2024 In Review: The Year The Tory Story Ended

An English parliament has existed for more than 800 years, and there have been some startlingly bad ones: the Mad Parliament of 1258; the Bad Parliament of 1377; and the Merciless Parliament of 1378. But, following this vigorous start, terrible parliaments took a 646-year break so they could get a really good run-up to the Conservative one that ended in 2024. 

This was a parliament that took the biscuit (and then probably tried to have sex with the biscuit, or chopped it up for snorting, or flogged it to their mates). Even the Telegraph described it as “the worst parliament in history” – and not without cause. Of the MPs elected in 2019, a record number were expelled or resigned due to some depravity or other.

How we laughed as Rishi Sunak promised that he was about to conjure “integrity, professionalism and accountability” from the cast of self-serving crooks, xenophobes, and charlatans that formed his party. How bereft of laughter it seems now.

The year began with an ITV drama, Mr Bates vs The Post Office, which shoved the story of Britain’s biggest ever miscarriage of justice into every living room, hot on the heels of 14 years of heroic governmental apathy.

Kemi Badenoch, at the time the Business Minister most recently responsible for doing nothing at all, immediately decided the buck stopped several miles away from her: she phoned the Post Office’s chairman, who she had never even bothered to meet, and sacked him on the spot. “Well, someone’s got to take the rap for this”, she told him, while instructing him via civil servants to stall compensation payments, so they’d land on the desk of an incoming Labour government, thus allowing the Tories to “limp into” the general election.

And limp they did, largely as a result of shooting themselves in both feet, not least over asylum seekers. Credit where it’s due: the Conservatives had guaranteed an illegal migration policy, and that’s precisely what they delivered. The Supreme Court ruled the Rwanda plan was unlawful, because the country was an unsafe destination. So the Tories attempted to declare it safe by parliamentary fiat. Why didn’t they just vote to make Gaza safe, if that’s how it works? Or Chernobyl? Or putting your fingers near Jonathan Gullis’ mouth?

Sunak’s inevitable failure over Rwanda was enough to make Andrea Jenkyns demand yet another Tory leadership election, so she could serve under a “new and true Conservative leader”. By the year’s end, her search for a new and true Conservative led her to Nigel Farage, an old liar from the Reform Party. But, in the meantime, Sunak spent the six months prior to Farage’s inevitable return to the spotlight tackling more urgent biggest problems: his immediate predecessors. 

Liz Truss was like an actor who had been cast in a single episode of Star Trek, and then eked it out into a lifetime of Comic Con appearances. In her endless quest for relevance, the least popular premier in the history of British polling launched a faction called ‘Popular Conservatism’, which was designed to unite the party but, in a dazzling return to form, managed to split in two during its actual launch event. Four speakers had been invited, but only Truss and Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up, like a jump-scare. Kwasi Kwarteng decided – only 14 years too late – that it would be better if he quit politics entirely. And Simon Clarke was forced to pull out because his most recent coup attempt left his colleagues describing him as “a self-indulgent tosser”.

Meanwhile, as Russia became ever-more dangerous, we discovered Conservative funding cuts had left the Army unable to afford enough bullets. Luckily, we could depend on our volunteer force. “Lance Corporal Johnson reporting for duty, Sah!”, declared Boris Johnson, secure in the knowledge he was 25 years too old for military service. But at least he’d moderated his ambitions. Where once he had aspired to be World King, he now reckoned he could make it all the way to the lowest-ranking non-commissioned officer it is possible to be. And he was certain the Army would want him, even though, as Jennifer Arcuri can attest, he’d already done his fair share of dishonourable discharges.

Since Worzel Damage turned out to be ineligible to fight on our behalf, and his Government’s cuts had left our military unable to do more than point their empty guns at Russia and shout, ‘BANG!’, we had to find other ways to deter the Kremlin. 

So, as part of the ongoing sanctions against Putin’s regime, Sunak relaxed the rules that banned Russians from attending the Chevening Scholarship, a master’s degree programme for future leaders, fully funded from Britain’s foreign aid budget. You probably assumed foreign aid was helping poor farmers in developing nations. In fact, it was training Russian leaders. The US anti-corruption campaigner Bill Browder called the move “highly inappropriate” because “a programme like this should be for citizens of countries that aren’t threatening us with nuclear war”.

But much of this terrifying news slipped under the radar because our attention was entirely taken up by champion edgelord Lee Anderson, a witless carnival barker for those who are convinced they can shout ‘BANG!’ well enough to stop the Russian bear, but who are unable to cope with seeing a trans person in a John Lewis commercial.

