Stewart Harper is Vice President of the National Conservative Convention, and sits on the Board of the Party.
I was in Berlin last week to address the Campaign Conference, which is a gathering of centre-right parties from across the world who watch British politics with a mixture of fascination and, frankly, bemusement. My job was to explain what on earth is going on. Having done so, I want to set out here why I left that stage (and hopefully the audience) far more optimistic about our chances in 2029 than I have been.
I started with the scale of the problem, because there was no point pretending otherwise. Between 1994 and 2010 Britain had three prime ministers and a broad sense of political stability (even if we didn’t like it). In the sixteen years since, we have had seven, one of whom lasted forty-nine days. Labour won a landslide in 2024 on the lowest vote share of any majority government in modern history, and has already changed leader once. The Conservative Party finished that election with fewer seats and a lower vote share than at any point since our founding in the 1830s. That is not a bad night. That is an existential moment, and we have to be honest with ourselves and with the country about what caused it.
Many pixels have been spent in saying the same thing – we did not lose in 2024 because we were too conservative, or not conservative enough. We lost because the public stopped believing that what we promised was what we would deliver. The 2019 manifesto’s central pledge, getting Brexit done, was fulfilled within a month of the election, and having done it we struggled to say clearly what else we stood for. Were we for lockdowns or against them? For building more homes or fewer? For lower taxes or higher spending? A fractured parliamentary party, riven by what our Leader has since (rightly) described as psychodrama and intrigue, compounded the problem. Voters do not forgive a party that cannot decide what it believes.
Rebuilding trust after a defeat of that scale takes years, not a single conference speech, and Kemi Badenoch has spent the last twenty-two months doing exactly that groundwork. Her personal favourability has climbed from 19% to 31% since taking over, and among 2024 Conservative voters it has risen from just under half to over three quarters. She is, discounting an as yet untested Andy Burnham (who has spent the summer giving out gifts and playing his guitar, so his popularity isn’t necessarily going to last), the most popular party leader in Britain. Kemi’s performances against Keir Starmer, and now Burnham, at Prime Minister’s Questions have started to cut through even to friends of mine abroad who do not normally follow Westminster’s detail.
That personal renewal has not yet translated fully into party vote share, and I will not pretend it has. But the Party has done much unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines: the Leader has strengthened her top team, the Party has recruited an enormously respected chief executive, we have expanded our Campaign Academy, invested in new campaign technology and member portals, secured a permanent home in Castle Lane, and a rewrite of the party’s own constitution – none of this will get us on the chat shows but have to be the foundations from which everything else is built.
We are moving to be in a genuinely battle-ready state for whenever the General Election comes.
We are also rediscovering what it means to be an effective opposition after fourteen years in government, holding ministers to account rather than the reverse, while setting out a clear offer: abolishing stamp duty on primary residences, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing net zero targets, maximising use of North Sea oil and gas, and reversing the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars. A low-tax, low-state, fiscally responsible message, communicated properly this time.
Meanwhile our opponents are not in good shape either. Starmer left office after just over two years with a low of minus 56% in his net approval rating, and resigned his seat this week to trigger a by-election. Burnham inherits a difficult position and, so far, a summer spent giving things away rather than making the hard choices that will test his popularity.
Reform, for all Nigel Farage’s ability to dominate headlines, is not the conservative alternative it presents itself as (depending on who is listening that day) as. Its policy is high-tax and high-state one week, promising nationalisation and welfare largesse, low-tax the next. Farage’s own personal ratings sit at around minus 45 per cent, and who knows if he will not lead Reform into the next election. If he goes, what happens to their support – which is thin, in practice.
Crucially, between two-thirds and three-quarters of those who left us to go to Reform say they would consider voting Conservative next time. That is our route back.
For the first time in living memory, three parties sit within single digits of each other at the top of polls. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and it tells you that British politics has genuinely become multi-party. It also means the General Election, whenever it actually comes, is wide open in a way it has not been for a generation. First-past-the-post punishes vote splitting harshly, which is why Reform’s 14% last time bought them only five seats. We have ruled out any pact or electoral arrangement with Reform, not out of stubbornness but because treating voters as a tradeable commodity, swapping their choice between parties by backroom deal, is not something a serious party should ask of the electorate it hopes to serve.
None of this guarantees victory. Renewal after a defeat this heavy is slow, and there is a great deal of hard work still ahead on candidates, funding and message discipline. But the conditions for a genuine Conservative recovery are now in place: a leader whose personal ratings are improving steadily, an organisation rebuilt from the ground up, a clear and distinctive offer, and two opponents whose own coalitions are visibly fragile.
As Margaret Thatcher put it, our job is to remind people that the facts of life are conservative. Restating those facts, patiently and consistently, is how we win back the country by 2029.
