Can the Conservative party survive defeat? | FT Film

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It's the most dramatic electoral disaster for the Conservatives in the party's history. Can the Tories survive? The 2024 general election saw huge tracts of Tory territory disappear across England, Scotland, and Wales as voters turned against the Conservative record after 14 years in government.

A leadership contest looms. Rightwing politics is in a state of flux, and the electorate is also changing. Three of the UK's leading political experts help me ask the question being posed by the Tories as they survey the wreckage.

What shape should the Conservative party take now? Hailed since its formation in the 1830s as a political organism that has always managed to adapt and survive, Britain's main centre-right party has moulded to new political realities and seized the chances to get and to hold on to power. Right now, though, its future path seems uncertain.

It is important that after 14 years in government the Conservative party rebuilds.

It is a very resilient organisation. It has shape shifted many times. It has taken the opposite view on different constitutional issues many times.

The Conservative party historically has been kind of famous for being the adaptable political party that can almost transform itself.

This time, recovering electorally will be a feat. Just look at the electoral map: a tide of blue receded as voters turned to anyone but the Conservatives. July's ABC election has transformed the landscape.

It haemorrhaged votes to the left to triumphant Labour, to the right to Nigel Farage's Reform party, and in the centre to a recovered Liberal Democrats. Rishi Sunak, the defeated Conservative leader and now former prime minister, apologised.

To the country, I would like to say first and foremost, I am sorry.

Farage, now part of a small band of Reform MPs, threatened havoc and a continuing split on the right.

It's not just disappointment with the Conservative party. There is a massive gap on the centre right of British politics, and my job is to fill it.

After a catastrophe on such a scale, a party dubbed the most successful in the democratic world is in danger of long-term irrelevance. But Britain's electorate is changing. Analysts spot opportunities for a party seeking to rebuild on the shifting sands of demographic change.

And, given a newly transactional relationship between the voting public and the parties, who are these voters who could come back to the Conservatives, and how could they woo them? Here's Jane Green, professor of politics at Oxford university and director of the British Election Study.

The Conservative party has a choice. It has a choice of how to deal with its split on the right. Do they try to just win back those voters who have gone to Reform UK, or do they try to bridge support in the more moderate part of the political centre?

Making the right choice depends on understanding what went wrong since the Tories won a healthy majority in 2019 and, says James Kanagasooriam of Focal Data, an expert on electoral trends and strategy, what did not.

The attitudes of the country didn't suddenly violently shift 180 degrees to the left with the election victory. Just like in 2019, with a more modest victory, the party didn't take a radical shift to the right. The reality is that in both of those instances the leaders of the parties very clearly stretched onto their political opponents' territory.

This territory was left undefended by the Tories because the broad, contradictory, and probably unsustainable coalition assembled by Boris Johnson after Brexit collapsed. It had brought working class and Leave supporting voters into the Tory fold in the so-called red wall alongside traditional Tory voters in prosperous seats. The huge 2024 defeat cleared out many of the Tories who won those new pro-Brexit seats from Labour.

It was very obvious, particularly after the Covid period, that the interests of these northern red wall, worse off, distrustful, left behind voters and the interests of your southern Surrey suburban voters were not the same. They were not the same on housing, public spending, and taxation. And as time went by those fissures tore the Conservatives apart internally.

The counter narrative is that voters felt worse off and were alienated by a government they concluded was incompetent and self-serving. Across the so-called blue wall seats in the south, research for the FT showed that with these voters it was rundown public services and the economy and a lack of probity by ministers that pushed voters away.

And in these places a newly powerful sort of voter now dominates, a group repelled by the very messages that might tempt back Tory supporters seduced by Reform - the graduates. Rob Ford has been mapping the shifting demographics that are changing the British electorate. He says the Tories need to understand how far and how fast the political landscape is being transformed by the rise of graduates whose views diverge radically from those of the outgoing Conservative government, and their march across previously Tory territory.

We're sat here, Miranda, on a university campus, the shop floor of one of the factories of electoral and social change right here. A university is pumping out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of graduates every single year. And if you accumulate that process over decades what you can see is the share of graduates in the electorate rising and rising and rising. Those people will tend to be much more liberal, much more outward looking, much more pro-Remain, much more likely to focus on social equality issues, gender equality, ethnic and racial equality as being big, important things to them. And they are everywhere.

