AHC: Tories Win 1997?

Your challenge ah.com is to make the Tories win the 1997 UK General Election. The rules are:

1) POD As early as 1990, as late as 1997.

2) Tories MUST have been in government since 1979, no Kinnock/Smith victories please.

3) Anyone can be Tory leader.

4) Blair MUST be Labour leader.

Make it happen. GO!
 
It's very difficult as even if you avoid Black Wednesday, either by Britain not joining the ERM or going in later at a different rate, or even have Major go for a realignment straight after 1992 then you've still got a weak economy leading to the imposition of VAT on fuel breaking a key election promise which hurt them just as bad as Black Wednesday. You then have the whole Maastricht Treaty time bomb which even without Black Wednesday is going to make the Tories look divided and weak.

Even if you can avoid all this you are still left with a Party tired after over a decade in power and with backbenches full of Has-Beens and Never-Where's diluting the talent pool available. Especially against Blair the Tories are going to look like Yesterday's Men, you can certainly keep Labour's majority down but a fifth Tory term is very difficult to create unless something truly unpredictable happened.
 

De la Tour

Banned
Maybe Blair doesn't become as much of a reformist as in OTL? He could well stay in the leftist camp (he was in the 80s). Basically, you can have Labour lose, but not New Labour.
 
In the Soviet coup in 1991, the hardliners capture Yeltsin before he can stand on the tank, they crack down hard on the nationalities and consolidate control. The Cold War re-starts and in March 1997 there is some crisis in the Balkans which causes tensions between the West and Soviets to rise to very high levels. Labour is not seen as strong enough on national defence to be trusted in this time of heightened international tension, so the Tories get re-elected.
 

Pangur

Donor
The only idea I can come up with is either no Thatcher or she was dumped earlier. Even with that you have the issue that a party can only stay in power just so long before the people decide to change.
 
After 18 years in power, the Tories were pretty much done, even without all the scandals and party-infighting. To get New Labour under Blair to lose the election, you'd have to have them do something very VERY stupid, like pledging to bomb Paris or invade the Republic of Ireland.
 
In the Soviet coup in 1991, the hardliners capture Yeltsin before he can stand on the tank, they crack down hard on the nationalities and consolidate control. The Cold War re-starts and in March 1997 there is some crisis in the Balkans which causes tensions between the West and Soviets to rise to very high levels. Labour is not seen as strong enough on national defence to be trusted in this time of heightened international tension, so the Tories get re-elected.

You have to do something to make Labour not seen as strong enough, and I can't recall the last time an election was decided in Britain on foreign policy (1983 doesn't count, as the Falklands were a huge factor in a Thatcher bounce that continued into the election, but the prominence of Labour's CND stance arguably makes this the closest we've come).

To the OP: you basically need ASBs. A hung parliament is doable with serious meddling. A Tory majority? Pft.
 
I agree with whoever said the only way this is even slightly plausible is if their is a succesful hardliner coo in the USSR in 1991 and eventually a major Protect and Survive style crisis that builds in the run-up to May 1st 1997 (or whenever the election happens). Obviously this crisis can only gain a certain amount of momentum-so basically the balance is dificult.
Perhaps someone in the labour camp makes their polecy seem weak on the resurgent Soviets, in comparrison to the Tories, while someone else from Labour severely criticises the government for their handling of said crisis, leading to people thinking that Labour are trying to gain political capital out of something which should be handled in a bipartisan manner.

So basically, Labour have to be collectively stupid and things have to play out in a certain way to make this a possibility. Even then, you could argue that if an election was going to be decided on that basis in the first place, then there would be a likelyhood of war approaching-and there probably wouldn't be an election as a result-more likely you'd end up with a National Government or something.

So yeah, this is almost ASB.
 
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