The death of the UK Conservative Party

07 June 2024 , 08:49

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The year was 1997, and U.K. Conservative Leader William Hague had convened a meeting of his top team following Labour’s landslide election victory.

A lively argument ensued over which topic the Tories should choose for their next opposition-led debate in the House of Commons.

Michael Heseltine — deputy prime minister prior to the election defeat — leaned back in his chair. “I think we should all calm down and take this slowly,” he said. “Because we’re going to be here for a very long time.”

A similar realization is dawning on the U.K.’s Conservatives today as they face the prospect of not only defeat at the general election on July 4, but an electoral hammering so severe it could fundamentally alter the party’s makeup.

Danny Finkelstein, a Conservative peer and grandee who advised both Hague and his predecessor, PM John Major, in the 1990s, fears a long-term reversal of Tory fortunes is on the horizon.

“Having been for a century the natural party of government, with occasional periods of progressive alternative, we could be in a position where we have long periods of Labour with occasional periods of Conservative governments,” he said.

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The Conservatives are on course to win between 71 and 180 seats. | Dan Kitwood/Getty Images

Right-wing agitator Nigel Farage, speaking on a forthcoming episode of POLITICO’s Westminster Insider podcast, was blunter. “They’ve killed themselves,” he said. “It’s done. It’s over.”

Numbers game

A Conservative defeat at this election has looked on the cards for some time, with the opposition Labour Party hovering around 20 points ahead of the Tories in opinion polls.

The party’s popularity slumped with Boris Johnson’s “Partygate” scandal and went into freefall during the calamitous Liz Truss administration. It’s never really recovered through the 19 months of Rishi Sunak’s premiership.

And the scale of Tories’ potential losses is now crystallizing, with the polls failing to narrow so far as election day looms.

Will Jennings, professor of political science at Southampton University, said that until recently “the collective conscience at Westminster hadn’t fully processed that a lead of that size might translate into electoral devastation.”

Recent large-scale opinion polls which attempt to predict the election result at a constituency level have put the Conservatives on course to win between 71 and 180 seats on July 4 — fewer than half the 365 won by Johnson at the last election in 2019.

And now Farage has entered the fray with his upstart party Reform UK, threatening to eat further into the Conservative vote with an attack from the populist right.

According to Jennings, a surge in support for Reform — with Farage as its newly-established figurehead — would imply “huge drops in support” in Conservative constituencies that would make the Tories “really electorally vulnerable.”

Indeed, a bullish Farage predicts Reform UK will be outpolling the Tories in a matter of days, pushing the governing party into third place in terms of votes cast (if not seats won.) Suddenly, the threat to the Tories looks existential.

“It looks as if they’re going to do very badly — possibly as badly as they’ve ever done in the 20th and 21st century,” said Tim Bale, academic and author of “The Conservative Party After Brexit.”

Bale cites the famous Labour landslide election victories of 1945 and 1997, when the Conservatives were reduced to around 180 MPs. He notes that historians have to go all the way back to 1906 for the Tories to slump to anything below 160 seats.

A bullish Nigel Farage predicts Reform UK will be outpolling the Tories. | Carl Court/Getty Images

A different kind of party

Any Conservative loss on July 4 will thrust the party into a battle over its future direction, regardless of scale.

But if the party is routed, that changes the calculation about how it should adapt — with many insiders expecting a dramatic shift to the right.

Andrew Cooper, a former director of strategy for David Cameron who now sits in the Lords as a non-affiliated peer, predicts that it will be “tempting” for the Tory party to “move further in the direction of Reform” in its positions on cultural issues, particularly immigration.

One current Tory adviser, granted anonymity to speak frankly, said retaining 150 seats was being held up internally as a “survival point — above that, it survives. Much below, it’s dead.”

They added that “people are already considering alternatives to the Conservative Party,” whether that might be defecting to Reform or even finding a role for Farage inside a reshaped populist Tory party post-election.

Another influential Conservative voice, Tim Montgomerie, founder of the ConservativeHome website and a former speechwriter to two Tory leaders, said a common view among his friends was that “we no longer trust the Conservative Party.”

He said this was down to a succession of “Napoleonic” leaders “focused on presentation”, prompting Conservatives like him to conclude their efforts are better focused on alternative forms of influence, such as shaping the news agenda and developing policy ideas.

Not so fast

Publicly, of course, leading Conservatives remain bullish about their prospects.

Andrew Bowie, an energy minister and Tory candidate, told POLITICO he was “absolutely not” worried about a Reform incursion, observing that Farage had “run, and lost, in a number of general elections gone by.”

A former Cabinet minister on the right of the party conceded it was a “tough time” to be Tory, but insisted “it’s not an existential threat — we are a very resilient party.”

For Finkelstein, there are more fundamental reasons to feel optimistic about his party’s survival. Namely, the “conservative temperament” of the British people.

“There is a need for and there will always be a party of the center-right. Assuming that that isn’t what Labour wishes to be, there will need to be a Conservative Party,” he argued.

Any Conservative loss on July 4 will thrust the party into a battle over its future direction. | Anthony Devlin/Getty Images

However, even if reports of the party’s death have been exaggerated, few doubt that it could be a long route back to power.

Cooper recalled that “in 1997, as we sat there in the ruins, we were saying to each other: ‘how many how many defeats will it take for the Conservative Party to be electable again?’”

The answer turned out to be three. Three heavy defeats, three electoral cycles and three changes of leader.

“Essentially, it’s the same question again,” he said. “And it’s difficult.”

Aggie Chambre and Abby Wallace contributed reporting.