This is what the dying embers of an 'era' look like. After the Tory - Labour - Tory power shifts, each equalling well over a decade, it's pretty rare for a party to keep that foothold, as people simply get fed up and want any sort of change 'up top'.
Although the five years of ConLib don't count
I'd imagine if indeed there was a GE at this moment in time, Labour would take a huge slice of the pie, though perhaps not 'landslide'- level capitulation levels of '97. Fact is even I don't have much hope for the current Tory lot, as the quality gets ever- watered down and evermore out of touch with the electorate, never mind its own party base.
So chances are unless Labour were to come up with something so revelatory and actually workable, I'd likely not even bother voting at all, for clearly it matters little in the continuous saga of Tory hand-me-downs anyway. Not that anyone voted Truss & co in, is it?
You'd think losing £65bil would be somewhat of a 'job scrutinizer', and that they'd take pariah status rivalling Nick Leeson, yet somehow Truss & Kwarteng are being given, what, time to 'do better'?
I think the Tories have a lot of thinking to do in the coming days....
Yes we have seen this sort of thing before, and TBH I don't think it's healthy, where there is competition, it should be healthy competition, where the choices on offer all have compelling aspects to their prospectus.
For example, in the PC CPU space, for quite a few years Intel were absolutely dominant, AMD's products were poor, they couldn't compete on performance, they ran stupidly hot and noisy, and even at keen prices they were very unappealing. End result, Intel just rested on their laurels for years, churning out basically the same quad-core processors year after year, at stupidly high prices. Yes there was technically a choice, but Intel was the only choice that made sense, and they knew it.
And then finally in 2017 AMD put out their Ryzen architecture CPUs, swinging right out of the gate with 8 cores (Intel were still on 4), a whole new efficient architecture, at super prices, making them very compelling propositions, with 6 and 4 core variants filling out the product stack.
They turned the CPU market upside down overnight, Intel went straight into panic mode and had to actually start fighting back, suddenly pulling a 6 core processor out of their arse, followed not long after by an 8 core part. (So they could have done it for all those years, they just didn't have to because there was no competition.)
You get the idea, Intel and AMD were competing again, and it meant the consumer got better products, at competitive prices, with both companies duking it out to get one over on each other.
So it goes with politics, during the New Labour years the Tories disappeared into the wilderness, they were fighting more with each other than they were with Labour, the next two general elections were basically gimmes for Blair,
but this is a bad thing. Like Intel, in some regards they got complacent, and over-confident, policies that shouldn't have made it out of the door did so, because there was no one around to properly challenge them, culminating of course in the travesty of the Iraq War, and a final term that was marred by infighting and some awful blunders.
I can see the same thing happening again, the destruction job that Truss looks like doing could effectively see the Tories out of 'meaningful opposition', to all intents and purposes, for quite some time, and I don't think that's healthy for politics, or the country.
(And of course by the mid 90s the Tories were in absolute disarray, ripping themselves to shreds over Europe (sounds familiar!.....) and giving Labour something of an open goal.)
The next two years are certainly going to be fascinating, I'm not a huge fan of Starmer, and his Labour Party is very centrist, you could probably pitch it as 'centre left' but that's about it, he has done a pretty effective job of expunging 'undesirable' left wing elements (much to my chagrin, but hey, he wants to win an election), and he's knocked together a decent shadow cabinet. Also, more than anything perhaps, he looks serious and competent, which I suspect is something the people of the UK will absolutely be looking for come the next general election.
Personally I wish Sunak had won, I don't agree with his politics but he is at least competent and has a grasp on actual economics, something which appears to elude both Truss and Kwarteng. Yes he'd have given Labour a harder time but at least he wouldn't have blown up the UK's economy, and like Intel vs AMD post-2017, it would have been a decent fight.
Still, Truss is what we got, so thanks to all those Tory Party members who gave us, out of the entire list of candidates, the worst possible result.
I suspect the Tory Party will change its rules on leadership elections so something like this can never happen again....