The then Deputy Tory Chairman claimed Islamists had “got control of [Sadiq] Khan [and] he’s given our capital city away to his mates”. The outrage drew Sunak’s racism problem into sharp focus: he simply couldn’t afford to offend racists, because he needed their money and their votes. So he declared Anderson “wrong” to target Khan, although he wouldn’t be drawn on exactly why Anderson was wrong. He just was. Islamophobic? I guess that’s just unknowable. Prejudiced? An impenetrable secret. Xenophobic? What do words even mean, anyway? All Sunak knew was that Anderson was “wrong”, an abstract term that placed unconcealed bigotry in the same category as a lapse in mental arithmetic.

None of this helped Conservative hopes in May’s local and mayoral elections. In London, the party’s candidate was Susan Hall, was the batty neighbour from a 1970s sitcom that they can’t repeat anymore because attitudes have changed. On social media, she liked messages endorsing Enoch Powell, and she joined Facebook groups rife with Islamophobia, which – morality aside – is an arrestingly poor campaigning move in multicultural London. Unsurprisingly, she lost by the largest margin in the mayoralty’s history. Her response, beamed live from whatever planet she was on, was that she was “proud” to have “so nearly” defeated Khan.

But the Tories’ racism problem deepened when the party’s largest donor, Frank Hester, was reported to have said that merely looking at Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women”, and that he hoped Abbott would be shot. Fortunately, the Conservatives had stocked up on the word ‘wrong’ during the Anderson debacle, and were quick to roll it out again.

This did nothing to end the scandal, and Downing Street refused for days to call the Tories’ biggest donor a racist. It insisted he had merely said something that was “clearly unacceptable”, but which it was prepared to accept in return for a few million quid. When Scottish Conservatives urged the UK party to “carefully review the donations it has received” from Hester, a senior Conservative official responded: “Nope, no way, not going to happen. They’ll have spent it.” He was right. Three days after the story broke, the Conservatives accepted a further donation of £150,000 from Hester’s company and, by the time the election was done, he’d donated a total of £15 million.

Meanwhile, Lee Anderson was considering his options before deciding which party he wanted to be kicked out of next – and eventually plumped for the National Front’s new haircut, Reform UK. This left an opening for Most Embarrassing Conservative, an accolade which most of the party seemed to compete for in a spirit of insatiable gusto. 

Enter William Wragg. 

And then exit William Wragg, who at the tender age of 36 still managed to be described as a ‘senior Tory’. He stood down after sharing what he euphemistically described as “compromising things” on dating app Gridr, and then – and this is the really clever part – waiting until the perfectly obvious extortion racket tried to extort him, and then handing over private details about his colleagues, rather than calling the police. “I’ve been a bit of a clod”, said Wragg in a masterful demonstration of understatement.

He should have been prouder: he was punching above his weight in the relentless struggle to be declared Stupidest MP of 2024, but sadly he lost out to Mark Menzies, who, barely one week later, managed to get himself kidnapped by the crime gang he’d accidentally joined. “I’ve got in with some bad people and they’ve got me locked in a flat and they want £5,000 to release me”, Menzies told Katie Fieldhouse, the 78-year-old woman he called from captivity, perhaps expecting her to launch a Liam Neeson-style takedown of his tormentors. It’s bad enough that he urged her to steal the ransom money from donations to his election campaign, but then you learn that the Conservative Party’s chief of staff had informed Fieldhouse not to worry about the sticky fingers of their own MPs. “It is fraud”, he told Fieldhouse, “but you are not duty-bound to report it because it’s not Conservative Party money.”

In desperation, the Conservatives urged the nation to ignore all of this and instead focus on the outrageous scandal of a working-class woman legally buying a house with money she hadn’t even stolen from donors. It was her own money. Imagine!

Many former Conservative ministers saw Tory attacks on Angela Rayner for what they were – “one of the most grotesque spectacles of hypocrisy I have ever witnessed”; and “brutal, snobbish and completely out of proportion”. Regardless, the Telegraph dedicated 28 shrieking headlines to Rayner’s non-existent malfeasance in a single week, while hidden away in the paper’s pathless backwoods there appeared a minor article, in which tax experts admitted any outstanding liabilities “would likely only be about £500”. In the event, she didn’t owe a thing. 

Meanwhile, one of the Conservative Party’s largest donors, Lord Bamford, along with his brother, was under investigation for tax liabilities quite literally one million times larger. There is not a single article relating to Lord Bamford’s tax in the Telegraph. 

But mud had to be slung, because the election was nearing, and nothing was going right for Sunak. He’d already been through more relaunches than the Space Shuttle, generating just as much hot air, and culminating in just as many disasters. And now it was time for another. He donned his muscle suit and pretended to be a strong man. It was like being led by Mr Benn.

“The next few years will be some of the most dangerous… our country has ever known”, he announced – perhaps hoping he could win an election by scaring voters shitless. I guess making us piss ourselves laughing counts as a near miss. His relaunch speech was still echoing along Downing Street, and was already written off as a failure. Did the party even have a strategy? It didn’t look like it. It looked like government as improv: a real-time Whose Lie Is It Anyway? in which members of the public called out ideas such as “f**k off”, or “no, seriously, fuck off”, and then the Conservatives did the opposite.

