Looking to the past won’t help the Tories navigate their future

These are going to be dark days of introspection for Conservatives. And, as they try to make sense of the 2024 election, some will look to the party’s past to put it into historical perspective. There is, however, no precedent for how awful the result was for the party in terms of vote share and seats won: it really was that bad.

Yet, as a comfort amongst the wreckage, but also an inspiration for future effort, some party members will likely alight upon earlier examples of how the Conservatives recovered from cataclysmic defeat. Of those modern instances – 1906, 1945 and 1997 – 1945 is by far the most appealing. After being thumped by the Liberals in 1906, the Tories needed the first world war to get back into government as part of a coalition; after Tony Blair took them to the cleaners in 1997, an international financial crash was required to help them win office again and then only in another coalition.