Don't worry, the equally inept pals of yours will get a crushing victory this year and will quickly prove to be equally incompetent, bent and hopeless.
The Tories had a swingeing majority via the northern seats they won, mainly due to UKIP/Brexit party in 2019 - those Labour voters who couldn't bring themselves to vote Tory voted that way thus taking enough votes from Labour to allow the Tories to win by default. Not applicable this time around, they will all go back to Labour.
So the situation will reverse itself. I cannot vote Tory this time - the spineless, blathering, dishonest and disingenous cretins in power now are the biggest shitshow since Callaghan's 1974-79 administration. So I will vote Reform UK, a gesture only as they will likely get millions of votes as with the LDs but few or no seats. But this will make certain of the biggest ever swing (in terms of seats) in UK electoral history. Labour will make colossal gains, I can even see them leaving the Tories with less than 100 seats.
As well as this massive fillip for Labour, you've got a nasty, anti-white, venomous-looking muslim Hamas supporter in charge of the SNP in Scotland (WTF??) who was unelected like Rishi Sunk and leads an equally discredited and hopeless party. Labour have never had it so good, they could stand a six-foot plastic turd for election in 620-odd UK mainland seats and still win 400+ of them easily.
Beware of what you wish for mate, it's soon gonna happen.....
As you note yourself, the Tories had something of a clear run at it in 2019, with many people simply unable to bring themselves to vote for Corbyn, and the dynamics around those Red Wall seats wanting to 'Get Brexit Done' making Johnson's pantomime act a one time only credible electoral proposition.
The thing with Labour is that they do make things better when they're in power, and in ways that most people really notice, such as the NHS. Many political arguments and debates are somewhat esoteric and seem very far removed from a lot of what goes on in the day-to-day lives of people in the UK, but everyone notices when it's taking them, or their family and friends,
weeks to get an appointment with a doctor, when by the end of Labour's last stint in government, the target (which was almost universally met), was
48 hours. (NHS hospital waiting lists are also now catastrophically longer than they were in 2010, and this was happening long before Covid, so that's not a Get Out Of Jail Free card.)
Moreover, the Tories have fundamentally fucked themselves with what has traditionally been their Ace up the sleeve, being the party of economic competence. And I don't just mean Truss and Kwarteng (who have done a
huge amount of damage to the Tory's economic brand). The national debt, for example, which was £770bn when the Tories came to power, is now £2760bn, which if you work it out is a frankly mind-boggling £380m per day. Yes, that's
three hundred and eighty million pounds,
PER DAY, added onto the UK's national debt in 14 years of Tory rule. (And seriously folks, what have we got to show for it?)
The young are already massively anti-Tory, and as people pass into middle age they're not switching to the right - (as discussed previously in this thread, as the old economic model that saw people get better off, own houses, get a decent pension etc as they got older has been smashed) - we all know for a fact that the Brexit referendum would go for Remain if it were held now, and that's only going in one direction (further towards Remain) as the years roll by and demographics does its thing. (My dad, rest his soul, voted Tory in 2019 and for Leave in 2016, neither of his children, or their children, would ever do so.)
The Tories are almost certainly getting hoofed out at the next election, and I'm wondering what their route back in will look like. Starmer's Labour aren't going to be revolutionary, but they do have some pretty solid policies that are decently popular with a fairly broad slice of the electorate. They're also laudably sane and have an air of workmanlike boring competence about them, which after the rolling Tory shitshow since the Brexit referendum in 2016, is quite electorally appealing.
The latest act of self-destruction that the Tories are performing over Rwanda is emblematic of how much they're lost the plot, that policy is pure poison to just about everyone of a centre-left disposition, but also to huge chunks of more centrist and reasonable folks who lean to the right, there was a telling moment in the latest episode of Question Time, which had a
majority Tory audience, and they were asked for a show of hands on who supported the Rwanda policy - not a single hand went up.
Still, as they say, as week is a long time in politics, let alone a year, and if there's one thing the Tory party is good at, it's reinventing itself and winning elections, but from the current position it's hard to see how they don't lose the next election, and with this ongoing lurch to far right populism and general bat-shittery, it's kind of hard to see how they win again, either.