Britain’s most under-rated prime minister of recent decades was James Callaghan. He became Labour leader in the 1970s during a period of strikes and industrial unrest, economic stagnation and disruption in British industry and society. This has obvious echoes of today in the UK. People wanted a change then and want one now.
Mr Callaghan was ejected from office in 1979 by a Conservative leader who surfed the waves of change and gave her name to a political ideology – Thatcherism.
Margaret Thatcher was Britain’s first woman prime minister, and she profoundly changed British society – selling off state-run industries including British Airways, taking on strikers in one of the country’s most powerful unions, the coal miners, and running her party and government with endless energy and discipline.
Mr Callaghan famously commented: “You know there are times, perhaps once every 30 years, when there is a sea-change in politics. It then does not matter what you say or what you do. There is a shift in what the public wants and what it approves of.”
We are at such a time in Britain now, despite many obvious differences between 1979 and 2023. The Labour leader, Keir Starmer, is not an ideologue like Mrs Thatcher. Some think he is too timid. But people today forget that Mrs Thatcher in 1979 was very different from Mrs Thatcher of 1990. She began cautiously and grew remarkably in office, often through adversity. She even survived an assassination attempt by the IRA.
Right now, seasoned British politicians and political observers are beginning to detect the possibility of one of those seismic shifts that Mr Callaghan alluded to. Voters are fed up with things as they are. Change is in the air in British public life. And Prime Minister Rishi Sunak may soon find that, like Mr Callaghan, it “does not matter” what he says or does because the public has “shifted” in what it wants and approves of.
That, at least, seems to be the evidence of one of the two big public events in Britain this month – the local government elections. We’ll get to the other big event in a moment. But these elections for local councils are the biggest test of public opinion in England outside a general election. While the election winners are a mixed group, the election losers are absolutely clear. The Conservative party, in the tradition known as “expectation management”, let it be known that they might expect to lose 1,000 council seats. Politicians always over-estimate the number of potential losses so that if they lose only 900 seats, they can then claim the results “exceeded our expectations".
But this May’s elections were even more dismal for the Conservatives than their own doom-laden prophecies. They were emphatically the losers. The winners were everyone else. Labour performed well, up some 500 seats. The Liberal Democrats were up 400. It was an “anyone but the Conservatives” election. Some Brexit-supporting former voters seem to have returned to the Labour party.
Two big political questions, therefore, will dominate the next 18 months. First, can Labour win an overall majority in the next general election? Second, will the Conservative party, which has been riven with internal divisions since 2016, fall into line behind Mr Sunak, despite the fact that under him the party is clearly a vote loser – or will the Conservative internal civil war continue?
Feuding would be madness, but that has not stopped the Conservatives in the past. Choosing Boris Johnson and Liz Truss as leaders, some commentators would argue, also suggests that the Conservatives are no strangers to bizarre and ultimately self-destructive behaviour.
Labour is also cheered up by events in Scotland. They have a relatively new leader there, Anas Sarwar, and hope to pick up perhaps a dozen or more seats because the governing Scottish National Party seems demoralised, divided and embroiled in an investigation of party finances.
Scotland and London, incidentally, did not vote in these local elections and both have proved to be areas where the Conservatives find victories hard to come by. So May 2023 has proved an odd month for the UK.
Future historians may note that the great public celebration of the coronation confirmed in Britain a sense of constitutional continuity. The crowning of King Charles III means the royal succession seems assured for decades to some. But this same month, the political succession is much in doubt. Voters, to return to Mr Callaghan’s pointed observation, have tired of 13 years of the Conservative party psychodrama over Europe, economic policy and much more.
Conservative insiders worry that the careful politics of Mr Sunak will not be enough to keep them in office because – as Mr Callaghan put it – there really is a sense of a sea-change in British politics. The big question remains about who the British public will trust to ride this new tide. Mr Starmer has a chance to make history, although in the unforgiving world of politics, he will have only one chance.
