For almost two centuries, the Conservatives have been the democratic world’s most successful political party. Their MPs have occupied parliament’s government benches for 67 of the past 100 years. Occasional predictions of the party’s demise have never come true.
Could this time be different? Last year the Tories slumped to their worst ever defeat. Since then, the party has not only failed to capitalise on a Labour government that has lost more than one-third of its support; their support has actually fallen further. This year’s local election results were catastrophic. Four months on, their support shows no signs of reviving.
Lessons from the past
To Tories scratching their heads and wondering what on earth to do, I offer two lessons from the past—one going back more than a century, the other from the last 10 years.
First, the long term. The Conservatives have languished in the wilderness on three occasions. Each time they paid the price of bitter internal divisions over the UK’s relations with the wider world: the corn laws in the 1840s; tariff reform at the start of the 20th century; and battles over the European Union’s Maastricht treaty in the 1990s. Each time, internal divisions did not just damage the party; they defined it.
Now for the more immediate past, Tory fortunes over the last 10 years. We all know the party has been outflanked on Brexit and immigration by Nigel Farage. But it is instructive to chart the voting figures for the two Brexit tribes, Remain and Leave. Among other things, they show that, in retrospect, Boris Johnson’s big victory in 2019 was more fragile than it seemed at the time.
Separate YouGov surveys have recorded the party loyalties of Leave and Remain voters for the last 10 years. Here, for the first time, they have been brought together.
Take Leave voters first. Of the people who voted at the general election in 2015, the Tories won 43 per cent of those who would go on to vote Leave; 23 per cent voted Ukip. By 2019, when Johnson won his get-Brexit-done landslide victory and Nigel Farage remained on the sidelines, the Tory share of the Leave vote climbed to 74 per cent. In 2024 it halved to 37 per cent, with 28 per cent of Leave voters backing Reform. Since last year’s election, Reform has raced past the Tories and now enjoys a two-to-one lead (52 versus 25 per cent) among Leave voters.
On to Remain voters. In 2015 the Tories picked up fully 31 per cent of the voters that subsequently backed staying in the EU. At the time, the Conservative party could reasonably claim to be a truly national party with strong support on both sides of the Brexit divide. Two years later, when Theresa May called a snap election, Remain voters started to drift away. Overall, the Conservative share of the national vote rose by six percentage points, a historically unusual achievement for an incumbent government. But this masked the huge disparity in the trajectory of Leave voters (Tory support up 21 points) and Remain voters (down six).
Conservative support among Remain voters has continued to decline. In 2019, Johnson effectively cleared out his pro-European contingent at Westminster. Remain voters got the message. Their support for the Tories fell another six points, to just 19 per cent—a fact obscured by Johnson’s 80-seat majority.
Now just 14 per cent of surviving Remain voters back the Tories. The Liberal Democrats have been the great beneficiaries of this pro-European backlash against the party of Harold Macmillan and Edward Heath, the two Conservative prime ministers who fought to take Britain “into Europe” in the first place.
Johnson’s deceptive landslide
Here, then, is the Conservatives’ basic problem. After defenestrating May for seeking a compromise version of Brexit, the party positioned itself as an out-and-out nationalist party. This helped it win the 2019 election, but has since hobbled it.
After decades serving as a broad church, it now finds one large chunk of its congregation rushing out of its main door to worship Farage, while another large chunk saunters out past the choir to embrace the Lib Dems.
Two questions now dominate discussion about the party’s future. Will it replace Kemi Badenoch as leader; and will it seek a pact with Farage? These are obviously significant questions, but there is another that needs answering first. Should the Conservatives become more fervently nationalist and seek to reclaim the votes lost to Reform, or should it revive the more ecumenical habits that delivered success in the past?
Their battles over the corn laws, tariff reform and the Maastricht treaty appear to suggest that the nationalist road leads to a dead end. But if the Tories are united in their nationalism—as they weren’t in the past—can they recover their appeal? Possibly. It would, however, take a supreme optimist to believe that they can defeat Farage this way. If nationalism is to remain their central cause, it makes more sense to join forces with Reform. But right now, this year’s polls and local elections tell us that this would hand the leadership of the right to Farage and kill the Tories as a separate force.
Cameron got it right—until he got it badly wrong
For an independent Conservative party to survive and prosper, it needs to learn not just from the distant past but from more recent times. Over the past 30 years, its one sustained respite from the battles over Europe lasted from 2005, when Cameron became party leader, until 2013, when he started down the road that led to Brexit.
Early on in his leadership, Cameron told the Conservatives to stop “banging on about Europe”. After three big election defeats, he sought to return to government by focusing on the economy and public services. In 2010 the Tories gained almost 100 seats. This was not quite enough for an overall majority, but it did end 13 years in opposition.
