On the eve of the 2019 general election I wrote (hardly as a lone voice) with a certain lack of enthusiasm at the choice offered by the major parties. Looking back now, I suspect I may have been over-optimistic…

When this website launched, at the start of August 2015, a David Cameron-led Conservative government seemed in place for years to come, with Nigel Farage’s UKIP, despite significant support, having missed out on a threatened electoral breakthrough. Jeremy Corbyn was emerging as an unlikely front-runner in the Labour leadership election, even if the prospect still had an air of unreality. And while the possibility of the UK voting to leave the European Union was on the horizon and Donald Trump had announced his US presidential candidacy, both outcomes looked likely to be shocks averted in the manner of Scottish independence.  

Of course by December 2019, Trump was US president, the UK was in the process of leaving the EU, and Corbyn was leading Labour in his second general election. Cameron had in the meantime been replaced not just once, but twice; Theresa May (thanks to the 2017 election outcome and the divisive Brexit process) having given way to, of all people, Boris Johnson, an MP for the second time by August 2015 but still Mayor of London with national ambitions that seemed to have a faint comic air. 

Yet somehow, the chaos of December 2019 seems more to resemble the relatively familiar calm of August 2015 than where we find ourselves now. The covid pandemic made the concerns of the previous decade seem rather fleeting, the economic effects hitting a financial landscape that had barely recovered from the late 2000s slump – arguably the major cause of the political upheavals in the following decade.

The pandemic did not permanently bring down Johnson physically, but its handling was the underlying cause of his political demise. That was swiftly followed by the Liz Truss catastrophe, and by Rishi Sunak’s rise from virtual obscurity in early December 2019 (let alone August 2015) to future prime minister within months, to former future prime minister, to actual prime minister, to (seemingly unprotesting) obscurity again in far less time than it takes to curate a thoughtful blog. 

Add all the above to the effects of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the aftermath of the Hamas attack on Israel in October 2023, and Trump’s presidential return, all of which have had observable domestic economic or political consequences for the UK, and again December 2019 seems to present a context far from contemporary.  

And that is without considering the extraordinary outcome of the 2024 general election, which produced a political map almost inconceivable in 2019 and certainly before 2015. It was a Labour landslide under a conventional leader in Sir Keir Starmer, but the doubling of seats from around 200 to over 400 somehow felt, from the party’s point of view, ominous and provisional rather than triumphant and decisive. 

The Conservatives, seemingly hegemonic in 2015  and even more so in 2019, now faced an existential crisis. The Liberal Democrats – who themselves appeared potentially on the way out in the late 2010s – won more seats than they’d had for more than a century (counting the old Liberals), but still seemed somehow less of a force than Nigel Farage’s Reform, while the Greens and various Corbyn-flavoured independents also found unprecedented representation. (We should note too the various shake-ups in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.)

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Fourteen months later, even that result seems ancient history, with Labour struggling to deal with a taxing inheritance, and Starmer at odds with a party not fully over the election of his predecessor in 2015 (and in some cases resentful that Corbyn does not remain at the helm, let alone inside the Labour tent at all). Coming so soon after the self-inflicted wounds of Angela Rayner and Peter Mandelson, the 2025 Labour Party Conference – the second in government after more than a decade in opposition – somehow has the potential to get as fraught as the one in 2015 (the pessimistic anticipation of which was the subject of one of my first Lion & Unicorn pieces).

Until this summer, Reform have to all intents and purposes been a policy vacuum – apart from a core hostility to immigration and their dedication to being led by Nigel Farage (a man whose own substantial proposals tend to have a rather short sell-by date). They also have an ever so slightly mixed record in local government. But, as their poll ratings attest, they are now a major force – apparently more so than the ailing Tories – and with the defections to prove it. Brexit might not have solved all of the grievances presented by Farage, but a proxy refighting of the 2016 referendum could pay big electoral dividends. A decade on from Cameron’s tactical blunder of offering that people’s vote, the Conservatives are now positioning themselves to offer a pale Farage-ism without Farage, which seems doomed when the real thing is available – whatever that actually might prove to be.

And somehow filling the role taken by Jeremy Corbyn in 2015 is still Jeremy Corbyn – though now sharing the stage with a new Green leader who’s just as principled and radical/self-regarding and ludicrous (delete according to taste). Except that a decade on Corbyn and his allies (possibly including Zack Polanksi’s team if mutual egos allow) may no longer need a hostile takeover of the Labour Party to elbow into the national conversation.

I would mention the Liberal Democrats, but a year after that influx of MPs they seem to be making less impact (nationally at least) than in the wake of electoral wipeout a decade ago, when – wondering if inspiration for their revival could come from the similarly depleted post-war Liberal Party – I was moved to write that: ‘The best way to describe the Liberal Democrats at the moment is to say that they are like a normal political party, only worse.’ That would be harsh on Ed Davey’s LibDems, especially considering their strength in local government, but they do not feel like the old third force, providing a home for voters tired of the Conservative-Labour duopoly; rather they find themselves bracketed with their two old rivals as one of the legacy parties, dreaming of an old, safe political world now faded away.

The febrile state of Summer 2024 looks now an oasis of calm, and the late 2010s a mythical, placid political utopia. 

