Freddie Downing was the Conservative candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the general election, and for City and East in this year’s London Assembly elections.
To stand a chance of winning the next election, the Conservatives must neutralise the threat from Reform; we must recognise the mistakes we made in government and say sorry; and we must position ourselves as the party of aspiration once more.
It was an honour to stand as the Conservative candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the recent general election. In addition to the time I spent campaigning in that brilliant part of the world, as Vice Chair of the LGBT+ Conservatives I was also knocking on doors in a number of other constituencies, like the Cities of London and Westminster, Chipping Barnet, Ely and East Cambridgeshire and Portsmouth North.
Wherever I went, local people kept repeating the same two messages: they either said they were fed up with politics and wouldn’t be voting, or they were voting Reform. I can’t recall coming across anyone who backed us in 2019, but were now supporting Labour or the Liberal Democrats.
Hands up, I’m no psephologist, but these doorstep conversations do seem to have been borne out in the results. The Conservatives down from 14 million votes to less than seven million. Turnout down more than seven per cent and Reform attracting four million votes. The share of the vote achieved by Labour and the Lib Dems was only marginally higher than five years ago.
I don’t support a merger with Reform, nor allowing Nigel Farage to join the Conservatives. It’s clear, however, that it presents a significant political threat to us – a threat we need to neutralise.
I lost count of the number of times I deployed the warning “vote Reform, get Labour” to potential Reform voters. Even at the time, it was clear the phrase had almost negligible cut through.
This is because the Reform backers I spoke to fell into two groups. In the first group were the people who genuinely seemed to believe Reform was on the cusp of a major political breakthrough and perhaps would come out of the election as the main opposition party. This group was small, but noticeable.
The other group comprised those people who, at one level, knew a vote for Reform would likely mean a Labour or Lib Dem local MP, but they didn’t care. They weren’t thinking beyond 4 July. They just wanted to give the Tories a kicking.
In short, it was a mass demonstration of cognitive dissonance; I suspect it’ll be this group of voters who will be left most frustrated by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government and, now they have given the Tories a kicking, some will naturally return to the Conservative fold.
However, to wait for these voters to come back to us isn’t good enough. We must tackle the root cause of their frustration.
Typically, Reform backers raised three issues on the doorstep: tax, immigration, and the NHS. Of these, immigration prompted the greatest display of frustration – and frankly, it’s understandable. We failed on immigration. In 2010, we promised to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. By the end of our time in office, it had more than doubled.
Eighteen months ago, Rishi Sunak promised to stop the boats, but the boats continue to cross the channel, hotels and other facilities continue to be overrun with people who have come here illegally, and whatever the scheme’s merits, very few people believed the Rwanda Plan would work, least of all the voters.
We failed. We need to be honest about it, and we need to come forward with new policies that address people’s concerns.
Immigration is a good example of the challenge presented by the move from government to opposition: on the one hand, it’s natural for us to want to defend our record in office. On the other hand, the voters have cast their judgement and there is little to gain from refighting past battles. We must concede and move on.
I don’t think we’ll be allowed to move on unless we say sorry for two big mistakes. The first is ‘Partygate’. As a candidate in the London Assembly election and the general election, I have spent more than a year regularly canvassing voters. I found no other issue provoked such a strong response on the doorstep as Partygate.
I don’t just mean rule breaking by rule-makers in Downing Street, but also concerns over the way some PPE was purchased, and what Michael Gove more broadly described as the perception that a different set of rules applied to those in charge. I also found it was our own supporters who were most likely to raise this issue, and who were most visibly angered by what had happened.
The other mistake was ‘Trussonomics’. I completely agree with people who want to reduce the tax burden. I agree we must improve economic growth if we want to cut taxes and still have good public services. I agree we need to press for supply-side reforms if we’re going to boost growth.
However, the combination of unfunded tax and spending commitments, coupled with poor execution, proved disastrous. The economic consequences of those 49 days may be debated, just like the economic consequences of Black Wednesday are debated, but the political fallout from both episodes is indisputable: the public stopped trusting us to manage the economy better than Labour.
Unless we lance the twin boils of Partygate and Trussonomics, we won’t be able to win back the public’s trust. We need to hold-up our hands and apologise for our mistakes.
My final observation is this: too many people no longer felt the Conservatives were on their side. During the campaign, I remember chatting to a woman; she lives in a rented flat, and is facing eviction this summer under Section 21. She also works all the hours she can to put her teenage son through private school, because she wants him to have the best start in life. She knows Labour will make her life harder, but she no longer believed we would make her life better.
We must convince voters, like her, we are the party of aspiration once more. That we will help people who work hard and want to get on. That unlike Labour, we will support success, not just tax it. That we believe hardworking people know best how to spend their money, and we are prepared to match rhetoric with action.
We may have suffered our worst electoral defeat for more than a century, but I’m genuinely optimistic about our party’s future. We can absolutely come back. But we must make a choice.
We can take Route 1997: refuse to accept the voters’ verdict and try refighting the last election; spend all our time talking about issues of little interest to the average person; move further away from the electorate; and spend more than decade in opposition.
Or we can take Route 1945: accept our defeat; think hard about why it happened; and get serious about winning back power and the work needed to get there. The choice is ours. I know which route I prefer.