Not that there was much enthusiasm about the alternative. In recent years, the Disney corporation has taken to filming in a facility called The Volume, a 360° wall of GCI artificiality that renders everything small, meaningless and dull, but facilitates the mass production of empty crap for mass consumption. Perhaps it is this that inspired Keir Starmer to create a form of flat, fake, wraparound politics that allowed room for Natalie Elphicke in a party that still contained John McDonnell.

I think it’s fair to say that Elphicke’s defection to Labour united every party in abject horror. She’d been so far to the right that Conservatives openly expressed surprise that she hadn’t joined the BNP. Vidal Sassoon’s nemesis, Michael Fabricant, accused Elphicke of wanting to “drown migrants” and “start a war with France”, and deplored the fact that “someone with those views is accepted into Labour”. He’d nonchalantly accepted her in the Tory party three days previously, but Fabricant has always battled three great foes: consistency, Toni and Guy.

Finally, the news arrived that Sunak would go to the country on 4 July. The period since 2010 had felt like a long illness. The election of 2024 felt like a grateful death. 

As election announcements went, it wasn’t half bad. It was three-quarters bad. Sunak didn’t even have the wit to stay in, out of a torrential downpour, opting instead to get cinematically drenched as he performed his climactic big number. ‘I’m just Rish’, he sang, the only Ken in history to be smaller than his own action figurine. It was hard to look at him without thinking about the chef from Ratatouille after being abandoned by the rat.

In accordance with tradition, Sunak rolled up his sleeves, the political equivalent of a bat-signal indicating that he was all about getting things done. Or so we thought. It turned out his sleeves were rolled up because he’d been groping elbow-deep in the Number 10 policy toilet, from which he plucked the glistening masterpiece at the centre of his plans for British renewal: making people pretend to be a soldier for one day a month.

In fairness, his Government had brought back slum housing, food shortages, DIY dentistry, scurvy, rickets, and acceptable racism. So I guess National Service seemed the logical next step on his path to secure victory in the General Election of 1924. Maybe he hoped the policy would transform Conservative electoral prospects – in which case it worked: he transformed them from dreadful to terminal. Dozens of his MPs decided to jump rather than be pushed, and the party seemed to be slowly disassembling before our eyes. You half expected them to start singing ‘Daisy Daisy’ at an ever-decreasing speed and pitch. 

But we could still rely on the steely presence of vainglorious wazzock Steve Baker, who decided to stick around long enough to rap his favourite Action Man dream on live TV. “What do you want to do if you’re not an MP,” asked Victoria Derbyshire. “Skydiving, motorcycling, fast catamaran sailing,” barked Baker, in the style of somebody up against the clock on the Generation Game conveyor belt round. “I was talking about work,” Derbyshire replied, “but that’s fine.”

And with that, off we go to Normandy, where Sunak’s quick exit from the D-Day commemorations managed to compress The Longest Day down to a couple of hours. Penny Mordaunt, angling to be the next Tory leader, went so far as to describe Sunak’s decision as “wrong”, placing it in the same category as the kind of racist outburst that gets you jettisoned into another party. It was Sunak’s worst week to date. 

But, then again, so was every preceding week. He’d spent his entire premiership wandering listlessly from calamity to catastrophe and back again, like a latter-day Micawber, chanting a mantra that something would turn up. What turned up was Nigel Farage, with a smile like the brass plate on a coffin lid, taking over as the Leader of Reform, and reassuring those with the memory of a goldfish that he shared their grievances, having personally caused most of them.

So now the right was split between two bonkers visions for the country. In Sunak’s topsy-turvy UK, poor people were skint because we’d given them all the money, while those who were drowning in riches remained too poor to pay tax. In Farage’s arsy-versy Britain, foreigners had ruined the country so much that everybody wanted to come and live here. The only fly in Reform’s ointment was how dazzlingly attractive it had become to candidates who thought Hitler was “brilliant” and “inspiring”.

As if that wasn’t repugnant enough, Farage said that Sunak – born in Southampton and educated at Winchester – “doesn’t understand our culture”. For – and I’ve checked my notes on this – the gazillionth time, Farage stood accused of racism, but defended himself by reminding us that he had “done more to drive the far-right out of British politics than anybody else alive. I took on the BNP just over a decade ago”. See also: that time, Snickers took on Marathon bars.

This nasty little incident made many feel for Sunak, although we’d have felt for him a good deal more if he’d responded appropriately to Lee Anderson and Frank Hester. But hypocrisy was the name of the game, and the Tories played it to perfection. For 14 years, they’d been a Government obsessed with gambling the country’s future for personal gain and, a week before the election, they chose to remind us of that fact with the most on-the-nose fashion imaginable. A remarkable number of Sunak’s close aides and confidantes had placed identical bets on the date of the election, and whadayaknow? They paid off.

