Andrew Gilligan: Selling doom is counter productive. What every party lacks is an optimistic offer

Andrew Gilligan is a writer and former No10 adviser.

One of the reasons my old boss, Boris Johnson, won a higher vote share than any Tory since Margaret Thatcher is the same as one of the reasons Labour has crashed – and the same as one of the reasons Reform has failed to break through the 30 per cent ceiling.

That reason is optimism, or the lack of it.

In the last full quarter of the Sunak government, the economy was growing by a respectable 0.7 per cent. But Starmer’s “everything is terrible” speech in the No10 garden, weeks after the election, set a tone of confidence-sapping gloom from which business sentiment, and his government, haven’t recovered (it was only one of many mistakes, but an early and important one.)

In his defection speech, Reform’s Robert Jenrick made the question of whether “Britain is completely broken” the dividing-line between his new party and the Conservatives. As he put it: “I challenge anyone to argue Britain is not completely broken…. At a recent [Tory] shadow cabinet, a debate broke out. The question was put to the group: is Britain broken? I said it’s broken. Almost all said it’s not broken.”

In my time as a journalist, I reported from almost 50 countries, some of which were indeed “completely broken.” I know what a broken country looks like, and Britain is nowhere near. As Jenrick fairly said, some things in Britain have certainly got worse – but lots haven’t. Food, clothes and consumer goods are better and cheaper. We’re healthier. We live longer. We travel more. We survive illnesses that, even recently, killed thousands of us. We have multiple forms of entertainment on tap, any time we want, instead of having to wait for BBC2 to repeat Fawlty Towers (a caricature, by the way, of the kind of abysmal service business that has almost totally disappeared from modern Britain.)

My fundamental reason for optimism about Britain is that for all the echoes of the 1970s, the country is still in a better, more recoverable place than it was then. Above all, British business is far stronger and more efficient than it was then. It has survived everything the politicians have thrown at it – though its resilience is not, of course, infinite. It could power our recovery, if burdens on it were lifted.

I think we can say that British government and politics have stopped working properly. But even they have scored some recent successes, and even they are not as dysfunctional as those of many other democracies. And the “everything is broken” view carries a risk of nihilism: if crapness is inevitable, why even try?

To run a place, you need to look as if you like it. To get people to accept the difficult choices that are needed to rescue Britain, you must give them hope for something better at the end of it. Reform hasn’t yet managed either of these things. (I wonder if Nigel Farage brought his bonhomous side to the fore, his party would get those extra five to 10 points it needed.) The Tories are better: Kemi Badenoch talks about optimism, rejects the everything-is-broken narrative, but still doesn’t sound very optimistic, still doesn’t have much of a (published) plan to fix anything, and hasn’t yet really dealt to the public’s satisfaction with what the party did wrong in government.

There isn’t an obvious Thatcher figure waiting to rescue the country now, but there wasn’t then, either. Thatcher wasn’t seen as an obvious rescuer for quite a while. What there are, though, are lots of people who know things need to change and lots of little Project 2025s, a reference to the work done in the US to prepare both a conservative manifesto and a manual for how to get it done in government.

Boris was too optimistic, I agree. Just saying that the covid test-and-trace system was going to be “world-beating” didn’t make it so. He didn’t have a plan for that or much else. You need that too. The hope he created ended up being squandered.

But he did manage to make many people feel better about him, and about themselves, creating the juice to get at least some things done, and helping deliver the Tories their best vote share since 1979.