Two weeks on from the most crushing defeat in its 190-year history, the United Kingdom’s Conservative Party is poised between reinvention and decline.
The party is, in a sense, completely united. Its leaders all recognize that the election result is a clarion call for introspection. The election catapulted now-Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s Labour Party—out of government since 2010—straight into power with an overwhelming majority, and it cost the Conservative Party three-quarters of its seats.
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s resignation speech hit all the right notes. There were apologies; there was humility. Current and former politicians from both wings of the party agreed that the Conservatives—also called the “Tories”—had failed to deliver in government. But there is no consensus about why they failed—and therefore why they lost.
The hardest thing in politics is to learn the right lessons from defeat. Every faction is inclined to believe that a wipeout at the polls shows that were right all along, both in why they couldn’t deliver on the goals of stopping mass immigration or increasing housebuilding, two of the big issues facing the United Kingdom, but also electorally.
One wing of the party believes that the relative success of the young Reform U.K. party shows the Conservatives gave up on their core right-wing offering of lower taxes and border control. Reform U.K., an insurgent rightist party, offered an alternatives to the Tories through its unadulterated right-wing populism. Led by Nigel Farage, the former leader of the U.K. Independence Party and the Brexit Party—and perhaps the most famous face of Brexit itself after Brexit enthusiast and former Prime Minister Boris Johnson—Reform U.K. sapped support from and undermined the Conservative Party, the world’s oldest and hitherto, by some metrics, most successful political party.
The other side believes that a slew of controversies—short-lived Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss’s attempt at supply-side economics; Johnson’s bombastic rhetoric and chaotic personal life; and the scheme to process entrants seeking asylum not in the U.K., but in the landlocked African nation of Rwanda—cost the Tories their centrist swing voters. On this view, Britain’s right has undermined its strongest hand—economic stability and low taxes—and with it, its chances of staying in power.
Where one stands on this very much depends (to borrow a phrase from the BBC’s Yes Minister) upon where one sits. Many Tories were hemorrhaging votes to Reform U.K. in their local seats. Others were principally losing votes to the Liberal Democrats. Of the 173 seats lost by the Conservatives, 124 saw a margin of defeat smaller than the Reform vote. A hypothetical amalgamation of the Conservative Party’s 23.7 percent vote share with Reform U.K.’s 14.29 percent could have altered the electoral landscape significantly. The right would have won for the fifth election in a row. Yet, this simplistic arithmetic belies the complexities of political alignment and voter behavior.
The notion that a mere shift to the right could consolidate right-wing votes in this way is a seductive yet flawed proposition. Many will vote for the unvarnished populism of Reform U.K. over a diluted, broad-church Conservative Party anyway.
A right-wing shift would lose votes in marginal constituencies in the midlands and south (where British elections are won and lost). But it would also be a dangerous proposition for eastern and northern English seats, where—while right-wing social and immigration policies are broadly popular—the aspirational middle classes still make up a large minority of the vote, and Labour holds a large enduring legacy vote with the working classes despite the party’s ideological shift to the politics of left-wing London seats such as Islington.
The idea, put bluntly, that the Conservatives can hope to win the same coalition of voters won in 2019 under Boris Johnson is not realistic. Brexit and opposition to then-Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, an avowed socialist who opposed NATO, united a diverse voter base while the Brexit Party only stood in so-called Red Wall seats—those working-class areas that have traditionally voted for no-nonsense, social conservatism with left-wing economics. With the Brexit Party sapping Labour’s socially conservative heartlands, the Conservatives could devour their opposition from both sides.
Even more seductive still, for some, is the idea of a quick fix. For them, it’s not enough just to shift right; they also want to bring Farage into the party. It is clearly the far-right Reform U.K. leader’s goal to rejoin the Conservatives. He knows better than most how long it will take to build Reform into a party capable of displacing the Tories, let alone winning an election and governing. Many Reform campaigners speak openly about their desire for a “merged” party.
This is how the Tories send themselves to political oblivion.
