The Labour Party is bad at winning re-election. It took a hundred years before a leader (Tony Blair) achieved two comfortable majorities. Clement Attlee and Harold Wilson both lost office after six years despite winning large victories.
This historical trend alone is cause for Conservative hope. But the party was also buoyed at its conference by the early unpopularity of Keir Starmer’s government. Unlike in 1997, when Blair’s approval ratings surged, Starmer’s have plummeted.
As a new study by More in Common shows, 17 per cent of Labour supporters already regret their vote and the public narrowly prefer Rishi Sunak’s government to Starmer’s (by 31 per cent to 29 per cent). An increasingly volatile electorate – the trend that allowed Labour to recover from a bad defeat in a single term – could aid the Tories. Only around a fifth of former Conservative voters rule out supporting the party again.
There’s been something of a false debate over whether the next Tory leader should prioritise winning back Reform or Liberal Democrat voters. The reality is that they need to do both – and more.
More in Common suggests that they should start by winning back Tory abstainers, a crucial factor in Labour’s landslide (more than a million people who voted Conservative in 2019 stayed at home in 2024). They should then target Tory-to-Labour switchers – who count double in polling terms – with 33 per cent of this group already regretting their vote.
This leaves Liberal Democrat supporters – 57 per cent of who have previously backed the Conservatives – and Reform voters. The latter, contrary to some assumptions, are the hardest to win back: 38 per cent of former Tories who backed Nigel Farage’s party say they will not vote Conservative again for at least a decade. But Reform voters’ animosity towards Labour – they are eight times more likely than Lib Dems to prefer Sunak’s government to Starmer’s – gives the next Tory leader a chance to appeal to them on tactical grounds.
Such are the opportunities, what of the challenges? If voters noticed anything from the Conservative conference it is likely to have been Kemi Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay and Liz Truss’s unrepentance. Both were gifts to Labour.
As Michael Gove argued at a fringe event, a thorough repudiation of Trussonomics is essential for the next leader. “It was almost as though people felt that the Conservative Party was experimenting on the body politic,” he said. “That we were the people insulated from the consequences of these actions and were just waiting to see how the patient responded.” (Gove, incidentally, said Ed Miliband and Yvette Cooper had enjoyed the most “sure-footed start” owing to their past experience in government.)
Is Labour destined for unpopularity? Cabinet ministers believe that the party can overcome early stumbles through delivery in key areas. If the government succeeds, it will be able to run a “forward not back” election campaign. If it struggles, it will be forced to resort to a “better the devil you know” campaign. But if the Tories fail to detoxify their brand that could prove enough.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here.
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