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Conservative politics defied the dim expectations set of it this week. Pronounced dead on arrival in Birmingham by its political and media critics, the party showed genuine signs of life at its annual conference — mere months after suffering an electoral cataclysm.
The contrast between the Conservatives’ merry post-mortem and the funereal atmosphere at Labour’s victory fête was as plain as it was curious. Even Rishi Sunak was rewarded with a starry-eyed send-off this week: his final political “reset” as a sorrowful deposed premier, has been by far his most effective — and enduring.
The base suggestion of these juxtaposing symposiums is nonetheless a false one. Labour, after all, is coming to terms with the seriousness of government. The Conservatives, meanwhile, are finding pleasure in the unseriousness of opposition. At this stage in a parliament, vibes do not indicate the health of a party — on what side its spokespeople sit of the commons Speaker’s chair, however, does.
What, then, are the deeper reasons informing the Conservatives’ counterintuitive giddiness? Firstly, there was much jubilation over the fact that Labour’s recent triumph has been dampened by strategic missteps and a grim economic narrative. A schadenfreude-laden smugness pervaded Conservative conference — together with palliative observations that Starmer’s landslide is “thin” or “shallow” or “loveless”.
On top of this, conference organisers had shrewdly created outlets for the usual energetic infighting. Instead of briefing their criticisms privately, as has been the norm at recent get-togethers, factional agitators were literally carved up between four rival leadership camps. The end result was a near-total suspension of collective responsibility and the political solemnity it is considered to imply. How it must have healed the tortured Tory soul.
This was a party relieved of all meaningful responsibility — and thankful for it. Political irrelevance has its perks.
For these reasons and others, the far more instructive conversations in Birmingham took place on the conference fringe — where conservative wonks and psephologists collected to soberly consider the party’s defeat. The conversations were, for the most part, bereft of simplistic overtures to the activist base or surface-level “talked right but governed left” analysis. In its place: an unalloyed assessment of the political damage the main-stage leadership contenders were simultaneously skirting and deepening.
Review and rebuild
“The Conservative vote collapsed in every direction. In short, everything that could go wrong did go wrong”, begins centre-right think tank Onward’s report into the Tory loss.
The group’s research indicates the party lost 23 per cent of its vote to Reform UK, 13 per cent to Labour and 7 per cent to the Liberal Democrats. On top of this, it fell back across all major demographic divides including age, ethnicity, social class, and Brexit preference. Even more existentially, the party’s support base is now the oldest it has ever been: the “cross-over” point where voters are more likely to vote Conservative rose last election to a historic 64.
Unveiling the report at conference fringe event, Focaldata’s James Kanagasooriam explained how the Conservatives put on votes successfully over six consecutive elections from 2001 through to 2019 — and lost them in a single fell swoop.
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Enclosed in Onward’s Breaking Blue report are incontrovertible data, like these, that a future Tory leader must immediately come to terms with. They are the “Point A” — the position of defeat and the factors informing it, from which the journey to “Point B” — renewal and victory, will need to be plotted by a future premier. The Conservative Party’s conference slogan, “Review and Rebuild”, works logically because it is processual; the second phase cannot follow until the first is fulfilled.
The Conservative Party’s post-defeat task is, however, easier to express via slogan than it is to enact. The political journey its next leader faces is strewn with a series of political traps that will either prove the making, or breaking, of them.
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Onward — to what?
James Cleverly’s suggestion this week that his party must act “normal” in order to recover lost ground in the country has rightly received much attention.
But the assessment, which Kanagasooriam posited days prior on the conference fringe, is a starting point — not a strategy. More than this: notwithstanding the fact that any successful institution (especially one as venerable as the Conservative Party) should take being “normal” for granted, the observation also points to manifold further predicaments.
How, for instance, does Cleverly plan to root out examples of abnormal behaviour? How is he proposing the Conservatives identify it? And would he possess the will or strength as leader to stare down those, and there would be many, who disagree?
