The Tories Still Aren't Listening

The Conservative Party is too arrogant or too stupid to understand why its voters are deserting it.

I’ve just read an opinion piece in the Telegraph by Nick Timothy, who you may remember as chief of staff to the disastrous Theresa May when she was prime minister. Given the utter uselessness of the May government you might have thought Mr Timothy would do well to stay away from politics in future, but he seems to think otherwise. He’s currently the Conservative candidate for the West Suffolk constituency, which was a safe Tory seat until the party imploded, and is also busily urging those of a right-wing persuasion to ignore the lure of the Reform party and give their vote to the Conservatives again.

Nick Timothy is advising Reform voters to back the Tories instead. For a reminder of what his advice is worth, he was Theresa May’s chief of staff.

Timothy’s argument is that “Labour will hike taxes, open our borders and undermine our sovereignty”, and therefore we should vote Conservative. Otherwise, he warns, Reform voters “will get the opposite of what they want”.

Unfortunately for Timothy there’s a big flaw in his argument. Most of us who plan to vote for Reform next Thursday voted Conservative in the last four general elections, so we already know what it’s like to get the opposite of what we want. All the things Timothy is trying to frighten us with - immigration, tax and sovereignty - have got much worse under the last 14 years of Conservative government. At every election since 2010 the Tories have promised to reduce immigration; over that period it has almost trebled. They’ve promised to reduce taxation, which is now at a 70-year high and is set to rise even higher, with frozen personal allowances meaning the share of our money the government plunders will rise every year until at least 2028. As for sovereignty, we might have left the EU, but we’re still meekly obeying its laws, begging to be allowed to give it control of our defence policy and, just to put a cherry on top, have allowed it to seize part of our country as an economic colony.

In one sense, Timothy is quite right: If we vote Reform instead of Conservative we’ll get a Labour landslide, which is the opposite of what we want. Then again, going by the polls, if we vote Conservative we’ll still get a Labour landslide, which is the opposite of what we want. The real problem for Timothy is that even if by some miracle we vote Conservative and they win, what are we going to get? The evidence of the last 14 years says it will be more tax, more immigration, more crime, more wokery, less sovereignty, less defence, less security - in other words, the opposite of what we want.

Rishi Sunak is scuttling around once-safe Tory seats telling everyone that if he wins the election he’ll cut taxes, reduce immigration and do a lot of other wonderful things. The problem is nobody believes him anymore, because we’ve seen Conservative leaders make exactly the same promises at the last four elections - and then, once elected, proceed to do the exact opposite. I have no faith whatsoever that, if re-elected, Sunak would do any of the things he says he will. After all, none of his predecessors did.

The reason the Conservative Party leadership believed it could ignore what its members and voters wanted was that “they have nowhere else to go”. If you lean left you can vote for Labour, the Lib Dems, Green, the Worker’s Party or, in the devolved regions, the SNP, Plaid Cymru or Sinn Fein. If you’re on the right, the only option has generally been the Tories. So the parliamentary Conservative Party and the party’s leaders could do whatever they wanted, secure in the knowledge that right of centre voters would have no choice but to hold their noses and vote for the only party that at least pretended to be right-wing.

But that isn’t true anymore. Now there’s an alternative, a party that advocates right of centre policies and hasn’t shown, time after time, that it can’t be trusted to actually carry them out. Unsurprisingly, millions of former Conservative voters have decided to give Reform a chance.

And now the Tories are panicking. They’ve suddenly realised the game is up. Attracting voters with right-wing manifesto promises, then governing as Continuity Blairism, only works when the voters really do have nowhere else to go. Now we can go to Reform - and for people like Nick Timothy this is a disaster. Therefore here he is, waving the Big Bad Starmer at us in an attempt to frighten us back to the Conservative Party.

Well, it’s too late. Yes, I’m sure Starmer will be a terrible prime minister. But Rishi Sunak has been a terrible prime minister - as were David Cameron, Theresa May and, I’m sorry to say, Boris Johnson. All of them promised us conservatism, but gave us Blairism with a quick coat of watery blue paint. We don’t want that anymore. The two-party system has stopped working, because there’s no longer any real difference between the parties. We want to change that. It’s time to throw the pieces in the air and see where they land, so I’ll be voting for Reform UK.