Last week’s election results were not the complete destruction of the Conservatives long predicted by the likes of Zia Yusuf, but nor were they a cause of celebration.
If the Tory leadership thinks they were, it would be a worrying sign of deluded thinking. In reality, the results showed a party surviving, but not much more than that.
The strategic challenge for the Tories is that it has been losing support to both its right (Reform) and left (Labour and the Lib Dems – although not so much Labour anymore). Move decisively to the right and more votes get lost to left-wing parties, move decisively to the left and watch Reform steal the Tories’ lunch. What to do?
The view of the Conservative leadership is that the first task is to win the battle to be the pre-eminent party of the right. That means moving rightwards, squeezing Reform and – assuming that succeeds – winning back what is left of their support with the message that a vote for Reform is a wasted vote and will let Labour back in.
On the evidence of last week, that objective is a long way from being met. Indeed, it is impossible to conclude that unless Nigel Farage departs the political scene in the intervening period, the “wasted vote” argument is going to work at the next General Election. Reform UK will be a significant force when the country elects the next government.
This does not entirely invalidate the strategy of focusing on Reform and their voters. There is a respectable political argument that the best that can be hoped for the Conservatives is survival. Position the party close to Reform, stem the flow of defections, and wait them out.
Something might turn up.
We should not, however, be under any illusion that this is anything other than a strategy that condemns the Tories to – at best – a result very similar to 2024. There might be a few Labour/Conservative marginals to be won, but the Red Wall would not be won back and, if anything, the Liberal Democrats would be taking more seats off the Tories. The summit of the Conservative Party’s ambitions under this strategy would is to be a junior partner in a coalition with Nigel Farage.
There is an alternative strategy, which is to try to win over supporters of some of the parties of the left. Once upon a time, this was the conventional approach when elections were fought and won in the political centre. This is now unfashionable, and all the talk is of two voting blocs – the left and the right – and that few voters ever switch from one bloc to another. The route to victory is to dominate your bloc, it is argued.
In this context, Sam Freedman produced a fascinating essay last month. He commissioned polling asking voters which parties they would seriously consider voting. In broad terms, this revealed three blocs of roughly equal size – a left bloc (who would only consider voting Labour, Green, and Lib Dem), a right bloc (Reform or Conservative), and a swing bloc who would seriously consider voting for at least one party on the other side of their current preference.
He then obtained information about the three blocs and, curiously, the left and right blocs had more in common with each other than they did with the swing bloc. On average, compared to those who belonged to other blocs, members of the swing bloc were younger, better educated, higher earning, more positive about their fellow citizens, and more likely to think that everyone in Britain has a chance of getting on in life.
There was plenty of good news for the Conservatives about the views of members of the swing bloc. They are less hostile to big business than the other blocs, they prefer Kemi Badenoch to the other party leaders, and they do not currently vote Tory very much (demonstrating plenty of untapped potential.)
Should the Tories go after them?
A Conservative recovery in London, Surrey, Sussex, Hertfordshire and the Thames Valley is essential if there is ever to be a Tory majority again and that means appealing to the swing bloc. It is not as if Labour or the Liberal Democrats are formidably impressive.
The opportunity is there but there are some attitudes of the swing bloc voters that are not well-aligned with the current Conservative approach. For a start, compared to the right bloc, the swing bloc is much more enthusiastic about closer links with the EU. A Brexit purity test will put them off.
This then takes us to the counter-argument and the strategic dilemma stated above – if you appeal to swing voters, you lose votes and seats to Reform. Just as the Conservatives cannot win an election without winning in Surrey and Oxfordshire, it cannot win without prevailing in Essex and Suffolk – where Reform were victorious last week.
The temptation is to react to these results by doubling down on the focus on winning back Reform voters, not least because much of the Tory leadership hold seats in Essex which are at risk of going turquoise. This would be a mistake for two reasons.
First, it is an error to think that the overwhelming change in our politics is Conservative voters switching to Reform, even in Essex. Prosper UK commissioned More in Common to undertake an MRP poll seeking more information about what has happened to Tory voters, which could be extrapolated to individual seats. In Kemi Badenoch’s seat of North West Essex, for example, 42 per cent of ex-Conservative voters had switched to Reform. A sizeable number, but still a minority of ex-Tory voters (32 per cent were now supporting Labour, Lib Dems or Greens and 26 per cent were not voting or undecided).
Second, there is the issue of tactical voting.
What characterised many of the places where the Tories held off the Reform threat (such as Bexley and Broxbourne) is that support for left-wing parties fell, as their voters switched to the Conservatives to stop Reform. Come the next election, tactical voting could mean that the Conservatives win the vast majority of Tory/Reform marginal seats.
Again, take North West Essex as an example. Reform published an extrapolation of the County Council elections shows Reform winning the seat with 31 per cent of the vote versus 29 per cent for the Conservatives. But that still left 40 per cent voting elsewhere. Even a small amount of tactical voting sees off the threat.
In that context, a strategy of moving towards Reform imperils that tactical voting. Any suggestion of a pact with Reform or any attempts to outflank Reform on cultural issues will deter potential tactical voters. Instead, it is necessary to differentiate on policy, to reassure the electorate that the Tories are not populists or authoritarians, and to be prepared to criticise Reform more fully. (The Conservatives, for example, should be much more critical of Farage over the undeclared £5m gift from a crypto billionaire.)
The big point here is that trying to be more like Farage than Farage fails in both Surrey and Essex, because it puts off swing voters and tactical voters. In the circumstances where a centre left government will have failed but most of the country does not want a Reform government, there is plenty of space for a centre right platform to prosper.
But we need a shift in strategy to do so.