Where do they go from here? Why there is no guaranteed way back for the Tories
You might expect me to argue that a right-wing reset is the answer, but it could simply be too late for that now that Nigel Farage has his House of Commons bridgehead.
AS SOMEONE who warned the Tories in office to deliver on issues like immigration control, law and order and standing up to woke – or live to regret not doing so - you might expect me to jump in on one side of the debate about the party’s future.
In short, that debate has already been defined as an argument between those who want to re-establish right-wing credentials so as to claw lost voters back from Reform versus those who believe that only moving further towards the “centre ground” will restore Tory fortunes. Well, what if they are both wrong?
Because I’m not going to argue here that adopting now the full right-wing slate of positions – leaving the ECHR, a tax-cutting agenda, coming off the overly gruelling net zero schedule, expanding the prisons estate and getting the police and courts back to basics, or even ending mass immigration – will guarantee sweeping gains for the Tories at the next election.
Why is that? Simply because it may already be too late. Nigel Farage and Reform now have their bridgehead in parliament and have put together a party that is united and credible in terms of being understood to be committed to all of these things. Farage is a brilliant and massively high-profile campaigner and taking back this agenda from him may well be beyond the Tories.
Unlike him, they are saddled with a record in office which casts doubt on their basic sincerity in these areas. Just take the totemic issue of immigration control: Why would voters believe that a parliamentary party still containing the likes of Alicia Kearns, Caroline Nokes, Jesse Norman, James Cleverly, Victoria Atkins and Tom Tugendhat (to name but a few) and has ratted on promises to reduce immigration four times in a row will ever truly get to grips with immigration volumes, whether legal or illegal?
It is going to take much more than a Robert Jenrick or a Kemi Badenoch winning the party leadership to persuade voters that the Conservative Party has become a reliable vehicle for delivering conservative outcomes. All the while it contains high-profile and numerous patrician “centrist” and liberal voices indulged by the media and arguing for the party to stop “banging on” about immigration daddio, its credentials will be in shreds with the folk it lost to Reform.
Yet will a future leader from the Right who has only 120 MPs behind her (or him) think that she (he) can afford to mercilessly exclude “One Nationers” from the frontbench and ensure the candidate selection process is entirely devoted to recruiting new right-wingers? Surely it is far more likely that the new leader will cling to the false comfort of the “broad church” concept.
So should the Tories instead give up on the lost red wall for good, given that they were seen not to deliver for it in office and Reform is now in second place in most of its constituencies and threatening that it is “coming for” Labour and Keir Starmer? Should the Tories instead set about the task of recapturing the leafy “blue wall” from the Lib Dems, who took more than 60 seats from them last week and from Labour, which also seized plenty of previously Tory seats in the South East and South West – in Cornwall, Dorset, Sussex, Kent, Hampshire and Hertfordshire?
Is there indeed a potential informal and undeclared alliance to be had with Reform, of the kind Labour and the Lib Dems put together with such devastating effect in the run-up to the election just gone? “We’ll leave you to focus on beating Labour in the 87 working class seats in which you are in second place to them if you keep a low profile elsewhere, old boy.” Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.
It's a nice thought and there may be some mileage in it. For instance, the Conservative
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