In 2019 the number of young people in England attending university passed the 50 per cent mark for the first time. Rob's projections show how and where the number of constituencies with a greater concentration of university-educated adults, the darker green areas, are expected to spread across the country, potentially right up to the next general election in five years' time and beyond. So finding a way of winning back graduates will now become a key Tory challenge.

Whether it's Covid, whether it's house prices, whether it's the kind of changing political geography of the UK, graduates are moving into more rural areas. And that has a huge effect of basically taking Labour votes and distributing them more equally. And that's where the Liberal Democrats really hit the Conservatives in 2024. And so clearly they're going to have to accommodate to that.

Losing these graduate voters has been a recent phenomenon, though.

If you look at the David Cameron Conservative electoral coalition, education doesn't predict support for the Conservatives at that point. Conservatives there look like Conservatives did in Margaret Thatcher's time. They're better off.

They're middle class. They are free market right-wingers. They want lower tax, and that's what they're voting on.

But this changed with the Brexit referendum. It's truly a watershed. Look at how graduates' support in these graphs went up sharply for Labour and down for the Tories.

The flip side is the decline of a category of voters who have long been a dominant voting force - those who left education before attending university. Their numbers are going down across the country at the same time as the population with a degree has been rising. Just down the road from Manchester is the constituency of Leigh and Atherton. The Conservatives successfully took this area from Labour in 2019 after historic entrenched Labour dominance during Boris Johnson's Get Brexit Done campaign. Then Labour seized it back in 2024.

But these places are changing really fast. Between the 2011 and 2021 census, the proportion of people here who left school at 16 went down from 59 per cent to 45 per cent. That means the same sort of political messaging will not work here in the future.

So the Conservatives aren't going to be able to pull the same trick off again because the seat is changing, and it will never be that sort of skewed towards the school leaver electorate as it was back then.

The factors that enabled a win for the Tories in 2019 had vanished by 2024, leaving the party propped up by elderly supporters. Its abandonment by young people is part of a trend, as you can see, that we can trace back to the 1970s but made much worse by Brexit. So it's a hard tide to swim against. But these trends don't mean an automatic win for centre left parties if the Tories can construct a platform that convinces the young, both graduates and those who don't attend university, that they are on their side.

Age and education is starting to matter more. But that doesn't have to always be the case. It could weaken again, and that really depends on what the choices given to voters are, whether or not parties are appealing to young or old or higher educated, lower educated. I don't think anything's political destiny, really.

Graduates have a different worldview, a different set of values, but they are not partisan. They are, as it were, critical shoppers. They're not going to be sort of married to the Labour party for life.

If an offer comes from the Conservative party that they find attractive, they may well be willing to consider it again. University affects one set of values very profoundly. It affects people's social values.

It doesn't affect their economic values at all. Graduates are just as likely, if they earn a good income and own their own house, to favour tax cuts and a small estate as non-graduates are. There is a narrative there, a very traditional narrative, that can still appeal to those voters.

Reconnecting with younger voters is part of a wider challenge for the Tories of needing to find an economic message that works for a much broader swathe of the public. Jane Green's research shows bread and butter issues still matter to the way people vote.

As many as 18.5mn people feel economically insecure. That's more than a third of voters worrying about the cost of living, rent, mortgage, childcare, social care, and a safe level of pension. And many of those are of working age, not retirees, and have families.

The Conservative party has had a huge problem with its ageing electoral base, and the Conservatives are not going to win elections appealing to a small minority on sort of cultural issues or immigration - I think they're going to broaden their appeal by addressing economic insecurity and economic concerns across the electorate. These are the issues that I think would bridge divides on age and education basis but also essentially allow the Conservative party to start to build up a much larger but also much more moderate coalition.

So how should the Tories start this painful process of rebuilding?

When you've lost that badly you've got a lot of voters to get in order to build the kind of vote share that you need to win durably, which is between 35 per cent and 45 per cent.

At this year's election the Conservative party lost a quarter of its 2019 vote to Reform, to the right, and nearly a quarter to parties to its left, including even the Greens in a couple of rural constituencies. Can enough people be tempted back from all quarters by a reinvention matching some of its great transformations of the past? To their advantage the voters are much less tribal and are willing to switch. 2024 saw a record number of people changing their vote since recent elections. You can see this volatility and the opportunities for a party that's down but not out played out in Labour's astonishing dash to victory only five years after a crushing defeat.

