Matt Goodwin is a Senior Fellow at Policy Exchange and shares his research at mattgoodwin.org.
The Conservative Party’s vote has imploded. Since the party’s emphatic victory at the last election, in 2019, its share of the vote in the polls has crashed from 44 per cent to, this week, an average of just 26 per cent.
Were current polling numbers replicated at a general election tomorrow, with Labour on 43.5 per cent, they would deliver a commanding Labour majority of 202 seats. The Tories would be reduced to just 144 seats: their worst showing since 1906.
Election night would be filled with one remarkable scene after another, with a constant stream of famous, frontline Tories losing their seats: Iain Duncan Smith, Damian Green, Steve Baker, Grant Shapps, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Liam Fox, Penny Mordaunt, Robert Jenrick, Robert Halfon, to name just a few.
The Tories would lose just over 200 seats to Labour, around 20 to the Liberal Democrats, and would have to watch Labour make extensive gains north of the border, capturing around 20-25 seats from the SNP.
They would also suffer the humiliation of having to watch every single seat in the Red Wall return to Labour, symbolising how the Tories failed to lean into the post-Brexit realignment of British politics. Lee Anderson, Jake Berry, Miriam Cates, Ben Bradley, Jonathan Gullis, and Esther McVey, among others, would all lose their seats.
All those politicians, who briefly emerged to speak for a very different kind of blue-collar national conservatism, would be gone in an instant.
Which raises the obvious question. Why? Drawing on the very latest polling and analysis of the British Election Study, we can see why. It’s a fascinating story that tells us a great deal not only about what is likely to happen at the election, but the future direction of British conservatism, too.
It’s become popular in recent weeks to say the Tories are being hit on two flanks at the same time: by a more organised and professional Labour party, and the more radical Reform UK. If you look at what’s happened to the Conservative’s 2019 vote then the party is certainly haemorrhaging support on these two fronts.
About 10-15 per cent of 2019 Tories – mainly younger, anti-Brexit voters who didn’t like Boris, especially after Partygate, and are disillusioned with how the Tories are managing the economy – have defected to Labour. Another 15 per cent – mainly older, pro-Brexit, and disillusioned with how the Tories are managing immigration and the small boats – are defecting instead to Reform UK.
That Reform UK, even without Nigel Farage at the helm, is now attracting one in ten voters nationally, and about one in seven disillusioned 2019 Tories, should be ringing loud alarm bells in Number 10.
If somebody gave Reform serious money, if Farage returned as leader, and if he avoided the mistakes of his last general election campaign, then I think they could enter the 15-20 per cent range.
That would, chiefly, hurt the Tories. For every one disillusioned Labour voter and Liberal Democrat switching to Reform there are now five disillusioned Tories who are switching to them, too.
And these defections are not only being driven by specific issues, like the economy and immigration. British Election Study team have shown that many of the defections, whether to Labour or Reform, are being driven by a more diffuse sense among the British people that the Tories are simply no longer competent.
That on the most critical issues facing Britain today – the state of the economy, the cost-of-living crisis, the NHS, the small boats, and the level of immigration – the Tories have simply done a bad job.
But, at the same time, the narrative that the Tories are being hit on two fronts is actually misleading. They are being hit on three, and are also now losing an even larger number of their 2019 voters to something else: apathy.
Many people in Britain are simply giving up on politics, no longer convinced any of the big parties can fix the big problems facing the country. This is especially true for many of the people who voted Conservative at the last election.
Most of the people who have abandoned the Tories in recent months have not gone to Labour or Reform. Instead, they now say they will not vote at all, do not know who to support, or simply refuse to answer. Close to one in three of all 2019 Tories now say this.
Will they come home, as many Conservative MPs will be hoping? Maybe. But, then again, maybe not.
Like those defecting to Reform, these people tend to be more culturally conservative than socially liberal; to be strongly supportive of Brexit, deeply critical of mass immigration and how it is changing Britain, and think stopping the small boats should be the number one priority for government and that the failure to stop them is, well, a joke.
They tend to loathe woke ideology and what they feel is a deeply oppressive political correctness, and to be very disillusioned with established politics and the elite consensus in Westminster, which they think no longer represents the values and the voice of people like them.
Over the last fourteen years a succession of Conservative prime ministers and MPs, all of whom lean further to the cultural left than their own voters, have alienated these voters. After watching the Tories push the pedal down on even higher levels of net migration while consistently failing to stop the boats, many of these pro-Brexit, immigration sceptics have been running for the hills.
Since 2019, the share of Brexit voters backing the Tories has been slashed from a little over three-quarters to just 40 per cent. The share of blue-collar voters backing the Tories has fallen from over half to just 25 per cent, and the share of pensioners has likewise collapsed from more than two-thirds to 43 per cent.
If the Tories do suffer a heavy and historic defeat then it is inevitable, in my view, that the Conservative MPs who are left in parliament (who we know will be much more southern and much more likely to have gone to Oxbridge) will cling to a particular interpretation of this defeat.
It will be blamed on the alleged obsession with Brexit, with immigration, with the Rwanda policy, with the culture wars more broadly, and the robust language used by the likes of Anderson and Suella Braverman.
But this would be a major miscalculation. Whilst the Tories are currently losing support at about the same rate among pro-Remain, socially liberal voters as they are among pro-Brexit, culturally conservative voters, the latter still represent a much bigger part of today’s Tory electorate.
The Conservative Party has become far more dependent on older, blue-collar, non-London, non-graduate, pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, and culturally conservative voters to both hold and retain political power – and this remains true today.
As the British Election Study just made clear, even today close to 80 per cent of all Conservative voters either voted for Brexit or now want to stay out of the EU.
Just seven per cent of the voters it still has think immigration over the last ten years has been ‘mostly good’ for Britain; 87 per cent think the current level of net migration is “too high”; 70 per cent openly support the Rwanda policy; most do not think the law should allow people to legally change their gender; and two-thirds are only willing to support Net Zero policies provided they do not inflict additional costs on ordinary people.
The Tory vote is imploding mainly, albeit not exclusively, because it is haemorrhaging support among pro-Brexit immigration sceptics who were promised one thing in 2016, and then again in 2017, and then again in 2019, but were then given something else entirely.