat sounds implausible to me, although it’s unrealistic to expect any Cabinet minister to admit his government is heading for a serious drubbing.

Possibilities

For a moment, it’s worth considering the positive possibilities that might arise for the Conservative Party in Wales after the coming general election loss (which is so far beyond reasonable doubt that it’s not even worth referring to in the conditional tense).

With Labour in power in Westminster, the Welsh Labour government will no longer be able to blame the UK Tories for its many shortcomings and delivery failures. While ministers in Cardiff may continue to complain about the inadequacy of the block grant from the Treasury, their beef will be with a Labour Chancellor rather than a Conservative one.

Indeed, they may choose not to be so vocal anyway, given the new First Minister’s already manifest desire to cosy up to Keir Starmer and be his man in Wales.

The Tory Senedd group has already missed a trick by failing to condemn in sufficiently forthright terms the way in which Vaughan Gething secured victory in the Welsh Labour leadership election thanks to a £200k donation from a convicted criminal.

But it’s not too late for a new group leader to retrieve the situation in the run-up to the next Senedd election in 2026.

Practical policies

Instead of banging on about RT’s all-too-familiar hobby horses, it’s time for the party to devise a set of practical policies that could appeal to a wider section of the electorate than will vote for it at the general election.

It’s worth reminding ourselves that 17 years ago the Welsh Conservatives very nearly found themselves in government with Plaid Cymru and the Liberal Democrats. A policy programme had already been agreed and what was known at the time as the rainbow coalition only failed to come into being because there was a tied vote at a Lib Dem meeting that was meant to ratify the deal.

In 2007 the UK Labour government was less popular than it had been, with fallout from the disastrous invasion of Iraq still very much in voters’ minds.

Ieuan Wyn Jones, the Plaid leader at the time, could very easily have become First Minister. Instead, after the Lib Dem stumble, he settled for being Rhodri Morgan’s number two in a Labour-Plaid administration.

Andrew RT Davies has shown no inclination to work seriously with Plaid Cymru in opposing the Welsh Labour government. He prefers to remain in an apparently time-locked bubble, fighting past battles over and over again and opportunistically trying to turn every issue into a culture war.

He may be the official leader of the opposition at the Senedd, but the idea that he could run an alternative government is taken seriously by no one. It’s a joke.

But if the Welsh Conservatives decided to take my advice and put RT out to pasture in one of his many fields, there could be a new dynamic. While Welsh Labour would no longer be able to use a UK Tory government as an alibi for its own inadequacies, neither would the Welsh Tories be tainted by bad decisions made in real time by its own counterparts in Westminster.

David TC Davies understands the possibilities. Speaking to journalists during the briefing session in his office, TC said: “I wouldn’t be against working with Plaid Cymru. There are issues where we have some shared concerns – on agricultural matters. I wouldn’t imagine we’d fall out over the Welsh language – some might imagine we would, but I don’t think we would.

Clearly the main sticking point is going to be that Plaid Cymru is going to be pushing for independence for Wales, and we’re going to be pushing for Wales to stay firmly within the Union. [This didn’t impede the Labour-Plaid coalition formed in 2007.]

“I detect within Plaid Cymru that there are two different strands, or used to be a few years back: ‘We’re the true socialists – we’re more left wing than Labour.’ But there are also Plaid Cymru voters in parts of Welsh-speaking west Wales and north Wales whose general values are probably quite conservative with a small c. I’m not sure how they square the circle, but I don’t see any reason why we couldn’t work with them on certain issues.

“I don’t think the Conservative Party in the Senedd should rule out any kind of coalition, if we can remove Labour and agree on different issues. I wouldn’t have any personal issue with that at all.

“It would be nice to think we could win an overall majority at the next Senedd election, but it would be quite ambitious. The possibility is we might fall short of that ambition and therefore I think we need to be open-minded about working with other people on things. There is no reason in principle why we shouldn’t work with other political parties to take control of the Senedd, if the opportunity arose.”

In April 2024, with an unpopular Tory government still in power at Westminster, such a scenario may appear fanciful. But when in December 2019 Labour suffered its worst general election defeat in 84 years, no one gave it a hope in hell of being on the verge of a landslide victory less than four and a half years later.

Things can change and unlikely scenarios can become plausible.