There Will Come Soft Rains

The Conservative Party stood alone in a city of rubble and ashes

In the living room the voice-clock sang, Tick-tock, seven o'clock, time to get up, time to get up, seven o 'clock! as if it were afraid that nobody would. The morning house lay empty. The clock ticked on, repeating and repeating its sounds into the emptiness.

Doomscrolling late last night, I came across one of those insane Soviet-era Russian animations of a short story I read a long time ago, and to my shame had forgotten; Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains”.

The story centres on an automated house in Allendale, California. Designed to serve its human occupants, it continues its daily routines — making breakfast, cleaning, and reminding the family of appointments — despite the fact that its owners have been wiped out by a nuclear disaster. Outside, the city is silent and lifeless, and the only trace of the family is a set of silhouettes burned onto the side of the house.

The entire west face of the house was black, save for five places. Here the silhouette in paint of a man mowing a lawn. Here, as in a photograph, a woman bent to pick flowers. Still farther over, their images burned on wood in one titanic instant, a small boy, hands flung into the air; higher up, the image of a thrown ball, and opposite him a girl, hands raised to catch a ball which never came down.

Throughout the day, the house operates as if nothing has changed. It reads the children a bedtime story, plays music, and even recites the poem “There Will Come Soft Rains” by Sara Teasdale, which describes nature’s quiet endurance in the aftermath of human extinction.

As night falls, a storm and a fire break out inside the house. Despite the automated systems' desperate attempts to save it, the fire spreads uncontrollably. One by one, the advanced technologies fail, and the once-efficient home is burned out. By the end one last voice remains;

Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine upon the heaped rubble and steam: "Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is...”

A robotic operation reduced to rubble in the mid-2020s, mindlessly persisting in its’ routines, oblivious to the fact that its purpose no longer exists, still issuing trite encouragements years after anyone has stopped listening.

This is ominous stuff for the Conservative Party.

Somehow, things have become even worse since the election. We have no money, policies or cut-through; we are languishly settled in third, and it’s not inconceivable that polling starts showing us regularly below 20%.

There are, thankfully, some that recognise the scale of the crisis. A ‘Senior Source’ has written a report of sorts on the leadership so far, with the brutality only anonymity allows. James Frayne has written that ‘we might be witnessing the last days of the Conservative Party.’ Will Atkinson has likewise recognised the reality; ‘We are in the endgame.’

This is perhaps the worst start to any government in living memory, and we have not profited at all. We have gained literally nothing, in polling terms, from Labour so far; in fact, we have gone backwards. Voters are flocking to Reform UK because, unlike us, they are addressing the issues that matter (particularly border control) without making excuses for our dismal track record or vaguely promising to take action by 2027. This is not just a case of Reform having ‘The Big Mo’; they have an offering people can vote for, that people want to vote for. Sure, they may not be great at Parliamentary procedure and we may be the official opposition but what voter cares? Given the polling, clearly absolutely none. Maybe negative figures. We are going through automated motions that no-one notices.

The presence and performance of Reform puts us in a unique position. They have essentially disrupted our entire electoral strategy, which is maintaining ‘a hegemony over the right-wing vote whilst also being able to poach votes from the centre’. This is in part because we abandoned them; can we honestly say that the governments of the last 14 years comprehensively believed in – never mind delivered – the same things that its’ voter base cared about? Now, like Bradbury’s house, the human occupants for which we were designed no longer inhabit our building (and, soon, neither will we). The voters are no longer there to hear us; they are shadows.

A Wellingtonite strategy of “sit back and at ‘em” will not survive two years. There is clearly some recognition of this in LOTO. Despite promising no new policies for two years – and also not to be rushed into ‘knee jerk’ reactions – Kemi has already announced a major policy, the increasing of timelines for migrants to qualify for indefinite leave to remain from 5 to 15 years. It’s a sensible policy, one I’ve called for, but it looks an awful lot like a knee-jerk reaction to me. Besides which, there is no need for ‘thoughtful Conservatism’ on migration. The work has been done already. Steal, unashamedly, from Taking Back Control, Stopping the Crossings and Selecting the Best. We all know (and hope) you’re going to steal Karl Williams’ work anyway; why bother waiting?

We cannot afford to follow whatever ‘strategy’ is in place for much longer. As Frayne writes; ‘nobody across Britain cares about the Conservative Party… The Party is an irrelevance, culturally and institutionally. The Conservatives have not plunged in the polls to the low 20s because voters are consciously “punishing” them, or “sending them a message”. They have simply moved on, deciding to cast their votes for other parties.’

Just like Bradbury’s house, the Conservative Party is clinging to outdated strategies—apologizing, re-explaining, and consulting—despite the public having already moved on. Just as the house’s systems continue to serve a family that no longer exists, the Party engages in self-indulgent rituals, oblivious to the fact that voters are no longer listening. In both cases, what remains is an institution performing for an absent audience, trapped in a cycle of irrelevance until it ultimately succumbs to collapse.

We do not have two years. We have until August 5, 2026.

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.