Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
In politics, as in life, the final stage of grief is acceptance. Many Tory members have, like me, been prepared for this result for a long time.
Over the cycle of weeks, months, even years, we have been through denial, anger, bargaining and depression again and again, waiting for the end to put us out of our misery. All it takes is for us to accept that we deserved that election result and we can be, like Steve Baker, free.
It’s unlikely that every candidate we put up deserved to lose but as a party we did. The electorate is never wrong, and after 14 years of being ignored, we left them with little choice beyond Tory annihilation.
Since the Millennium there has been a consistent pattern of growing dissent from, and discontent with, the Conservative offering. From a forgotten third place in the 2004 European elections (the traditional home of British protest voting) UKIP came second in 2009, before carrying the 2014 election.
That was followed by the newly-born Brexit Party sweeping all before it in 2019, reducing the Conservatives to fifth place – and barely half the size of the Greens. Now, Reform UK have finally entered Parliament, not with any caveats about defectors benefitting from incumbency (bar Lee Anderson) but on their own merits, as well as finishing second in a staggering 98 seats.
Like it or not, Reform now present an existential threat to the Conservatives; not, perhaps, to their survival, but to their hopes of ever holding power again. As Professor John Curtice pointed out, over two-thirds of Tory seats were lost to Reform. Even if Labour proved to be the beneficiaries, it was Reform doing the damage.
With Reform forever snapping at our heels and splitting the vote, Labour will always sneak through, and Conservatives will find ourselves unable to win back enough of the electorate to win back power.
To someone like me – who is somewhat interested in the survival of the Conservative Party – the answer some are offering to solve this decades-long rightwards surge is staggering.
Witness the Eternal Centrist, Rory Stewart, tweeting that: “The only way that the conservatives will ever be in government again is by moving back to the centre and rejecting the fantasies of the Faragist right.”
Witness Bella Wallersetiner arguing that we need to “return to our centrist roots”, an argument that is historically illiterate; the roots of the Conservative Party lie in maintaining ‘a hegemony over the right-wing vote whilst also being able to poach votes from the centre’. Or the Guardian reporting that Tories inside the Cabinet were arguing:
“that the Tories should just ignore Nigel Farage’s party, and the campaign had been too frightened to tackle Reform’s arguments head-on for fear of offending voters who sympathised with them.”
The problem with the already-clichéd meme of returning to the centre ground whilst simultaneously rejecting populism is that the idea that ‘elections are won from the centre ground’ and that the Tories ‘must not cave to populism’ are incompatible.
The centre ground is not defined by the values of Westminster commentators or podcasters, but by the electorate. If the electorate are consistently voting for what Eternal Centrists decry as ‘populist’ policies, then they are – by definition – popular. If the policies you support are no longer popular, I’m afraid, then you are no longer in the centre, because politics does not revolve around you.
It revolves around the million different events, changes, quirks and concerns of the electorate. To be ever-attentive to their voice is the basis of democracy; to quote Alexandre Ledru-Rollin: “there go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
At every general election of the last 20 years the Conservatives have specifically pledged to reduce immigration levels. At every general election of the last 20 years the Conservative vote share has increased (until now, the election at which the electorate finally understood the difference between the stated and revealed preferences of the party).
Reducing immigration to the tens of thousands is amongst the most centrist positions in Britain today; but offer it to Eternal Centrists and it is decried as ‘fantasist’ or ‘divisive’, worthy of no more than being ignored.
This should leave us disappointed, but not surprised. As David Frost wrote on election night:
“Reform were treated as if they were the tenantry arriving at the front door with pitchforks, or uppity domestic staff disrupting the smooth running of a stately home, rather than people who had actual grievances & had every right to make their case.”
A battle for the soul of the party is about to begin. We can either appeal to the ill-defined centrism of the economic and social liberals who dominate Westminster (but nowhere else) and concern ourselves with a tiny slice of the electorate who hold few, if any, conservative positions.
Or we can listen to the voice of the electorate (who call loud, and often, and clearly) who delivered us a staggering majority in 2019 to address their concerns – and a staggering defeat in 2024 for failing to do so.
I hope to God it is the latter; otherwise, we will not bring the electorate with us. We must start the war from right here.
