The only certainty in contemporary politics is volatility. That is the fundamental lesson of the past six years – from the open, compassionate and pluralist spirit of the 2012 London Olympics, via the Tories’ surprise victory in 2015 and the nativist vote for Brexit in 2016, to Jeremy Corbyn’s unexpected surge in last year’s general election.
The oscillation is bewildering, the runes unreadable. Which is why smarter Tories do not buy for a second the notion that we have reached “peak Corbyn” – a silly attempt to graft branding jargon on to nuanced psephological reality.
Yes, Labour failed to take Barnet, Wandsworth and Westminster in last week’s local contests, and should be concerned about its failure to make much progress outside London. But the party denied the Tories control of Trafford, took Plymouth, and – according to the BBC – would be the largest party in the House of Commons if the results were replicated in a general election.
What has been scotched (or should have been) is the no less silly myth of impregnable destiny that has gripped some parts of the Labour left since the Tories lost their majority. There is no direction to history, no teleology in a complex democracy. To say that Labour has a lot more to do to win – as Alastair Campbell and others did on Saturday – is not to reassert Blairite values, defend neoliberalism, or declare the Iraq war a roaring success. Least of all is it a “smear”. This is all about the hard grind of gaining power, the door-to-door trials that face any opposition if it is to become a government.
William Hague has observed that the Tory party has two default positions: complacency and panic. It is fair to say that Conservatives are panicking a little less than they were a week ago. They have been reminded that Corbyn is a man rather than a shaman, that his path to No 10 is not mystically ordained. But, in private at least, they are uncertain what to do with this information, how to turn it into useful political action.
Let us say that Theresa May does not fight the next general election as Tory leader, but aspires to remain in office until at least 29 March 2019, when Britain leaves the European Union. The most important question facing the party after her departure – more important than the identity of her successor – is the trajectory it chooses to follow when she is gone.
It is undeniable that the Conservatives did extremely well on Thursday in areas that voted leave, and profited from the collapse of the Ukip vote. Boris Johnson’s claim on Twitter that the government’s “vision for leaving the single market and customs union [was] a key part of Tory electoral success” strikes me as a stretch. But this analysis is already hardening into orthodoxy among Conservative leavers: the country, they say, has made clear that it wants a hard Brexit, and the party cannot afford to alienate the Ukip bloc that it has won back.
You would need a heart of stone not to laugh at the decline of the movement formerly known as Nigel Farage’s fan club. It is glorious that Ukip should now be self-identifying as the Black Death: the words of its general secretary. But the Tory party must at all costs avoid becoming the willing host to its contagion. The defining characteristic of the Ukip voter – past or present – is implacability. No Brexit will be hard enough, no immigration reform tough enough, no recoil from progress fierce enough to please them.
It follows that a strategy designed to appease this tranche of the electorate is not only (in my view) terrible for the country but also (as a matter of fact) entirely pointless. If the post-May party becomes hostage to the spirit of Farage – and some say it already is – then it will lose the next general election, and deserve to do so.
Ours is a deeply diverse society, economically dependent upon immigration and culturally enriched by it. The Tory party has been wrestling with this fairly straightforward reality for more than 20 years now. What was once called “modernisation” is now in fairly obvious retreat: ask those affected by or – a much more numerous group – appalled at the Windrush scandal and the government’s handling of it.
To win a majority again, the party has to persuade (for a start) young, urban, socially liberal and ethnic minority voters that it does not hate them. This is, to put it mildly, no easy task.
Last week’s elections were a minor tremor alerting the political class to the tectonic uncertainty that still lies beneath. The Tories have been awakened from their fatalistic stupor and reminded they have a choice. What matters more, of course, is that the rest of us do too.
• Matthew d’Ancona is a Guardian columnist
