Today marks five months since the Conservatives’ worst ever electoral defeat. There will be little fanfare – the news this week is focused on Keir Starmer’s attempt at a totally-not-a-reset reset. But now that the Tories have selected a new leader and handed out jobs to as many of their 121 MPs as want them, it’s worth thinking about. Is there a path back to power for this deeply wounded party? And if so, how?
Right on schedule, the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) – the Tory think tank co-founded by Margaret Thatcher – has a new report out on exactly this question. Entitled “Common Ground Conservatism” (Thatcher would approve), it uses polling conducted by the research consultancy Public First just before the election to consider what has happened to all the people who voted Tory so enthusiastically in 2019, and whether these voters or indeed other ones could be tempted to vote that way again. “There is a path to a Conservative revival, albeit a narrow one,” Public First’s James Frayne writes in the introduction. Readers can decide for themselves from the rest of the report whether or not this is optimistic.
There is no shortage of polling about the disintegration of the Conservative Party in the last election. If the more recent travails of Labour have clouded your memory, just take a glance at Losing it by Michael Ashcroft (which I reviewed here), which determined that “the Tories didn’t so much play a difficult hand badly as drop all their cards on the floor”, or consider the complete lack of sympathy the party received when I sat in on a focus group of swing voters in Sittingbourne in Kent. But there are two nuggets of insight in the new CPS report that are worth considering – one that will fill Kemi Badenoch and her fledgling team with hope, and one that definitely won’t.
On the hopeful side, it turns out that 2019 Tory voters who have since abandoned the party don’t look all that different to 2019 Tory voters who stayed, in terms of political attitudes. This is important considering the momentum of Reform: this week, Nigel Farage’s party won over Conservative commentator Tim Montgomerie; last week, the former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns made the defection; and Jacob Rees-Mogg has been going around recently suggesting the two parties on the right should consider some sort of agreement.
How would all of this make those in the right-wing ecosystem who aren’t so enamoured with Reform feel? Frayne argues that the framing of the dilemma facing the Tories – how to win back the group who deserted to the Liberal Democrats along with the group who were tempted by Reform, plus everyone who stayed at home – is misplaced. The Conservatives don’t need to choose: there exists a strong enough voter cohort that holds broadly “Conservative” values to rebuild a winning coalition. Those values essentially translate into tougher immigration policy, tougher welfare rules, and a tougher approach to law and order.
There are a few problems with this. First is that being credible doesn’t just mean coming up with a policy platform that a broad coalition of voters likes (which the report indicates is achievable) but finding a way to get the public to trust you to enact them. After the disappointment of the past 14 years, that will be difficult. It turns out spending over a decade talking about how you were going to bring immigration and welfare down, only to have these numbers keep rising, doesn’t do much for public confidence. Who knew? Rebuilding a reputation for competence in opposition, when you can’t actually do any of the things you say ought to be done, is an excruciatingly hard challenge. (That’s one reason why the Tory peer Paul Goodman, former editor of ConservativeHome, suggested to me that his party should look to local leaders like Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen after the election defeat, as they’d be the figures who could actually achieve things.)
It’s also not particularly eye-catching, not when there are headlines to be grabbed by drawing up new dividing lines – on net zero, for example, or on the so-called culture wars. In the first month of Badenoch’s leadership, the anti-woke warrior has frequently retreated to this comfort (rather than common) ground: she challenged Keir Starmer on Labour’s net zero ambitions while Cop 29 was under way, and has used PMQs to accuse Labour of playing student politics.
Which brings us to the other interesting takeaway from the CPS report: these issues may be where the Tory party feels happiest, but they aren’t where its voter coalition is. There is widespread support for net zero (however much Reform would like to turn it into the next Brexit-like wedge issue), and for all of Westminster’s obsession with woke the public generally doesn’t really know what the word means. There may be scepticism of certain specific woke-coded policies among 2019 Tory voters, but it is far down the list compared with more pressing issues. Frayne warns “the Conservatives should be wary of making ‘anti-woke’ a publicly defining issue: it risks making them look like they’ve got the wrong priorities”.
The voters the Tories hope to chase aren’t even that keen on the core Conservative ideal of a smaller state, “at least as long as it is perceived to endanger funding for the NHS”. Case in point: 52 per cent of 2019 Conservative voters think reducing NHS waiting lists should be a top government priority, compared with just 19 per cent for cutting personal tax levels. Again, that’s fewer than a fifth of 2019 Conservative voters who are calling for tax cuts right now. Imagine telling that to Liz Truss.
All of this suggests the rebuilding of the Conservative Party might be possible, but the common ground Tories keep telling themselves is out there isn’t where they think it is. And the sharp collapse in Labour’s popularity won’t benefit them until they can accept that basic fact.
[See also: “Observer” staff rally against the sale of their newspaper]
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