I think our politics has greater potential to be unpredictable. So over time more voters are switching between parties, voting different ways in different elections. And over time fewer people have strong, deep attachments to political parties. And what that means is when these big moments come along, what we call electoral shocks, such things like a Covid pandemic or a cost of living crisis, that shifts voters there's greater potential, then, to lead to bigger swings, bigger changes.

We've seen some fairly wild changes, surprise victories, surprise majorities, one big Conservative majority and a very substantial one for Labour. To cope with that volatility parties kind of need to know who their core voters are. They shouldn't take them for granted.

And James believes that in their traumatised state post-defeat, this means the Tories staying close to the low tax, rural, less ethnically diverse voters in their geographical heartlands who stuck with the party this year or abstained. Last out, first back in. Then, recovery means building out a bit to what he calls lookalike voters, the most similar to your loyal adherents.

Has there ever been a political party that's been defeated that didn't reach out to its core voters first? Raised the bar amongst the 30 per cent of the country that looks and sounds most like it?

But this time, there's a problem. Competition for lookalike voters from a lookalike party - Reform UK, which split the Tory vote everywhere.

This is new. This is different. In 2015, when David Cameron won 37 per cent of the vote and Nigel Farage was on 12 and a half per cent, the Conservative party was different enough. Its core voters were different enough. But what happens when you have to live alongside a party that looks and sounds and feels a lot like your own, where it borrows voters?

Those fights with Cameron were under the banner of Ukip, but some see Farage's latest vehicle as an existential challenge to the Conservative party, and even some younger voters who did not turn out, particularly among non-graduate young men, are Reform-curious. If they were to turn out on polling day the picture might look very different in future elections.

There's a big chunk of younger voters who leave school at 16 with a few GCSEs or whatever, they're pretty socially conservative. But why are they not there in the electoral figures? Because they don't vote, and that makes them potentially a force for disruption. But at the same time it also makes it very difficult for the parties because they don't really know how to mobilise them.

Farage believes he can overtake the Conservatives. Some Tories want to merge or ally with Reform, and the electoral dilemma for the Tories as they try to recover is stark given the way that the electorate is changing.

They have to really make a choice. Are they going to try and be a nationalistic, socially Conservative party, or are they going to try and be a more moderate brand of Conservative focused on, say, economic values? They cannot be both. And I think one of the lessons for them of demographic change is the horse to pick is the one that's going ahead, not the one that's going backwards.

Jane Green warns that making peace with Farage or adapting their message and policies to imitate Reform won't help the Tories.

Across western Europe we've seen mainstream centre-right parties really grapple with the challenge of populist parties or radical right parties. And what actually you see is the more those parties look like those radical right populist parties, the less well they do. And that's because essentially they're appealing to smaller groups of voters on the right, and they're losing the support of those voters in the centre.

The march of the graduates and the loss of young voters may continue to depress Conservative fortunes, particularly if they flirt with or compete directly with Reform on the right. But there's another element in play, too. Labour has always been able to count on ethnic minority voters. But analysts are picking up signs they could peel off - if, that is, the Tories can appear more welcoming and find that sort of economic message with broad appeal that Jane Green argues for.

I think, if you can even imagine a Conservative party being re-elected again, when it next comes to power will probably do so on the backs of far greater ethnic minority voting than has been the case before.

Ethnic minority voters look pretty much like otherwise similar white voters in terms of their economic vote. So why, then, are they all set in the Labour camp? It's because when push has come to shove the Conservative party from the time of Enoch Powell onwards has always favoured the interests of white voters who fear migration and ethnic change. But if these voters no longer perceive the Conservatives as hostile, then it opens up potentially a lot of votes in this group.

James Kanagasooriam points to the example of the ethnically diverse industrial town of Slough, where Labour's vote went down, and affluent neighbouring Windsor, with rising graduate numbers, where the long dominant Conservatives saw their votes slide.

I've always talked about with friends the Slough Windsor dynamic. Many people think of that as a kind of right-left axis - Windsor, the seat of the queen - Slough, ethnically diverse. But actually, those seats might flip. One day, the seat of the queen might belong to the party of progressives, and Slough will probably at some point be a Conservative seat.

