Future of the Tories post-wipeout

Following the large majority the Conservative party achieved in the 2019 general election, it is insane to think that we could be looking at a wipeout for them in the upcoming general election this year. However, successive prime ministers, numerous scandals, and an economic recession has all but guaranteed a Conservative defeat with Labour 20 points ahead in the polls for over a year now.

Although these polls are likely higher than the final result, as polls usually do narrow during election campaigns, many estimate that the Tories could be left with less than 100 seats. Electoral Calculus’ latest professional MRP poll (with 18,000 surveyed) put the Conservative party on just 80 seats against Labour’s 450. Fringe polling will get you further, with some highlighting the possibility of the Conservatives becoming relegated to the fourth largest party on some 20 seats behind the Liberal Democrats and Scottish National Party.

But what exactly would a Tory wipeout mean for the future of the Conservative party?

The long road back to Number 10

The first option the Conservative party has going forward would be the same as their strategy going forward after their catastrophic defeat to New Labour in 1997. No defeat lasts forever, and the Labour party is set to inherit a disastrous economy. Rachel Reeves, the Shadow Chancellor, has implied that she will maintain Tory spending for at least a year after being elected, and has dropped many popular policies like the £28 billion green energy investment plan due to funding issues. With no real change coming from Labour, at least promised at the moment, a conservative party in ruin could wait out the clock on the five year term and return to office in 2029 if Labour fails to fix any of the major problems the country faces. The Conservatives are very good at campaigning with most of the media on their side usually and like in 2010, they could blame economic disaster on Labour once again.

It took the party 13 years to recover from their defeat in the 1997 election, even failing to make significant gains in the 2005 election despite major backlash on Tony Blair’s decision to join the Iraq War. But politics is more polarised than ever and a particularly politically savvy leader could exploit Labour’s willingness to maintain the status quo and promise real change. 

There are definitely two directions though that the Conservative party leadership could fall to, and one looks more likely than the other. ReformUK, formerly the Brexit party of Nigel Farage, is polling with over ten points with one of their key issues being immigration - an issue the Conservatives have failed to grasp. With a recent by-election in Kingswood, the Conservatives lost the seat because of a spoiler from ReformUK taking up a significant voting bloc. The party could shift itself ever more rightward in an attempt to take in further right voters, or possibly even merge with Reform. In this leap right, the Conservatives might want to focus on culture war issues like a ‘war on woke’.

It’s quite easy to see potential leadership bids from people with very safe Tory seats. Suella Braverman, the former home secretary whose rhetoric on immigration is potentially near fascistic; or Kemi Badenoch, who pedals misinformation on trans people from her position as Minister of Equalities; instantly springs to mind. Liz Truss, recently speaking at a convention for ‘popular conservatism’ and being as homophobic as the right-wing usually are, could also make a ‘triumphant’ return after her disastrous premiership in September–October 2022.

The less likely path in my opinion is the moderate path. Although it could be very successful, it also has the risk of completely killing the Conservative party in the process. The idea is that the Tories have shifted too far right from the times of Cameron in the early 2010s. Rishi Sunak’s government has many from the far right of the party, and during the 2019 election former prime minister Boris Johnson removed many on the centre of the party to focus on Brexit. 

The theory is that Labour is doing so well under Starmer at the moment because he is picking up the vast majority of the centrist ground, confining the Conservatives to appeal to just a small subsection of the electorate. Tackling Labour on centrist positions and convincing the centrist public that they are to trust over Labour could be one that wins them the election. After all, winning the working class like Johnson did with his rhetoric on Brexit was a key pathway to victory in the 2019 election, which may I remind you is the biggest Conservative victory since Margaret Thatcher.

The risk however is that the Conservatives fail to win on the centre ground. Their polling on the economy, which historically has trumped Labour even during their governments, has fallen vastly behind. And after 14 years in office, it’ll be very hard to find centrist voters who aren’t sick and tired of the Tory failure to act and change the country for the better, even with a fancy rebrand. ReformUK would also be willing to take in abandoned voters on the right and far right of the political spectrum, hoping to reach levels of above 20 percentage points which aren’t far off from their results at the moment. Labour trumping them in centrist grounds and ReformUK sweeping up their votes from the other side could see the Tories lose even more seats in this situation.

Potential leaders for this centrist resurgence though could be former prime minister Theresa May who could do better without Brexit looming behind her; well likened veteran Tom Tugendhat who had run for the leadership in July 2022; or Jeremy Hunt, the current Chancellor of the Exchequer under Sunak.

Ultimately, a shift further right to deal with their main electoral threat seems likely, especially as the more experienced and right-wing leadership candidates seem to be the ones more likely to keep their seats in a wipeout. Furthermore, Sunak himself might seem a bit of a centrist as it stands, having been rumoured to secretly dislike the right-wing Rwanda Bill he is championing, and breaking to the right of the party after a Sunak-led defeat is a natural thing to do. And lastly, the Tory party membership seems to favour less centrist positions being more elderly and very conservative enough to purchase the subscription. They elected Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak in the leadership election after all.

The end of the Conservative party

A second route out of a wipeout is also available for them: their replacement. Just like our cousins across the pond, the UK hasn’t had a major party be replaced for over a century, so it may seem like quite a confusing and foreign idea. However, we can look to a country like Canada, who uses our exact electoral system, to see what could happen.

In the 1993 election in Canada, the incumbent Progressive Conservative Party entered the elections with 169 seats under prime minister Kim Campbell and was devastated afterwards with just 2 remaining seats - losing her own seat in the process. There are remarkable similarities between the two circumstances actually. Campbell had become prime minister mid term, like Sunak, and was very unpopular; the party that replaced them on the right of the political spectrum was called ‘Reform’; and she lost the election by a swing of around negative 25 points, which is very close to the gap in polling in the UK which at its highest has reached a 28 point gap. 

After this election in Canada, the PCP was wiped out as a political force and ceased to exist before the new millennia, merging with Reform to become a new Conservative party. The fate of the Conservatives in the UK could therefore be very similar, either merging with Reform or being wholly replaced by it - or perhaps a whole new moderate conservative political party would be founded to take its place.

Stranger things have happened in UK politics recently: the Brexit referendum really shook things up and the last four elections have been extremely interesting compared to others prior. Even in the 1980s we had the drama of the Liberal–SDP electoral alliance and formation of the Liberal Democrats, and the rise of the SNP in Scotland. This is the perfect opportunity for the end of the two century old Conservative party as we know it. 

I definitely think this is a time for political realignment in the UK. Disastrous left-wing results in the 1980s saw the rise of neoliberalism under Thatcher and a shift from Labour away from socialism to third-way politics. With Labour shifting to the right and ReformUK becoming a political force, will politics shift irreversibly right once again, or will a Labour landslide and domination reframe the debate to the left as conservatism is seen as something of the past. There’s only one way to make this change though: vote out the Conservatives and ensure this wipeout of epic proportions in the 2024 election.