Tom Jones is Councillor for Scotton and Lower Wensleydale and author of the Potemkin Village Idiot substack.
In politics, as in life, the final stage of grief is acceptance. Many Tory members have, like me, been prepared for this result for a long time.
Over the cycle of weeks, months, even years, we have been through denial, anger, bargaining and depression again and again, waiting for the end to put us out of our misery. All it takes is for us to accept that we deserved that election result and we can be, like Steve Baker, free.
It’s unlikely that every candidate we put up deserved to lose but as a party we did. The electorate is never wrong, and after 14 years of being ignored, we left them with little choice beyond Tory annihilation.
Since the Millennium there has been a consistent pattern of growing dissent from, and discontent with, the Conservative offering. From a forgotten third place in the 2004 European elections (the traditional home of British protest voting) UKIP came second in 2009, before carrying the 2014 election.
That was followed by the newly-born Brexit Party sweeping all before it in 2019, reducing the Conservatives to fifth place – and barely half the size of the Greens. Now, Reform UK have finally entered Parliament, not with any caveats about defectors benefitting from incumbency (bar Lee Anderson) but on their own merits, as well as finishing second in a staggering 98 seats.
Like it or not, Reform now present an existential threat to the Conservatives; not, perhaps, to their survival, but to their hopes of ever holding power again. As Professor John Curtice pointed out, over two-thirds of Tory seats were lost to Reform. Even if Labour proved to be the beneficiaries, it was Reform doing the damage.
With Reform forever snapping at our heels and splitting the vote, Labour will always sneak through, and Conservatives will find ourselves unable to win back enough of the electorate to win back power.
To someone like me – who is somewhat interested in the survival of the Conservative Party – the answer some are offering to solve this decades-long rightwards surge is staggering.
Witness the Eternal Centrist, Rory Stewart, tweeting that: “The only way that the conservatives will ever be in government again is by moving back to the centre and rejecting the fantasies of the Faragist right.”
Witness Bella Wallersetiner arguing that we need to “return to our centrist roots”, an argument that is historically illiterate; the roots of the Conservative Party lie in maintaining ‘a hegemony over the right-wing vote whilst also being able to poach votes from the centre’. Or the Guardian reporting that Tories inside the Cabinet were arguing:
“that the Tories should just ignore Nigel Farage’s party, and the campaign had been too frightened to tackle Reform’s arguments head-on for fear of offending voters who sympathised with them.”
The problem with the already-clichéd meme of returning to the centre ground whilst simultaneously rejecting populism is that the idea that ‘elections are won from the centre ground’ and that the Tories ‘must not cave to populism’ are incompatible.
The centre ground is not defined by the values of Westminster commentators or podcasters, but by the electorate. If the electorate are consistently voting for what Eternal Centrists decry as ‘populist’ policies, then they are – by definition – popular. If the policies you support are no longer popular, I’m afraid, then you are no longer in the centre, because politics does not revolve around you.
It revolves around the million different events, changes, quirks and concerns of the electorate. To be ever-attentive to their voice is the basis of democracy; to quote Alexandre Ledru-Rollin: “there go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.”
At every general election of the last 20 years the Conservatives have specifically pledged to reduce immigration levels. At every general election of the last 20 years the Conservative vote share has increased (until now, the election at which the electorate finally understood the difference between the stated and revealed preferences of the party).
Reducing immigration to the tens of thousands is amongst the most centrist positions in Britain today; but offer it to Eternal Centrists and it is decried as ‘fantasist’ or ‘divisive’, worthy of no more than being ignored.
This should leave us disappointed, but not surprised. As David Frost wrote on election night:
“Reform were treated as if they were the tenantry arriving at the front door with pitchforks, or uppity domestic staff disrupting the smooth running of a stately home, rather than people who had actual grievances & had every right to make their case.”
A battle for the soul of the party is about to begin. We can either appeal to the ill-defined centrism of the economic and social liberals who dominate Westminster (but nowhere else) and concern ourselves with a tiny slice of the electorate who hold few, if any, conservative positions.
Or we can listen to the voice of the electorate (who call loud, and often, and clearly) who delivered us a staggering majority in 2019 to address their concerns – and a staggering defeat in 2024 for failing to do so.
I hope to God it is the latter; otherwise, we will not bring the electorate with us. We must start the war from right here.