How James Cleverly won Conservative Party conference
This is a case in point of the Conservative Party’s real big-picture political dilemma: assessments that would seem matter-of-fact and incontrovertible point, upon further scrutiny, to political traps that this tired, bewildered party is going to have to reckon with.
Another example, akin to Cleverly’s “normalcy” decree, is the common argument that the Conservatives must project competence in opposition. On the Tory fringe, this was the primary contention of former Whitehall mainstay Grant Shapps, who told Onward’s post-mortem gathering that the “route back” for the Conservatives “starts with a sense of unity and purpose that will allow people to come back and support us.”
“You can think about all these very fancy ideas, fantastic policies and the rest of it”, Shapps insisted. “But unless people think that you’re going to come in as a government and be competent at governing the country, then you don’t even pass the test that says we’re even going to bother to listen to your crazy ideas.”
“So the very, very first thing we have to do is to look and feel a lot more competent than we were, particularly in those last few years.”
Shapps puts the point simply and uncontroversially: the Conservatives lost because they were widely viewed as incompetent. Even if voters agreed with Rishi Sunak’s arguments and policies, they didn’t have faith in his party’s ability to deliver them. Projecting competence, therefore, is the necessary first step on the path to a Conservative rebuild — after which other aspects of an election-winning formula can be introduced.
Cleverly, whose campaign “spreadsheet Shapps” is managing, delivered a version of this argument from the main stage this week. But it isn’t without its sceptics.
Rachel Wolf, founder of polling consultancy Public First and co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, identifies this “competence” narrative as a potential trap. Speaking to a Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) fringe event, she dismissed the view that by simply “appearing statesman-like and measured and refusing to go for immoderate language on the right or the left… that this is somehow enough to either be voted in again or to run decent government again.”
Pointing to Starmer’s travails in government, Wolf went on. “So we have to actually figure out what it is we want to do. Competence is not enough”. Danny Kruger, CPS panellist and the Conservative MP running Robert Jenrick’s campaign, nodded in agreement.
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This strategic disagreement, still, is only one aspect of the Conservatives’ “competence” dilemma. Rather more portentously, it isn’t clear what recourse exists for the next leader to project such a virtue. The levers of government are no longer the Tories’ to exploit; restoring the party’s reputation for competence was, in truth, Rishi Sunak’s job. He failed. Why should his successor succeed when their room for manoeuvre, in opposition, will be even narrower?
Onward’s Breaking Blue report suggests that competence “can be displayed through strong leadership, clear messaging, a new fresh frontbench team promoting new coherent ideas”. But strength, clarity, freshness and coherence are not traits typically associated with this Conservative Party — and their possible contrivance all point to battles that a new leader must first win.
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Can the Conservatives do ‘change’?
That said, a more totemic “trap” concerns the Conservative Party’s ability to, first, change and, second, prove it.
This parliament, the Tories run a real risk of convincing themselves, via the elevation of fresh talent or the promulgation of new slogans, that it has conducted the change demanded of it by the electorate. This, in effect, is the mistake the Conservative Party made from 1997-2001, when then-leader William Hague, 36, spoke loftily of his intention to “listen” to the public while failing to take requisite action.
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There is also the question of what kind of “change” the Tories pursue. As party leaders, Tony Blair, David Cameron and Keir Starmer clearly articulated and imposed their agendas on their parties. Blair and Starmer, in particular, understood the importance of symbolism in signalling a definitive break with the past: hence the former’s pivot against doctrinaire socialism by rewriting Clause IV and the latter’s carefully choreographed decision to expel Jeremy Corbyn from Labour.
Blair, Cameron and Starmer, after all, had pretty tightly defined ancien régimes, which they duly denigrated and vowed to renew. The next Tory leader will take charge of a party riven with a series of competing, hostile elements, all of which have led at the others’ expense in recent years and have been duly blamed for July’s routing.
Choosing what to change “from”, let alone “to”, will be treated as an ideological decision — and a deeply controversial one at that.
