John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.
The death of Penelope Keith is the passing of a much-loved national treasure. As a Conservative, it also means the loss of perhaps one of our most famous fictional members.
Margo Leadbetter was canonically a staunch Tory, and to many embodied the spirit of the party. She was the comfortably off wife of a Surrey executive, deeply enmeshed in local life, fastidious in demanding good value from her council – and insisted on a party hat made from the Daily Telegraph. She was a caricature, but a charming one, and one close to real life. After all, in the years The Good Life ran, the Tories won Surbiton with a healthy majority. The problem for the party is that now there are very few Margos.
Surbiton itself is no longer a byword for Toryism. Each of its councillors is a Liberal Democrat, with only two Conservatives elected across the entire Royal Borough of Kingston. At a parliamentary level, the successor seat of Kingston and Surbiton has been Tory for just two years since 1997, that brief period of 2015-17 when the Lib Dems fell away. An area which was once considered a safe base for Conservatives with ministerial ambitions and ability is now the home seat of Sir Ed Davey.
This change is the culmination of shifting trends in the support of the Conservatives and the right in general. The voters are growing older, more male, and poorer than in the past. Such a change not only confuses the party’s electoral dynamics but also raises real questions about what the right’s role in politics is in the 21st century.
It is an exaggeration to say the 20th-century party was purely a party of Margo Leadbetters, but they played an essential role. Women were more likely to vote Conservative than men. They started doing so at a younger age, and outnumbered male Tories in almost every age and occupational demographic. As such, they were an essential part of the voting coalition – without women’s votes, the party would have lost every election from 1918 to 1979.
In recent years, this trend has reversed. Through the 2000s and 2010s, more men voted Conservative than women. 2024 was different, but likely because more male voters than female voters were lost to Reform. These headline figures, however, mask a more dangerous long-term trend for the right.
Working-age voters were far less likely to back the party, and this was doubly true for women. Just 19% of women aged 35-54 voted Conservative in the last general election, compared to 32% in 1997. Both elections delivered comprehensive defeats for the right – but the latter looks far more like long-term decline for the party.
New polling from YouGov, two years on, shows the shift is continuing. Support for the right among women stays at historically low levels, with Reform’s polling particularly skewed in favour of men. Older voters dominate support for both right-wing parties. Most strikingly, higher incomes now correlate with left-wing voting intentions, with routine and manual workers far more likely to be right-wing than higher-managerial workers.
The Margos of this world have gone from being emblematic of the right to being the least likely to support it. Affluent women around middle age are no longer a reliable demographic for the Conservative Party and are even less likely to consider voting Labour. In their natural home of the Surrey suburbs, these voters are supporting the Lib Dems. Elsewhere, they are likely Labour. Those who are half a decade younger and still living in cities are probably voting Green, as are many of the young men on the trajectory to being their Jerrys.
Reform is particularly struggling in this regard. The party shows little interest in drawing back the Margos of the shire counties. Farage’s party has the biggest gender split of any party, and it is hardly a surprise. Opposition to workplace equality laws, clumsy flirtations with pronatalism and a long string of candidates accused of misogynistic behaviour are unlikely to endear the party to women. Where the right of the past might have been paternalistic in its appeals to housewives and women, it did not seem to disdain them.
Even aside from the internal bloc split between the Conservatives and Reform, the right has lost its traditional demographics and a pipeline for future voters. This is partly generational, becoming confined to the oldest voters like never before. But it is also the result of losing support among women and higher earners. These shifts become political problems too. As your demographics shift, so does what they expect from voters – and it becomes harder to be a pro-business, economically liberal party when your voters are largely retired.
As the right fell back in the Home Counties, many saw salvation in the Red Wall. These, however, were seats that were already demographically set to be Conservative – but eschewed the party for cultural reasons. As those demographic assumptions shift, the route to recovery looks harder.
Trying to win in less affluent seats, with less comfortable voters, will mean pressure to adopt more statist, more interventionist economic policies. These may drift into nativism and will likely be framed as specious claims of reducing waste to keep them cost-neutral, but winning in Sunderland will ultimately require a departure from the approach that would win in Surrey.
In the 1970s, the Conservative Party was closely associated with Margo Leadbetter. Both Surrey housewives and the Tories could be imperious, snobby, and uptight, but they were also wedded to their communities, fastidious about getting things done, and surprisingly popular. In their own words, the characters were the silent majority.
Now, however, that link has been broken. The base of affluent, working-age and women voters is gone – replaced by a party of pensioners and a broader right that is poorer and more male. It might be enough for the next election, but it is not a coalition with much of a future. The right will have to restore those links, or else reach parts of the nation it never has before. The latter will require political choices that run counter to much of 20th-century conservatism. A Tory Party without the Margos becomes a very different entity.