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In December 2019, looking at two major parties trying to fashion themselves in the image of unconventional leaders, I wrote:  

What is occurring is not some thoughtful, or even tactically astute, repositioning, rather an attempt to define each party respectively around, on the one hand, the cynical posturing of Johnson, and on the other the attempt to replace the broad church of the Labour Party with a catechism based on loyalty to an individual. And it is most uncertain that failure in either case would lead to any sort of reappraisal; more likely, blame will be directed at the insufficiently loyal.

In the end both Johnson and Corbyn’s leaderships indeed ended in different flavours of failure, and the fallout was bitter. Johnson, I suggested in 2019 (and again I was hardly a lone voice), was ‘a man whose only consistent position is cynicism. And yet he has demanded the Conservative Party plant itself in a part of the political spectrum where such compromises to circumstance are anathema’.

Since 2022, the party has tried to overcome that contradiction but has despaired of both the uncompromising approach of Truss and Kemi Badenoch, and an abortive pitch at competence under Sunak. Farage may hate many things, but he at least does not seem to hate himself – no wonder his self-confident Reform has proved more attractive to those who would usually look to the Tories when dissatisfied with a Labour government. 

That a Labour government was returnable in 2024 was in part due to something I did not see coming in December 2019: the failure of the Left to put forward a plausible candidate in the coming leadership election, thus clearing the way for the elevation of a plausible candidate for prime minister. Starmer rightly saw that the Tories’ record in office was leading to their implosion, but he still had to persuade the electorate that, unlike his immediate predecessor, he at least was not worth actively voting to keep out. 

He succeeded in that, but the prospect of governing in the 2020s has proved no more straightforward for Starmer than for the three prime ministers he opposed. Having generated such limited enthusiasm a year ago, it is hardly surprising that he now sees so many voters who then backed (or at least consented to) Labour already looking around again.  

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After the May 2019 European election, which produced results with a rather distinct echo in the polls of 2025, pollster Peter Kellner wrote: ‘Britain’s two-party system is in intensive care.’ Six years on, those two parties may retain more than 80 per cent of House of Commons seats, but his words ring no less true. But what 2015, 2019, 2024 and 2025 (and presumably 2028 or 2029) have in common is the general feeling that past performance is no longer any guide to future outcomes. 

In 2019 I suggested: 

It seems somehow wrong that the political process should be effectively taken over by small selectorates within the Big Two, putting in place self-absorbed leaderships seemingly contemptuous of so many of their own half.

Now those in each ‘half’ of politics have no problem finding another option. And that has accelerated the hollowing out of parliamentary parties – no one pretends that the Reform leader is somehow reliant for his position on the confidence of his Commons colleagues, any more than Corbyn proved to be. The Conservatives’ continual parliamentary manoeuvring in their later years in power might have shown that weak party leaders need to court their MPs, but by the end of the last parliament the goings-on in the Commons seemed less and less relevant to the general election that had actually produced that House.

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One response has been the election of more independent MPs. And arguably the Reform, Green and even Liberal Democrats can be seen among their number, so localised were many of their individual campaigns – often in contradiction to positions taken elsewhere, or even nationally, by their parties. This does not suggest that the present party system can hold, even if it is in some ways an elegant response to the seeming impossibility of electoral reform. 

Of course, a stable two-party parliamentary system with credible leaders commanding the confidence of their own MPs is not much good if there is simultaneously a cost of living crisis, a housing shortage, ailing public services and a general feeling that there are few domestic or international certainties. And in attributing culpability, it is true that for all the tumult of recent decades, the UK government has been effectively in the hands of either the Conservatives or Labour just as much in the early twenty-first century as in the twentieth. 

Many technological changes have fundamentally altered the ability of governments to manage economic policy and public finances, regardless of membership of supranational bodies, and the UK can only do so much to insulate itself from international shocks. The fragmentation of media consumption, while allowing certain blogs to flourish, has encouraged people to immerse themselves in partisan channels (not necessarily in the television sense) that promote purity as necessity and compromise as surrender, deflating the big tents which were the architecture of the old system. 

Electorates turning away from traditional centre-right and social democratic parties is far from unique to the UK, and first-past-the-post has given the British equivalents more protection from decline than their European equivalents (the same is true in Australia and Canada). But the disillusion that was tangible in 2019 may now be producing a true realignment, even if there is plenty that can happen ahead of the next election to change that – as the upheavals from 2019 to 2024 show.

Still, there is no doubt that automatic allegiance to one or other of the two major parties has hugely declined even compared to 2019, as the unusual swings in recent elections have shown. Whether attracted by the furious and uncomplicated messaging of Farage or Corbyn, or the flavour of localism pitched by various Liberals, Greens, Celtic nationalists or independents, many voters, if they turn out, seem ready to produce a political landscape as unfamiliar as that which seemed possible six years ago but not imminent. Circumstance rather than incompetence or corruption on the part of the Tories and Labour might be the underlying cause, but their alternating presence at the helm leaves them sharing a can which may be too burdensome to carry without mutual serious consequence. 

In 2019, I was pessimistic about the politics of the coming decade, concluding with understatement that it did ‘not promise to be pleasant’. Neither Johnson nor Corbyn remained in position far into the 2020s, each ultimately brought down by long apparent weaknesses. But their dramatic rises were clearly symptoms rather than causes of the electorate’s chronic disillusionment, and by the end of the decade Britain could well end up even more fragmented, unstable and illiberal than could be imagined in the late 2010s. Or there might be a reassertion of popular power, sweeping away a decaying system. Forgive me for being pessimistic about that too.