The Tory delusion

The upbeat vibe at the party’s conference only shows how in denial they are.

It should not be possible to sum up the entirety of a party conference – the atmosphere, the big themes, the rhythm and rapport of politicians and delegates alike – in a single poll finding. Nonetheless, YouGov has come close.

Asked what they think is the main reason the party lost the 2024 general election, Tory members offer a varied range of suggestions. Infighting and disunity come top, picked by 16 per cent of respondents, with failure to tackle immigration a close second on 12 per cent.

Two things are clear from this poll. First, three months after the Conservative Party’s worst-ever defeat there is no consensus about what went wrong, with no answer garnering more than a sixth of the votes. Second, immigration is deemed the main reason by three times as many members as thought Liz Truss and her mini-budget were the key culprit, and by four times as many as blamed Boris Johnson and Partygate.

This assessment goes some way to explaining why the vibe here in Birmingham is so strange. As George wrote yesterday, this does not feel like the conference of a party that has just lost an election, let alone lost one so badly. Giant banners bearing the faces of the four leadership contenders – Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, Robert Jenrick and Tom Tugendhat – hang from the conference hall ceiling like the flags of medieval knights. The mood is cheerful, upbeat even. Speaker after speaker, from the candidates to party grandee figures like Jeremy Hunt to former MPs who recently lost their seats, is going around cracking jokes about luxury penthouses and plummeting poll ratings at Labour’s expense. There is an excited buzz as members queue round the Escher-esque walkways in the hope of seeing such erstwhile celebrities as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Truss. Rishi Sunak got a starry-eyed send-off in packed-out hall on Sunday evening.

The conference swag on offer from the candidates’ campaign teams – umbrellas from camp Jenrick, fake tan from camp Tugendhat, tote bags in various shades of blue from literally everyone – is being displayed with pride. I’ve even seen someone with a Tugendhat temporary tattoo – applied, she told me gleefully, with the help of her colleague’s spit.

They are battling it out, lest we forget, to lead a party that currently has just 121 MPs. So why the disconnect between vibe and reality?

One answer is that, now the worst has happened, the party can relax for a bit. The punishment beating that has been looming since Boris Johnson’s poll ratings first started to slip in December 2021 has finally been delivered by the furious electorate. Last year in Manchester, the atmosphere was thick with grief, anger and despair. This year is almost hopeful: let’s get on with the job of rebuilding. The fact that Labour’s honeymoon and popularity both collapsed upon contact with reality has obviously helped too.

But there is something else going on here as well, as evidenced by the YouGov poll. The story the Conservatives are telling themselves is that there is an easy – or at least a straightforward – way back from the wilderness. Cut the infighting, come up with a solution on immigration and make the case for so-called Conservative values, and the country will come to its senses, abandon Labour and return to the rightful party of government at the next election.

There may be some truth to the second of these three assumptions. As the New Statesman’s data expert Ben Walker has pointed out, voters are more politically promiscuous now than ever before, and there is no guarantee that Labour’s broad-but-shallow support base will last (especially not if the government keeps making unforced errors on things like campaign freebies and the winter fuel allowance). But there is also no guarantee that those voters will rush back to the open arms of the Conservatives. And while Labour’s popularity may be falling, there are no signs yet that the Tory’s is rising in response.

There is a sense here that the main issue is one of tone (on everything) and leadership (on immigration). Certainly those things mattered in the run-up to 4 July: divided parties with weak leaders struggle to win elections, and immigration was a key concern for voters who switched from Tory to Reform. But of other policy issues regularly cited by distressed voters on the doorstep – broken public services, the NHS crisis, social care, the housing shortage, the cost of living – there has been barely a murmur. Two other doorstep staples were the injustice of lockdown sacrifices made by ordinary people while parties were going on at Johnson’s Downing Street, and the devastating financial impact of the Truss experiment. No one here seems particularly keen to talk about either – except Truss herself, who on Tuesday told a auditorium packed to the rafters that the Conservatives would have had a better chance of winning had she remained leader.

Other Tories might be more subtle in their levels of delusion than Truss is, but the delusion is still there. It was there in the one-minute “elevator pitches” the four candidates gave at a reception on Sunday night, when they each spoke as if being back in power within five years was virtually inevitable. It’s there in the row (still rumbling on) over Kemi Badenoch’s comments on reducing maternity leave, in how she seems to believe there is a mainstream market for her small state, low-intervention ideology. It’s there in the way Tugendhat and Jenrick have both decided leaving the ECHR is crucial to winning back disenchanted voters. It’s there in Cleverly’s (correct) recognition that voters gave the last government “zero credit” for cutting National Insurance, but misguided conclusion that that’s because the Tories didn’t properly make the case for tax cuts, not because voters actually wanted better public services.

There’s delusion in the relaxed, magnanimous, we-barely-have-to-try vibe here in Birmingham. If losing an election is like losing a loved one, there are stages of grief that must be suffered through. And right now, the party is still in denial.