James is sceptical about how resilient some of the election winning coalitions can prove given the inherently risky nature of reaching out to groups with different interests, particularly as the electorate fractures away from the two main parties. He calls this sandcastle politics, flimsy constructions built of layers and disparate elements. He warns it can wash away like a sandcastle with the tide.

This happened to Conservative voters between 2019 and 2024. It could happen to Labour too, he warns. So the Tories should be ready.

We don't think of trying to go for a large majority as a very perilous act, but it is because what you're doing is you're stretching the internal tension of your party. You're making it more heterodox. You are introducing dissension and intellectual and cognitive and demographic and geographic diversity where it didn't exist before. The search for victory, to stretch a coalition, to stretch a group of people, can often be the seeds behind its downfall.

For the Conservatives who spent most of the 20th century and much of the 21st so far arguing that they were the natural party of government, this electoral vulnerability must feel new and unwelcome. That most useful of Conservative traditions has been a simple one - winning. But a major block to their recovery this time will be repairing the damage to any reputation for competence after the tumult and confusion of 14 years, five prime ministers, and the constant psychodrama of a revolving door in Downing Street.

The competence issue is where I'd actually be most pessimistic about Conservative prospects. Once a solid judgement has formed in the minds of the electorate that a party really messed things up while it was in government, that can stick around for a long time.

Memories of why they turfed a party out can remain potent in voters' minds. This may be the toughest element of any Conservative recovery, warns Rob Ford. After Boris Johnson's lockdown parties, the Liz Truss mini-budget, the post-Brexit chaos in parliament under Theresa May, and Rishi Sunak's failure to offer a fresh start, these competence shocks, as Jane Green calls them, disrupt stable political allegiances.

It takes time to forget. It takes time to renew. It takes time to prove competency, particularly when you're outside of government and you don't have the levers of power.

But Westminster is no longer the only game or the only town. Revival and repairing the party's reputation could be nurtured in the new political fiefdoms of the mayoralties, where more competent moderates like Andy Street, former West Midlands mayor, could prove they can deliver in government.

Are you worried about the Conservative party drifting to the right?

I would definitely not advise that drift. I mean, the psychology here is really very straightforward, isn't it? This is the youngest, most diverse, one of the most urban places in Britain, and we've done, many would say, extremely well over a consistent period. So the message is clear. Winning from that centre ground is what happens.

There's more opportunities for recovery, more opportunities for leadership, different figures, different people.

So that's an opportunity for the Conservatives as well.

It is. I mean, not just an opportunity - it might be where they have to start.

Does the future of the Conservatives lie in appealing to a broad coalition of voters built on a patched up reputation for competence and the sort of compelling argument on prosperity that could unite disparate demographic groups, the red wall and the blue wall, the old and the young? Or will Britain see a radical realignment of the right, a merger or some sort of alliance? Rob Ford says a swing of only 6 per cent at the next election would be enough to demolish Labour's landslide.

The opportunity is there for the Tories to win again if they are in a fit state to take it. Just look at the example of Labour's rapid recovery from brutal defeat under Jeremy Corbyn to electoral triumph under Keir Starmer. This shows how quickly political fortunes can change in this turbulent new political climate.

I absolutely believe that the Conservative party can rebuild. I recall very vividly the state of the political discussion in the wake of the 2019 election. The consensus view was Labour were out of power for another generation now, and within five years everything had changed completely. Our electorate is less fundamentally tribal than the electorate used to be. That is another vital demographic fact because it means however far you fall, you can still climb back up again.

If you have a greater propensity for switching in electorates and you have major events that happen that cause people to switch and political failures and difficulties that mean people want to desert parties, then there's greater potential for those big change elections to happen more frequently, really for nothing to be a given. I mean, every political party in this context really has to, really has to work hard for every vote.

The battle over the direction of conservatism had begun even before the scale of this defeat was confirmed on the 4th of July. But reports of the party's imminent demise may have been exaggerated, says James Kanagasooriam.

It is a very resilient organisation. It has shape shifted many times. But my instinct is that almost every other party has been written off over the last five years, from Ukip to the Labour party to the Liberal Democrats. And they're all still here, and they're all thriving.

A split on the right could leave Labour in power for a decade or more, or the Tories could find ways to reach out to voters who might smile on them again and tempt others to try their wares for the first time. But with the electorate undergoing such changes in worldview, in what they care about, and in their willingness to switch allegiance at election time, the stakes have never been higher.