Forget 'landslide'. Here are some new electoral disaster metaphors
4 min read
You can keep your comparisons with 1931, 1906 or 1832. Here we present the Cowley-Bailey Electoral Disaster Metaphor Scale.
The Liberal victory of 1906 was variously described at the time as an “avalanche”, a “wave”, a “landslide”, and a “deluge” – although George Whiteley, the Liberal Chief Whip, drew on the description of St Paul’s shipwreck in Acts 27:14 to describe it as “a veritable Euroclydon”, which isn’t a phrase you hear much these days from MPs talking to their constituents.
Fast forward 91 years and early on election night in 1997 Tony King reached for a different metaphor. Landslide, he told those watching the BBC’s results coverage, was much too weak a word to describe the result. What was about to befall the Conservatives he said was more like “an asteroid hitting the planet and destroying practically all life on earth”.
It was an arresting image, one that summed up a night in which John Major’s Conservatives suffered their worst defeat since the one in 1906.
And as the polls continue to forecast another painful night for the Conservatives on Thursday, so King’s metaphor is being pressed back into use.
And yet…
True, election night in 1997 was a bad one for the Tories. But it didn’t wipe them out.
The Conservatives went into the 1997 election defending – on what were then new, redrawn boundaries – some 343 seats. They lost 178 of them, ending up with just 165. That’s a loss rate of around 52 per cent. That’s very bad, but it’s not practically all life on earth. It’s more akin to what’s happened to the Beatles (two down out of four). Plus, what the polls are currently predicting for the Conservatives is worse than what occurred in 1997 – but how can you get worse than practically all life on earth?
We need new metaphors. Here we give you the Cowley-Bailey Electoral Disaster Metaphor Scale, a sort of psephological Beaufort scale. It’s a list that betrays our own interests – including far too much time as children watching TV in the 1970s. It’s Euroclydon-free. We offer it as a cut-out-and keep guide ahead of election night.
The Conservatives go into this election defending (again, based on the notional estimates of the redrawn boundaries) some 372 seats. If they lose 37, that would be the equivalent of the Roman military practice of decimation, which saw one in ten soldiers bumped off. At the other end of the scale, a truly catastrophic night which saw them reduced to, say, one MP would be roughly proportionately comparable to the losses suffered by HMS Hood in 1941, which sank with the loss of all but three of its 1,418 crew.
Because the polls are currently predicting a bad night for the Conservatives, we have used them for our benchmarks here. But no party bias is implied. If on election night, it turns out the polls were totally wrong and it is Labour that suffer losses, feel free to adapt. And anyway, whatever happens this time, the electoral scythe will come for Labour in time.
Lest you think this is in bad taste, it’s worth remembering that landslides – a phrase that entered US political language towards the end of the nineteenth century – can be pretty deadly things, regularly inflicting death and destruction. In 1997 the BBC illustrated the scale of defeat with a graphic that showed a dozen Conservative politicians buried up to their necks.
A final note for the pedants. Some of these figures are estimates. Should you feel the need to email us to correct anything, do feel free, although it may be that you are taking this more seriously than we are.
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