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Notes -
Ultimately, the tl;dr for why the Tories lost in 2024 is that they were so incompetent in government that you couldn't tell whether they were failing to deliver on a right-wing agenda or failing to deliver on a centrist one.
And part of the reason for the incompetence is that they were high on their own supply over Brexit. The discussions within the Conservative party in 2024 were not about "How do we do the hard work of replacing EU policies on agriculture, immigration, customs administration etc?" (which needed doing, and either wasn't done or was botched with visible consequences), it was "How do we spend the £350 million a week Brexit dividend?" (which was always only £160-180 million because Johnson and Cummings lied about the numbers, and which in any case wasn't available for the first few years because the government negotiated a deal including a divorce payment). A large part of why the Boriswave happened is that Cummings thought (he boasted about this on his blog) that Brexit defused the immigration issue without the need to actually reduce immigration, because we had "taken back control."
Another part is that they chose a leader whose character made him unsuitable for executive leadership because he was able to tell the lies needed to win the Brexit referendum.
And another part is that the purge of people who were insufficiently Brexitty left the incoming Conservative govenment short of talent.
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