Far from a Canada-style merge, where that nation’s conservatives were able to reintegrate their own upstart Reform Party and went on to win the next election under Stephen Harper in 2006, Farage wants to take over the U.K. Conservative Party machinery, already geared to win elections, just as former U.S. President Donald Trump has done with the Republican Party.
Opponents of this plan can talk about how elections are won from the center, and how the British public won’t ever wear it. They could also talk about how this would alienate “small-c” conservatives and classical liberals for generations. But more crushing still would be the reality of a party suddenly rearranged around a single leader, and what it would do to British politics. Much like Trump, Farage would be quite impossible to be rid of. He would take down the ship with the captain.
But conversely, the idea that the Tories only need to shift to the center is also for the birds. While indeed, new Prime Minister Keir Starmer only won 34 percent of the vote for his center-left Labour party (barely higher than the 32.1 percent of the vote that buried the party under far-left Corbyn), there is nothing to suggest that a traditional Conservative platform could not win a general election.
Indeed, while Sunak presided over the worst Conservative result of the modern era, there’s no suggestion that it was his policies that were unpopular. His party met its median voters well on tax policy, immigration, transgender rights, and net-zero fossil fuel emission goals. He may have thought that voters would observe inflation back on target and G-7-topping growth and back his party. He didn’t lose the election on policy, or even recent performance.
Even announcing the return of mandatory national service barely got the nation talking about policy, instead garnering accusations of last-minute straw-clutching desperation, including from those who supported it. This was an election where Sunak, though he tried, could not escape the party’s past.
The polls show two key inflection points in Tory support. The first was the scandal known as “Partygate” which saw Johnson accused of allowing his staff to hold a party, with birthday cake, downstairs below his Downing Street apartment at the height of the COVID-19 lockdowns. It showed an undignified and deceptive side to Johnson that built a wider narrative about decadent and arrogant Tory rule.
The second inflection point was Truss’s botched attempt at supply-side economics and the political fallout from it. Having borrowed heavily during COVID-19 to the tune of some 500 billion pounds, and on the cusp of a potentially 150 billion pound energy bill subsidy to help consumers keep the lights on, Britain was ripe for a bonds crisis by mid-2022. After Truss, Boris’s successor, announced her mini-budget in September that year, the subsidy and tax cut announced proved to be the fiscal straw that broke the camel’s back, with no real attempt made to make the numbers add up.
In the fallout, Tories were so busy with infighting and deciding their next leader that they completely surrendered the political narrative. The one that took hold placed the entire blame on tax cuts, not on the rampant (and still increasing) spending since COVID-19 or on the spike in energy prices following the start of full-scale war in Ukraine. With that, the right’s key economic offering—lower taxes—was politically neutered. Despite taxes being at their highest level in peacetime, rates were barely mentioned during the campaign. Their defeat wasn’t about policy—it was about reputation.
Rather than pivoting on policy, if they hope to return to government in 2029, the Tories need to focus their efforts on restoring their reputation and faith in their capacity to deliver. This effort will require leadership that shows some humility. The job may be thankless, but as Starmer’s Labour Party begins to suffer the consequences of a shallow mandate that is light on detail and faces difficult issues in immigration, net-zero emission targets, and foreign policy, voters will have time to forgive them.
As the Conservative Party grapples with its identity and future, it must address the erosion of its core values in the public eye. The once-vaunted reputation for economic prudence and fiscal responsibility must be restored. The party allows for the selection of its leader predominantly through garnering support from fellow members of Parliament. Those leaders are already emerging, and they are calling for a slow, measured leadership contest, and perhaps even a temporary head of the party to give them time to reimagine their offering to the electorate, and the kind of leader they will need in the long term.
With a party such as the Conservatives that thinks of itself as the so-called “natural party of government,” a loss will always be jarring. The party is reputed for its ruthlessness and efficiency in seeking office. The time has come again for a metamorphosis—and both Tory wings will need to confront their mistakes and realize why they lost, or else face being permanently confined to the electoral margins.
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