The Tory Post-Mortem Begins

After a defeat of this magnitude the Conservative Party needs to understand what it did wrong. I have little faith in its ability to do so.

Last Thursday the Conservative Party went down to its worst electoral defeat since 1832. A party that won an 80-seat majority less than five years ago has been unceremoniously turfed out of office and reduced to a rump of 121 MPs. It wasn’t exactly crushed by a surge of enthusiasm for Keir Starmer’s Labour, either; Labour actually got half a million fewer votes than it did in 2019. No, the Conservative Party was defeated because its own supporters - even many of its own members - are thoroughly sick of it. Now the Tory remnants are poking through the wreckage, trying to work out what went wrong and how to fix it. So far, all the signs are that a major faction of the party has already decided to draw all the wrong conclusions.

The Wets Dig In

On Friday, four defeated former Tory MPs spoke to the Daily Telegraph about the election catastrophe. The excellent Miriam Cates made some good points, but Tobias Ellwood, who lost his Bournemouth East constituency in a 15% swing to Labour, is calling for the Conservatives to “return to the middle ground”. He said the party has to “look beyond its base”, and called for the selection of Tory leaders to be “returned to the Parliamentary Party”. In other words he wants party members completely shut out of the process of choosing a new leader. That isn’t going to go down well with those members, many of whom are already angry and disillusioned with the parliamentary party.

And then there’s Matt Warman, who whined that Reform is “the worst of the old kind of politics”. I can understand why Warman might be a little bitter about Reform; after all, until last Thursday he represented Boston and Skegness, the second-safest Tory seat in the country - in 2019 he got 76.7% of the vote. Now, of course, that constituency is held by Reform’s Richard Tice, who took it with a staggering 40.3% swing. Warman’s response to most of his voters defecting to a right-wing party is to blast those who say the Tories must move back to the right to recover, insisting Tice’s victory “proves the opposite”. Really? The reason 15,500 of his 2019 voters abandoned him for Reform is that the Tories weren’t left-wing enough? If there’s logic here, I’m not seeing it.

The Tory left wing - the wets, the One Nation group, the Lib Dem entryists brought in by David Cameron - are either in denial or simply don’t care about reality. In Warman’s former constituency Labour’s vote share rose by a mere 3.3%, less than a third of the national swing. The Lib Dem vote share actually fell. Reform’s, on the other hand, went from zero to 38.4% - and yet Warman doesn’t think the Tories’ steady drift to the left since 2010 is the problem. There’s really no way to reason with people like that; they’re never going to listen, and they’re never going to learn.

Will They Face Reality?

For now Rishi Sunak is still the Tory leader, but his days are obviously numbered and he could step down as soon as late July. It’s likely he’ll be replaced by a caretaker leader, with his real replacement elected later in the year. Several senior Tories are already manoeuvring for the job; the two favourites so far, according to the bookies, are Kemi Badenoch on the right of the party and Tom Tugendhat on the left. For a variety of reasons I dislike Badenoch and think Suella Braverman would be a much better choice, but many MPs are angry at her for being honest about what went wrong and her chances are slim. Other contenders include right-wingers Priti Patel and Robert Jenrick, and James Cleverly and Victoria Atkins on the left. Of all of these I think only Braverman has a chance of making the Conservatives electable again, because none of the others really understand why the party lost its 2019 voters.

In 2019 Boris Johnson managed to build a coalition of several voting groups, including some that don’t traditionally support the Conservatives - working-class voters, non-graduates, northerners. The most significant of those was in the so-called Red Wall, the historically Labour seats in northern England. There are 38 seats usually counted as belonging to the Red Wall, and most of them are resolutely Old Labour. They’re working class, often trapped in decaying industrial towns. They’ve seen sharp rises in the immigrant and immigrant-descended populations in their areas, and they’re naturally Eurosceptic. In 2019 Boris promised to get Brexit done, focus on “levelling up” the North and, critically, take back control of our borders.

In response people who had voted Labour all their lives took Boris at his word and voted for the Tories; almost 30 Red Wall seats went blue. This was a historic realignment, and could have spelled the death of the Labour Party; after all, if the northern working classes it was set up to represent didn’t support it anymore, what was it for? The Red Wall’s swing to the Tories in 2019 was a seismic upheaval in British politics, one of the greatest opportunities any governing party has ever been given.

And the Tories blew it.

They didn’t even blow it from incompetence; they blew it because, while they’d promised to leave the EU and secure the borders, far too many of them had no intention of allowing either of those things to happen. In the end we technically left the EU, but remain aligned to its ever-growing flood of regulations (and gave it control of Northern Ireland’s laws and economy). And, on immigration - a vital issue to those who see their towns changing before their eyes into places that are alien and frightening to them - the Tories didn’t even pretend to give their new voters what they wanted. Instead they deliberately pushed immigration to undreamed-of levels, massively accelerating the ongoing damage done by Tony Blair.

The Red Wall voters who gave the Tories a chance in 2019 feel, quite understandably, betrayed. They trusted the Conservative Party to keep its word, and it didn’t. Last Thursday many of them returned to the Labour Party. That’s no surprise. What should really worry the Tories, though, is that large numbers of them voted for Reform instead. In dozens of seats across northern England, Reform are now in second place.

The coalition that gave the Tories their 80-seat majority in 2019 lies in ruins. Unless they can demonstrate that they can be trusted to actually do the things they’re elected to do, the Conservatives have little hope of rebuilding it - and how can they demonstrate that in opposition? Of course they can oppose the continuation of mass immigration under Labour, but who’s going to believe them? After all they opposed mass immigration in every election manifesto since 2010, but then spent 14 years increasing it. The Tories are distrusted across huge swathes of the country, and now have no obvious way to change that.

Tory Risk - Reform Opportunity

Meanwhile the broken bits of that 2019 coalition are still lying around, just waiting for someone to pick them up and assemble the election-winning engine again - and Nigel Farage has already made a start. Reform has made huge inroads into those who voted Tory last time around. Of 2019 Conservative voters, only 52% remained loyal to the party. Twelve percent switched to Labour; many of these will be long-term Labour voters who trusted Johnson at the last election, but have now learned their lesson and are unlikely to ever trust the Tories again. Relatively small numbers defected to the Lib Dems or Greens. Meanwhile 23% - almost half of those the Tories lost - voted for Reform. Those defectors are concentrated very heavily among the new voters Johnson attracted; the working class, non-graduates and the northern Red Wall.

Already, Reform have come from nowhere and taken a quarter of the Conservatives’ voters. If the Tories refuse to accept that they lost those voters because they made promises they had no intention of delivering, and if they continue trying to win the largely mythical “centre ground”, the voters will never come back. I know this; I’m one of them. Before I could even consider voting Conservative again I’d need to be reassured that the party would keep its promises on Brexit, immigration and defence, and that it wouldn’t be derailed by a wet faction in thrall to European courts and cheap migrant labour. Looking at the conversation the Tories are having right now, I am very far from reassured. I have a strong suspicion that their response to last week’s wipeout will be to move even further to the left - and if they do that, they will have lost my vote for good.