And more: how does the party publicly reflect on its record in government? Does a future leader inaugurate a clean “Year Zero” approach, admitting that the “fourteen years of Tory government” debate is lost? Do they pick and choose achievements, defending some aspects while disowning others? (What organising principle would drive this approach?) Or do they try to win the argument that Conservative governance, in the round, benefitted Britain?
There is no satisfying answer to these questions. The last government, and people’s ill-will towards it, is much too recent history.
The traps under the traps
Nonetheless, the act of navigating these “traps” represents but a fraction of the travails the Conservatives face this parliament. The big challenge the Conservative Party faces this parliament, especially in its early stages, will not be avoiding political traps — but ensuring the public is listening if it does.
After all, the Conservatives will not be rebuilding in a political and social environment sympathetic to their plight. The public, as trained over the last parliament and beyond, simply expects Tory politicians to behave chaotically. And the Conservative Party, no matter how “smiley” its next leader is, will have the odd psychodramatic moment over the next few years — likely many of them, probably over short spaces of time.
Indeed, there are already hints as to the potential incoherence to come. Reacting to one leadership candidate’s speech on Wednesday, Conservative moderate and party intellectual Jesse Norman reacted: “I am very sorry to have to say it, but that speech of Robert Jenrick’s was lazy, mendacious, simplistic tripe.”
Counterintuitively, it is possible that this leadership process is most united the Conservatives appear over the coming months — after which the leader’s chosen post-election direction draws fevered criticism from both internal and external actors (read Suella Braverman and Nigel Farage).
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Cutting through the noise on the occasions when the party does not revert to type will be a defining imperative for the next Conservative leader.
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The Conservative Party is loathed
Reacting to the Tories’ landslide defeat at the 1945 election, Quentin Hogg described the rejection as indicating “a long pent-up and deep-seated revulsion against the principles, practices, and membership of the Conservative Party”.
In 2024, this is again the reality the next Tory leader will be reckoning with — and needing to challenge: an atmosphere of loathing.
The Conservative Party, in the end, is loathed by those voters who defected from it to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and Reform UK in July. It is loathed across demographics, income groups, Brexit preferences and geographies. It is loathed for “partygate” and foisting Liz Truss on the country. It is loathed for the broken of promises, the regicides, the irresponsibility. It is loathed for what it said, and for what it didn’t say. The Conservative Party is loathed.
Now, this is not totally lost on the conservative ecosystem which convened in Birmingham this week. Wolf, the aforementioned 2019 manifesto author, proved the most explicit in advancing this view. “While it is unquestionably true that people voted against the Conservative Party, not for the Labor Party”, she told a CPS fringe, “we cannot, for one second convince ourselves that doesn’t mean we’re still loathed.”
“We cannot underestimate the mountain that we have to climb”, Wolf added.
In short: how does a Conservative leader, in just five years, convince the public that a party that serially broke promises in power is now suddenly telling the truth in opposition?
Of course, whoever is picked on 4th November must make an immediate effort to rebuild the party campaign machine for the 2025 local elections. Failure even at this most early juncture could ensure suppressed habits froth to the surface with familiar rhapsody. For a seething public, at every turn, such episodes will serve as reminders of the party it rejected last election.
Rishi Sunak failed as prime minister. But he succeeded in proving one iron political rule: things, even at a new historic nadir, can always get worse. Onward, in acknowledgement of this fact, has described this febrile juncture as the Conservative Party’s “sink or swim moment”.
But the truth is the Conservatives will face many “sink or swim” moments over the coming years, in the form of the traps outlined in this article. Failure, of course, is not pre-ordained; but to suggest the party will readily and effectively respond to the challenges posed of it does correspond with precedent.
All the while, the Conservatives must remember that the public — while unconvinced by Starmer — are pretty set in their view of them. A new leader can either reckon with this reality or ignore it: the latter would be a sure sign that this is a party sinking still.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.