In January 2013, Cameron made his fatal mistake. He bowed to pressure from anti-EU Tory MPs and promised a referendum on UK membership of the EU if his party won the next election. The thing is, he did not expect to win it outright. He anticipated another coalition with the Lib Dems. This could have required him to abandon plans for a referendum. (The 2015 Lib Dem manifesto did propose a referendum—but only if there were a plan to hand more powers to Brussels.) Instead, he did win a majority and had to hold the referendum he didn’t really want. The rest is history. The 2015 election seemed to be a triumph for Cameron. Instead, it ended up destroying his premiership a year later when the country voted Leave.
How, then, should the Tories apply the lessons from their past?
The wisdom of Tony Hancock
A useful starting point is a radio comedy that the BBC first broadcast in 1961, 10 years into the Conservative party’s run of postwar election victories. In one sketch, the comedian Tony Hancock decides to give blood and tells a nurse how this fitted into his plans.
“I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. Something for the benefit of the country as a whole. What should it be, I thought: become a blood donor or join the Young Conservatives? Anyway, as I’m not looking for a wife and I can’t play table tennis, here I am.”
Hancock’s scriptwriters neatly pinned down the postwar culture of middle England that the Tories reflected: socially conventional and non-ideological. Insofar as it had a philosophy it could be summed up as “tradition where possible, reform when necessary”.
Today, any attempt just now to return to centre-right pragmatism would raise an obvious problem. It could alienate the voters it has lost to Reform. That is why the Tories keep on chasing Farage down the nationalist rabbit hole—most recently in arguments about hotels that are housing asylum seekers. However, as long as the terms of debate on the rights are defined by battles over immigration, Reform will win. Its uncompromising commitment to full-blooded nationalism is always likely to defeat its anguished Tory rivals who bought the hotel rooms in the first place and let immigration soar.
The Tories’ solution—and as far as I can see, their only solution—is not to answer the nationalist question but to change it. Farage is a far smarter politician than his beer-swilling, hail-fellow manner suggests. He knows that most voters care about their homes, crime in their neighbourhood, their taxes, the cost of living, their local schools and hospitals. Reform succeeds when it persuades enough people that nationalist policies, implemented by people untainted by the failures of the past, will solve all these problems.
Where Reform is vulnerable
For Reform to fail, its opponents must break the link between the politics of nationalism and the challenges of everyday life. Part of this should be achievable. Brexit has failed. By a big and sustained margin, voters now think we were wrong to leave the EU. Like almost all serious economists they think we are worse off as a result. Majorities back lowering the barriers to trade, working closely with the EU countries on science and defence, and welcoming European doctors and nurses to British hospitals and European students to British universities.
Rejoining the EU is off the agenda for the time being, so it should be possible to have an adult debate about how to work pragmatically with Brussels. That is not the kind of debate that Farage wants. No wonder he has pretty much stopped talking about Brexit. By moderating their stance on the EU, the Conservatives could link their pragmatism to more day-to-day issues and start to revive their lost reputation for the competent management of Britain’s economic and social prospects.
This would also help the Tories to differentiate themselves from Reform by positioning themselves as good global citizens—on Ukraine, the Middle East, AI, climate change, modern slavery and so on. Farage has nothing useful to say on any of these; and Badenoch speaks only to minimise her differences with Reform. Given the record of past Tory leaders, this retreat from practical internationalism is not just an opportunity missed but a legacy betrayed.
Immigration, the boats above all, is a far tougher challenge. The Conservatives are saddled with their record in government. Last week’s YouGov poll for the Times had bad news for Labour, with 71 per cent of respondents saying it is handling the issue badly, but even worse news for the Conservatives: only 6 per cent say it is the best party for handling immigration and asylum. They are not just behind Labour (on 9 per cent) but way behind the 31 per cent who name Reform.
A different political strategy will take time to work. The biggest influence on Tory prospects is outside the party’s control. By 2029, voters will judge whether or not Labour has taken effective steps to tackle these issues. If it is deemed to have failed, Farage may be unstoppable.
The Conservatives’ best hope is for Labour’s policies on boats, hotels and immigration generally to be seen to work. This would do more than anything else to burst the Reform bubble. It would also allow the Tories to reject the ugly simplicity of scapegoating immigrants as a whole, and to set out a strategy for positively welcoming the newcomers we want, while keeping out those we don’t.
Among other things, this would help the Conservatives to restore their reputation for sound economic management. As the IMF, OECD and even the Bank of England say, countries such as ours need more workers, not just to keep hospitals, restaurants, bars and much of industry functioning, but to grow our economy and generate the tax revenues we shall need to sustain a civilised society.
Moving the boulder blocking a Tory revival
Which brings us back to the point that, above all, the Conservatives need the political agenda to be ripped up and rewritten before the next general election. In 2029, the central political question should be not how to keep away outsiders and vaccinate British politics against the schemes of foreign governments, but how to build a more prosperous and harmonious UK, working with other countries, especially in Europe, to reconstruct a rules-based world order.
Sadly, any candidate in a fresh leadership election who makes that case right now is bound to lose. That might change in due course, but not yet. Meanwhile, who can move the nationalist boulder that currently blocks the path to the party’s recovery? To an extent that leading Conservatives probably don’t realise, and would certainly not admit, the two politicians who are best placed to do this are Keir Starmer and Yvette Cooper.
