Ruth Davidson is co-chair of Prosper UK, a Conservative peer and former leader of the Scottish Conservatives.
When we launched Prosper UK at the end of January, the response by some on this site was not especially warm. The polite version was that we were a support group for people who had lost an argument. The blunter version was that the centre right had already had its turn, made a poor job of it, and that anyone serious about winning again should be looking rightwards rather than setting up a movement aimed at the middle of the electorate.
Six months in, we’ve got a bit of a record now and the evidence to back it up, so it’s worth a proper answer.
To be honest, part of the charge is fair. The last Conservative governments were led, in large part, by people who’d put themselves on the centre right of the party, and on some things they got it wrong. We need to own that. Anyone from my end of the party asking for a hearing has to start there. Fine. I start there. Where I get off the bus is the conclusion that gets bolted on after, that the only voters worth chasing now are Nigel Farage’s.
Prosper UK has spent a fair chunk of the past six months in halls in Newcastle, Liverpool, Cardiff, Guildford, Edinburgh and Birmingham, listening to people who used to vote Conservative and stopped. They didn’t go happily. They went to Labour holding their noses, or to the Lib Dems, or they stayed home and watched the telly. But they are looking for a home.
What we’ve heard in those halls matches the polling too. More in Common asked people last month whether they’d consider voting Conservative. Nearly half of likely voters said yes or already do, which is a bigger pool of potential support than any party in the country has. Bigger than Reform’s. Bigger than Labour’s. Two years after the worst defeat in our history, that’s not nothing.
Then comes the detail that ought to be pinned above every desk in CCHQ. Of those persuadable voters, 38 per cent currently vote Reform. Almost exactly the same number, 39 per cent, vote Labour, Lib Dem or Green. The rest mostly don’t know. For every winnable voter parked with Farage, there’s another parked with Burnham, Davey or Polanski, and a hefty group sitting on the fence behind them.
Chase only the first lot and you’ve written off half your own recovery before you’ve started. The pitch that squeezes Reform is the exact pitch that sends a wavering Labour voter scurrying back home, and it gives the fence-sitters nothing at all, because people are on the fence precisely because they don’t fancy either flank. Uniting the right sounds muscular. In practice it means fighting hardest over the smaller half of your own supporters’ club, on Farage’s home turf, by Farage’s rules. He’s been playing that game for thirty years. He’s better at it than we are.
What can reach both halves of that pool is the economy. A Reform-leaning voter in Wigan and a Labour-leaning one in Guildford disagree about plenty, but neither can buy a house, both have watched their bills climb, and both would quite like a pay rise that outruns inflation. Growth is the one message that doesn’t ask half the pool to hold its nose. It’s also the ground on which the centre right, at its best, has always won.
None of which is a pop at the current leadership, which is taking meaningful strides in rebuilding the party after a chastening election result and, in Kemi Badenoch personally, is connecting with voters across the country. Last autumn barely one voter in ten rated her positively. She’s now above 30 per cent, ahead of Farage, Davey and Polanski on net approval.
Two years ago, the party looked finished and she has won it a hearing. However, goodwill towards the leader is not the same as a vote for the party. Our support has stayed flat for the best part of a year, and now that Reform has started to lose ground, the polls state we’re not the party picking those votes up.
I’ve been here before, when in 2011 I took over the Scottish Conservatives after our worst ever Holyrood election and with just 15 MSPs. Some said we needed to talk louder to the base of voters we still had, there being allegedly no others able to be reached. We did the opposite. We found a unifying policy area – the Union – to foreground and build our conversation out from, picked candidates who sounded like actual human beings, and went after voters everyone swore we could never reach.
By 2016 we had our best ever Scottish election result, more than doubling our votes and seats and pushing Labour into third for the first time in any vote for 98 years. In the general election a year later we returned 13 MPs, up from one, and the party’s best Scottish result since 1983. Nobody who watched me and Nicola Sturgeon go toe to toe in those years would call any of it soft. The positions may have been based in the moderate sensible centre ground – strong on law and order, fiscally responsible, evangelical about improving education – but the campaigning was muscular. Get that the right way round and you grow, get it wrong and you just end up shouting at your own reflection.
That’s the work Prosper UK was built for, and six months in there’s a record of policy development and outreach in the economic space to point to. Papers out on welfare reform, immigration and devolution, the last built on a fact that should make Westminster blush. Central government in this country collects over 90 per cent of tax revenue, against an OECD average of about half. David Gauke’s immigration paper argues for high-skilled migration within a system of secure and controlled borders.
In June we launched Fair Fees, our campaign to fix student loans in England. Gavin Barwell’s housing commission reports in September. Over 25,000 people have signed up with us, and around two thirds of them didn’t vote Conservative in 2024. Those are the exact people the party needs to be reaching.
We’ll be at party conference this autumn and hope to see many ConservativeHome readers there. The invitation isn’t to come and hear that we told you so. Come and have the argument. The party has the biggest pool of winnable voters in the country. And what it does with that comes down to one decision. Make an offer to all of those voters, or spend three years wrestling Nigel Farage for half of them.