The party’s director of campaigns ended up spending the rest of the election on a leave of absence because his wife stood accused as part of the betting scandal. Few voters were shocked. We were too busy being astonished that this campaign was being directed at all.

Perhaps it was misplaced loyalty, perhaps a weary disdain, perhaps merely his sterling native impotency, but Sunak threw nobody to the wolves. He had chosen the hill he wanted to die on, and that hill, it seemed, was William Hill. He answered all enquiries about misuse of insider knowledge with his best Manuel impression – ‘I know nothing’ – thus proving to Farage that he did know our culture.

I guess it could have gone worse, although I can’t imagine how.

Conservative candidate James Cracknell described his own party as “a shower of shit”, and ministers stopped agreeing to make public appearances. Laura Trott had failed to turn up to so many hustings that, in the end, the organisers replaced her with a toy squirrel. In a party that still had 372 MPs, 25% of all TV and radio interviews were undertaken by one man: Mel Stride, whose only notable achievement is that he once undertook 25% of all TV and radio interviews.

Of course, it was perfectly possible that Keir Starmer was equally lousy at electioneering, but we never had to find out because the Conservatives were so hilariously bad at doing politics that Labour didn’t even need to try. Which is fortunate because Starmer turned out to be as hollow and soulless as the chalk outline around the corpse of socialism. His offering to the nation boiled down to: things will not get better, but they will get worse at a slightly slower rate.

Labour won by a landslide. But for Rees-Mogg, the worst part wasn’t that he lost seat. It was that, by the time the result came in, it was dawn – which meant it wasn’t safe for him to return to his crypt until the sun went down again.

The Conservatives ended up with the lowest number of MPs in the party’s history, and the largest ever drop in MPs between one election and the next … at least until 2029. Labour’s mandate is a mile wide and an inch deep. Starmer’s 412 MPs seem like a vast buffer against discontent, but the party only increased its vote share by two points. The landslide was so gossamer thin that you could look straight through it and see Farage lurking from behind.

That things have not begun well can be put down to two things. Certainly, Labour has the worst economic inheritance since the war, but it is not addressing it with anything like the radical resolve of Clement Attlee. But a large part of the problem is the robotic nature of, not just Starmer, but of his entire team. It’s as though they spent so long handling Ming vases that they’ve learned an abject terror of any movement. 

Sunak’s bestie Elon Musk foresees millions of jobs being replaced by a partially effective AI bot, but nobody predicted that the first job affected would be Leader of the Labour Party. Starmer espouses his vision for the nation in the tone of a man who hates visions for nations. It’s as though the country has elected The Auditor Of All Things. Everything is to be enumerated and balanced in Starmer’s ledger: ideas, hope, enthusiasm, even his own personality. The sum total of Keir Starmerness available to the public will not exceed the sum of his parts; nor will it fall a microgram short, or your money back.

The months since July have been as low, flat, and dishwash-grey as half a year of rainy Wednesdays, each moment distinguished only by its indistinguishability from the next. It feels like Labour spent a decade cunningly plotting its route back to power and then dedicated 10 minutes after a boozy lunch to considering what would happen if it won. Within just two months, Starmer’s popularity fell below that of Sunak, which won’t surprise you when you remember the first Labour budget didn’t arrive for 76 event-free days, during which nobody detected any hope of an improvement to their lives.

Already Elon Musk, the planet’s top troll, is forecasting Reform as the winner of the next general election and, although it’s easy to ignore a man who predicted that by 2024 he’d have crisscrossed the US with 600 mph hyper-tunnels, populated our cities with autonomous robot taxis, and landed the first humans on Mars, I still worry he’s on to something. Unless you’re a tribal voter – and fewer of us are than ever – there is no reason to vote for a progressive party if it does nothing to improve your life. During Labour’s months of wet inactivity, 36% of British children languished in poverty, and the effects of a vastly unpopular Brexit left the economy tumbling by a further £500 million a week. When we did finally get a Budget, it seemed to deliver almost nothing, unless you count irritating Jeremy Clarkson as a major accomplishment. And you can achieve that much with a cold meat platter.

It’s easy to imagine disillusioned masses already forming intractably negative opinions about Starmer’s project, throwing their hands in the air, and crying ‘stuff it, I’ve got nothing to lose by giving the insane racists disruptors a try’.

The Parliament ending in 2024 may have been Mad and Bad, and only avoided being Merciless because its leading lights were 100% malevolent, but only 7% effective. But if Labour wants to experience a truly appalling parliament, it should continue as it has started – and watch what happens when it’s replaced by Prime Minister Farage.

Russell Jones is the author of ‘The Decade in Tory’ and ‘Four Chancellors and a Funeral’