IT’S easy to miss anniversaries at the moment, just as we’re missing birthdays, weddings and – the hardest when so many are bereaved – funerals. But today marks the point at which the Conservatives have, nominally, been in power at Westminster for more than a decade, since it was 10 years ago yesterday that David Cameron announced the formation of the Coalition.

Now that it’s difficult to remember what life was like 10 weeks ago, it’s not surprising that few are going to mark this impossibly distant occasion, when birds sang in the rose garden and there was the promised dawn of a new kind of politics; given that it never came, and the party managed to run through three prime ministers over that period, lose a parliamentary majority and quite a few MPs, you’d imagine that they have little to celebrate.

What’s more, a substantial number of what might be chalked up as “achievements” – from delivering Brexit to introducing same-sex marriage, and leaving aside whether you approve of them or not – were victories over themselves, or what would once have been considered their natural base of support.

In 2010, remember, it was only the Liberal Democrats who wanted a referendum on EU membership. When the rise of Ukip led to the Tories promising one, and they managed to squeeze a majority, the Government backed Remain.

Once it had lost that argument – and Mr Cameron – and when all the parties (bar the SNP) stood on a manifesto of respecting the result, Theresa May, much of her party and the opposition created total paralysis for three years; if Boris Johnson’s Government deserves any credit or electoral capital from “having delivered Brexit”, it’s only because his immediate predecessors as Tory leader made a complete pig’s ear of it.

And, as Ed Miliband and then Jeremy Corbyn assured us, and as Labour MPs still like to claim, this was over a “decade of austerity” during which there was untold misery, public services were destroyed by huge spending cuts, and which was – in the more hysterical claims – responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths.

So, at a point where fatigue and discontent usually start to wear down any party that’s been in power for that long, and in the midst of a crisis which looks likely to cause more economic damage than the crash of 2008, will certainly cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and business closures, and which critics maintain the Government is handling uniquely badly, what is the current state of play?

The Tories have a majority of 80, their biggest since 1987, and a 20-point lead over the Labour Party, that’s what. Constituencies like Sedgefield (Tony Blair’s old seat), Bolsover (Dennis Skinner’s for half a century), Workington (Labour at every election since 1918, bar one by-election in 1976) and Bishop Auckland (which had never elected a Tory in its 134-year history) now have Tory MPs.

Half of the UK population intends to vote for them at the next election. Given the SNP’s dominance here, the fact that they have just a third of Welsh seats and the different party set-up in Northern Ireland, it basically means that in England, people are about twice as likely to vote Conservative as they are for anyone else. And England has 533 of the UK’s 650 seats.

This is, to put it mildly, not the result that one would necessarily expect, especially to judge by the chorus of disapproval raised against the Government in some quarters. But if you find it actually bewildering or incredible, you are not only ignoring reality, but probably labouring under one of the following misapprehensions.

First, the idea that Jeremy Corbyn was personally electable. This is demonstrably just a delusion. The idea that a party that shares most of his ideas is electable. This is almost as certainly improbable. So the Tories had the advantage that the main Westminster Opposition was even more rubbish than they were. Whether this changes will have more to do with Sir Keir Starmer and Labour than the Government.

Secondly, the conviction that the UK as a whole didn’t want Brexit or, more accurately, that once that had been confirmed as the result, most people didn’t want it implemented. This seems very difficult for some people to grasp, but it really is time to get over it.

Thirldly, the assumption that “austerity” was especially severe. The fiscal constraints of the past 10 years reduced previous spending plans, but not public spending itself. NHS spending, and indeed public spending overall, rose every year of the coalition, from £673 billion to £759bn. Full-time employment rose by three million, unemployment fell by a million, until we had, at the start of the coronavirus outbreak, the highest number of people in work in history.

Meanwhile, the budget deficit – which was why there had to be savings – went from seven per cent of GDP into surplus last year. Traditional Conservatives might complain that there weren’t enough cuts, given the increase in the national debt, while if there’s anyone in the party who actually wants to privatise the NHS, they’re not doing anything about it.

The (current) misconception most likely to change, and that poses the most obvious danger to Mr Johnson’s administration, is of course its handling of the current crisis. It almost certain that serious mistakes have been made, and that may well lead to the Government becoming incredibly unpopular.

But as things stand, most people think it is doing its best, following the science, and actually approve of the restrictions that have been imposed on them. This opinion is probably not held very firmly, and could easily change, but like it or not, it is the widespread one.

And given that, beside the amount of daily exercise or the timing of reopening garden centres, there has been basically no difference at all in the governments’ approach, those who claim to approve of the Scottish, but not the UK, policy cannot be judging the policy, but the messenger.

The possibility that the UK Government will be blamed for errors, or will botch the effort at recovery, is high; there are enormous political, economic and social problems to face. But right now, if you think there is overwhelming opposition to them, you’re misjudging the public mood.

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