Stewart Harper is Vice President of the National Conservative Convention, and sits on the Board of the Party.
I was in Berlin last week to address the Campaign Conference, which is a gathering of centre-right parties from across the world who watch British politics with a mixture of fascination and, frankly, bemusement. My job was to explain what on earth is going on. Having done so, I want to set out here why I left that stage (and hopefully the audience) far more optimistic about our chances in 2029 than I have been.
I started with the scale of the problem, because there was no point pretending otherwise. Between 1994 and 2010 Britain had three prime ministers and a broad sense of political stability (even if we didn’t like it). In the sixteen years since, we have had seven, one of whom lasted forty-nine days. Labour won a landslide in 2024 on the lowest vote share of any majority government in modern history, and has already changed leader once. The Conservative Party finished that election with fewer seats and a lower vote share than at any point since our founding in the 1830s. That is not a bad night. That is an existential moment, and we have to be honest with ourselves and with the country about what caused it.
Many pixels have been spent in saying the same thing – we did not lose in 2024 because we were too conservative, or not conservative enough. We lost because the public stopped believing that what we promised was what we would deliver. The 2019 manifesto’s central pledge, getting Brexit done, was fulfilled within a month of the election, and having done it we struggled to say clearly what else we stood for. Were we for lockdowns or against them? For building more homes or fewer? For lower taxes or higher spending? A fractured parliamentary party, riven by what our Leader has since (rightly) described as psychodrama and intrigue, compounded the problem. Voters do not forgive a party that cannot decide what it believes.
Rebuilding trust after a defeat of that scale takes years, not a single conference speech, and Kemi Badenoch has spent the last twenty-two months doing exactly that groundwork. Her personal favourability has climbed from 19% to 31% since taking over, and among 2024 Conservative voters it has risen from just under half to over three quarters. She is, discounting an as yet untested Andy Burnham (who has spent the summer giving out gifts and playing his guitar, so his popularity isn’t necessarily going to last), the most popular party leader in Britain. Kemi’s performances against Keir Starmer, and now Burnham, at Prime Minister’s Questions have started to cut through even to friends of mine abroad who do not normally follow Westminster’s detail.
That personal renewal has not yet translated fully into party vote share, and I will not pretend it has. But the Party has done much unglamorous work that rarely makes headlines: the Leader has strengthened her top team, the Party has recruited an enormously respected chief executive, we have expanded our Campaign Academy, invested in new campaign technology and member portals, secured a permanent home in Castle Lane, and a rewrite of the party’s own constitution – none of this will get us on the chat shows but have to be the foundations from which everything else is built.
We are moving to be in a genuinely battle-ready state for whenever the General Election comes.
We are also rediscovering what it means to be an effective opposition after fourteen years in government, holding ministers to account rather than the reverse, while setting out a clear offer: abolishing stamp duty on primary residences, leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, repealing net zero targets, maximising use of North Sea oil and gas, and reversing the 2030 ban on new petrol and diesel cars. A low-tax, low-state, fiscally responsible message, communicated properly this time.
Meanwhile our opponents are not in good shape either. Starmer left office after just over two years with a low of minus 56% in his net approval rating, and resigned his seat this week to trigger a by-election. Burnham inherits a difficult position and, so far, a summer spent giving things away rather than making the hard choices that will test his popularity.
Reform, for all Nigel Farage’s ability to dominate headlines, is not the conservative alternative it presents itself as (depending on who is listening that day) as. Its policy is high-tax and high-state one week, promising nationalisation and welfare largesse, low-tax the next. Farage’s own personal ratings sit at around minus 45 per cent, and who knows if he will not lead Reform into the next election. If he goes, what happens to their support – which is thin, in practice.
Crucially, between two-thirds and three-quarters of those who left us to go to Reform say they would consider voting Conservative next time. That is our route back.
For the first time in living memory, three parties sit within single digits of each other at the top of polls. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago, and it tells you that British politics has genuinely become multi-party. It also means the General Election, whenever it actually comes, is wide open in a way it has not been for a generation. First-past-the-post punishes vote splitting harshly, which is why Reform’s 14% last time bought them only five seats. We have ruled out any pact or electoral arrangement with Reform, not out of stubbornness but because treating voters as a tradeable commodity, swapping their choice between parties by backroom deal, is not something a serious party should ask of the electorate it hopes to serve.
None of this guarantees victory. Renewal after a defeat this heavy is slow, and there is a great deal of hard work still ahead on candidates, funding and message discipline. But the conditions for a genuine Conservative recovery are now in place: a leader whose personal ratings are improving steadily, an organisation rebuilt from the ground up, a clear and distinctive offer, and two opponents whose own coalitions are visibly fragile.
As Margaret Thatcher put it, our job is to remind people that the facts of life are conservative. Restating those facts, patiently and consistently, is how we win back the country by 2029.