Cllr. Eddie Reeves is the Leader of the Conservative Group on Oxfordshire County Council and the Leader of the Conservative Group on Cherwell District Council.
In Oxfordshire, despite strong parliamentary candidates with good campaigning nous and healthy association finances in most cases, we followed colleagues in Cornwall by being swept away altogether in the early hours of Friday morning after the General Election.
For the first time since 1777, over half a century before the Great Reform Act of 1832, Oxfordshire is now without a Tory MP.
Regrettably, for seasoned campaigners on the patch, this was entirely predictable. Indeed, I warned party strategists of the tsunami set to hit the Blue Wall in my piece for ConHome last year:
“Not to put too fine a point on it, traditionally gold-standard Conservative seats such as Banbury, Henley and Wantage (the latter two, having been renamed Henley & Thame and Didcot & Wantage) could all go at the next election unless the party invests time and resource into them now. The party’s 80:20 strategy is misconceived, and Red and Blue Wallers in the know should start saying so.”
And so, it came to pass. CCHQ invested no resource in Oxfordshire seats, cleaving instead to its superannuated 80:20 strategy before summarily scrapping it in favour of an eleventh-hour pitch to Reform-leaners.
Such unprincipled political careening led only to decimation across the heart of England – not only in Oxfordshire but in Gloucestershire and Somerset to the West and Northamptonshire and Cambridgeshire to the East – each just a seat or two away now from parliamentary extinction.
With equal dependability, la tendance mode in the Conservative Party is now to panic and to set about arguing how best to ape Reform. The logic goes, if only we could more successfully squeeze the Reform vote, we would surely win scores of newly marginal seats at the next election.
As with all voguish ideas, there is an air of plausibility about it. In Banbury, once a blue-chip Conservative seat, our respected local MP Victoria Prentis lost to an equally local – and, I concede, competent – Labour candidate by a significant margin of 3,256 votes.
A respectable Conservative vote share of 31 per cent was eclipsed by Labour’s at 38 per cent, the latter up only 13 per cent on 2019 and accounted for largely by Liberal Democrat support, which fell 11 per cent over the same period. Leapfrogging the Lib Dems into third came Reform, whose 6,284 votes – equivalent to 13 per cent – now far exceeds our Labour MP’s majority. Out-Reform Reform to recapture Banbury and seats like it, the argument runs.
Yet, even within Oxfordshire, such a strategy seems improbable or, at least, incomplete. In the equally ‘safe’ Conservative constituency of Henley & Thame – the seat, no less, of Heseltine and pre-Brexit Boris – the Party recorded a higher vote-share of 33 per cent. Yet, our excellent candidate Caroline Newton, another local champion, lost to a distinctly less impressive Liberal Democrat challenger by almost the twice the margin at 6,267 votes. Taken in its entirety, the Reform vote of 5,213 votes – a share of under ten per cent – would not have eclipsed the 45 per cent secured by the Liberal Democrats, whose vote-share rose by 12 per cent, far more than the decline in Labour and Green support put together.
The solution? I am yet to find a comprehensive one. I suspect though that recognising the problem in all its richness is the right place to start: a Reform press to the Right and a Lib Dem pinch to the Left allied to considerable Conservative abstentions, more efficient tactical voting and modest centre-ground churn.
My hunch is that keeping calm and carrying on as Conservatives is likely to be bear fruit. To be any less than a broad coalition of centre-Right and Right-wing interests is not to flex in both directions, as we ostensibly now need to do.
The adverse effects of First-Past-The-Post can be cruel when facing a fractured Right-of-Centre vote. But, with 252 seats in this parliament now with majorities of less than 5,000 – by far the largest on record – ours is by far best placed to build the broad coalition of voters required to recapture the country from Labour in 2034, if not in 2029.
Articulating what a Conservative is in the second quarter of the Twenty-first Century will be a key task for our next Leader. So, too, will be finding Conservative solutions to the public policy challenges of our age: planning, housebuilding and labour shortages in the slipstream of loose monetary policy; the disruptive effects of Artificial Intelligence on employment and public services; the nation’s geostrategic alliances and the perennial difficulties around defence spending; mass migration in an increasingly volatile world and its effects on community cohesion at home; social care provision in an ageing society; the paucity of SEND and mental health services in an age of more fragmented families; energy security, and its associated environmental and fiscal challenges. On the list bleakly goes.
And still, what makes me optimistic about our great Party and its fortunes is this basic truth: none of the above will be solved by the Labour Party, given the spectacularly low base from which its new government starts and the strategic challenges it faces in managing its own coalition of interests. This new Labour government is likely therefore to become unpopular quickly. Provided that we unite behind our new Leader, stand firm on our Conservative values, and speak credibly to these and other challenges, the uptick in our fortunes could yet be stark as was our descent.