If you’re looking for electoral suspense, don’t look across the pond. Barring a polling error of world historic proportions, 14 years of Conservative rule will come to an end in the United Kingdom on July 4. The question isn’t whether Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s party will lose, it’s whether anything will be left of them the day after.

Just five years after the Conservatives won their own historic landslide, pollsters are warning that the party faces “electoral extinction.” The current forecast from the Economist predicts the opposition Labour Party will win around 431 seats in the 650 seat parliament, up from the 205 they currently hold. That would be the center-left party’s biggest majority of the post-war era, eclipsing the landslide 1997 election, when the Tony Blair-led party trounced John Major’s Conservatives, ending a 18-year period of Tory dominance. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are projected to fall from 344 seats to just 109. Constituencies that have been loyal Tory bastions for decades are in play.

The party is likely in for a brutal internal battle over its future, with some right-wingers calling for a merger with Trumpian gadfly Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform UK party. Some polls suggest Sunak might become the first ever sitting prime minister to lose his own seat. (Though he fortunately has a $7.2 million mansion in Santa Monica, California to fall back on, which presumably has many seats.)

The Conservatives ended up on the brink of a historic loss the way Hemmingway described going bankrupt: Gradually, and then suddenly. The Tories have been underwater in the polls since late 2021, but Sunak only called this election in late May, likely sensing his party’s prospects were not likely to improve any time soon. That’s a swift, though not exactly painless, end to a political era that radically changed a country and its place in the world. The consensus view is that it has not changed for the better.

A forthcoming book, The Conservative Effect, 2010–2024: 14 Wasted Years?, co-edited by Anthony Seldon, a veteran chronicler and biographer of contemporary British prime ministers, attempts to take stock of the legacy of this period. Seldon is unsparing in his concluding essay, writing, “By 2024, Britain’s standing in the world was lower [compared to 2010], the union was less strong, the country less equal, the population less well protected, growth more sluggish with the outlook poor.” He concludes: “Overall, it is hard to find a comparable period in history of the Conservatives which achieved so little, or which left the country at its conclusion in a more troubling state.”

• 14 years, five prime ministers, one Brexit
• The aftermath
• Not-so-global Britain
• What’s next?

...read more at vox.com