So funnily enough, yesterday, I went on to Facebook, and I don't know if you know, but Facebook has this memories feature, which shows you posts from that day, but from previous years.

And I saw that two years ago, I posted in an article by yourself entitled The Last Days of the Conservative Party question mark.

Now, you've alluded yourself to the fact that you're known as Mr.

Conservative decline thesis, all words to that effect.

In light of the general election, what do you think you missed

and what parts of your analysis do you think still stands up today?

Well, I guess I can say that the path of decline is not a smooth one.

It comes with many bumps and many upswings along the road.

I suppose what I take from it, most of all, is just looking at the character of the coalition that the

Conservatives have assembled during the 2019 general election. And it is still, I know it's

very hard. This involves some serious dialectical thinking, but it's still a kind of a coalition

that's in decline. So they increase their numbers absolutely. They managed to put on 300,000 votes. And of course, those extra 300,000 votes has meant that they've been awarded many extra seats. So it looks as like they've got a huge, huge landslide. They only had some in the region of just over 3 million votes more than the Labour Party did,

which is not a massive number in the grand scheme of things.

And again, when you look at the composition of the vote that they got,

it is pensioners almost entirely older people.

Older workers and people who are retired or on the point of retirement,

people who own property. And the issue that the Conservatives have got is they still have

what I've called previously their young people problem. They have assembled a coalition of

propertyed people, some of whom have quite modest levels of property but

nevertheless own their own home and therefore have skin in the game as it were.

But they still have nothing to offer younger people who are not on the housing ladder

who are trapped in low-paid jobs or trapped in

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