Freddie Downing was the Conservative candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the general election, and for City and East in this year’s London Assembly elections.
To stand a chance of winning the next election, the Conservatives must neutralise the threat from Reform; we must recognise the mistakes we made in government and say sorry; and we must position ourselves as the party of aspiration once more.
It was an honour to stand as the Conservative candidate for Poplar and Limehouse at the recent general election. In addition to the time I spent campaigning in that brilliant part of the world, as Vice Chair of the LGBT+ Conservatives I was also knocking on doors in a number of other constituencies, like the Cities of London and Westminster, Chipping Barnet, Ely and East Cambridgeshire and Portsmouth North.
Wherever I went, local people kept repeating the same two messages: they either said they were fed up with politics and wouldn’t be voting, or they were voting Reform. I can’t recall coming across anyone who backed us in 2019, but were now supporting Labour or the Liberal Democrats.
Hands up, I’m no psephologist, but these doorstep conversations do seem to have been borne out in the results. The Conservatives down from 14 million votes to less than seven million. Turnout down more than seven per cent and Reform attracting four million votes. The share of the vote achieved by Labour and the Lib Dems was only marginally higher than five years ago.
I don’t support a merger with Reform, nor allowing Nigel Farage to join the Conservatives. It’s clear, however, that it presents a significant political threat to us – a threat we need to neutralise.
I lost count of the number of times I deployed the warning “vote Reform, get Labour” to potential Reform voters. Even at the time, it was clear the phrase had almost negligible cut through.
This is because the Reform backers I spoke to fell into two groups. In the first group were the people who genuinely seemed to believe Reform was on the cusp of a major political breakthrough and perhaps would come out of the election as the main opposition party. This group was small, but noticeable.
The other group comprised those people who, at one level, knew a vote for Reform would likely mean a Labour or Lib Dem local MP, but they didn’t care. They weren’t thinking beyond 4 July. They just wanted to give the Tories a kicking.
In short, it was a mass demonstration of cognitive dissonance; I suspect it’ll be this group of voters who will be left most frustrated by Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour Government and, now they have given the Tories a kicking, some will naturally return to the Conservative fold.
However, to wait for these voters to come back to us isn’t good enough. We must tackle the root cause of their frustration.
Typically, Reform backers raised three issues on the doorstep: tax, immigration, and the NHS. Of these, immigration prompted the greatest display of frustration – and frankly, it’s understandable. We failed on immigration. In 2010, we promised to cut immigration to the tens of thousands. By the end of our time in office, it had more than doubled.
Eighteen months ago, Rishi Sunak promised to stop the boats, but the boats continue to cross the channel, hotels and other facilities continue to be overrun with people who have come here illegally, and whatever the scheme’s merits, very few people believed the Rwanda Plan would work, least of all the voters.
We failed. We need to be honest about it, and we need to come forward with new policies that address people’s concerns.
Immigration is a good example of the challenge presented by the move from government to opposition: on the one hand, it’s natural for us to want to defend our record in office. On the other hand, the voters have cast their judgement and there is little to gain from refighting past battles. We must concede and move on.
I don’t think we’ll be allowed to move on unless we say sorry for two big mistakes. The first is ‘Partygate’. As a candidate in the London Assembly election and the general election, I have spent more than a year regularly canvassing voters. I found no other issue provoked such a strong response on the doorstep as Partygate.
I don’t just mean rule breaking by rule-makers in Downing Street, but also concerns over the way some PPE was purchased, and what Michael Gove more broadly described as the perception that a different set of rules applied to those in charge. I also found it was our own supporters who were most likely to raise this issue, and who were most visibly angered by what had happened.
The other mistake was ‘Trussonomics’. I completely agree with people who want to reduce the tax burden. I agree we must improve economic growth if we want to cut taxes and still have good public services. I agree we need to press for supply-side reforms if we’re going to boost growth.
However, the combination of unfunded tax and spending commitments, coupled with poor execution, proved disastrous. The economic consequences of those 49 days may be debated, just like the economic consequences of Black Wednesday are debated, but the political fallout from both episodes is indisputable: the public stopped trusting us to manage the economy better than Labour.
Unless we lance the twin boils of Partygate and Trussonomics, we won’t be able to win back the public’s trust. We need to hold-up our hands and apologise for our mistakes.
My final observation is this: too many people no longer felt the Conservatives were on their side. During the campaign, I remember chatting to a woman; she lives in a rented flat, and is facing eviction this summer under Section 21. She also works all the hours she can to put her teenage son through private school, because she wants him to have the best start in life. She knows Labour will make her life harder, but she no longer believed we would make her life better.
We must convince voters, like her, we are the party of aspiration once more. That we will help people who work hard and want to get on. That unlike Labour, we will support success, not just tax it. That we believe hardworking people know best how to spend their money, and we are prepared to match rhetoric with action.
We may have suffered our worst electoral defeat for more than a century, but I’m genuinely optimistic about our party’s future. We can absolutely come back. But we must make a choice.
We can take Route 1997: refuse to accept the voters’ verdict and try refighting the last election; spend all our time talking about issues of little interest to the average person; move further away from the electorate; and spend more than decade in opposition.
Or we can take Route 1945: accept our defeat; think hard about why it happened; and get serious about winning back power and the work needed to get there. The choice is ours. I know which route I prefer.