This article is taken from the October 2024 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

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Oh my party, what is happening to you? I have always been, through temperament, birth, instinct and enquiry, a Conservative. A member since my youth, I remember being dragged along to constituency events by my parents.

At times it feels like being a Church of England congregant, something I also am, as part of a decreasing number of the faithful — ageing participants supporting a leadership cadre of increasingly disconnected views. Just as many C of E members have trod toward Rome, many Tories have turned to Reform. Both are reassured and reanimated by the certainties preached.

Yet here I remain, a Conservative Party member and one about to sniff the air at conference. Some might feel this minority pastime a sad indictment of my outlook and social life. I view it as a mix of belief, duty and a primordial urge to try to make an improving difference. There will be four leadership candidates to be inspected and persuaded by. I suspect none will be particularly persuasive.

Mostly the scripts will be hackneyed, the dramas confected, the stage ignored except for any embarrassments and the media will miss most of the more interesting undercurrents. Conferences can be unintentionally cartoonish.

At least there will be some media interest, because of the leadership contest. If for some implausible reason Rishi Sunak had wanted to continue as leader and emerged at Birmingham to rally his angry troops, I suspect the media would largely ignore us. Meanwhile opposition to the government is largely supplied by the Daily Telegraph whilst a Doomsday Budget, which will be effectively unopposed, looms. Soon after that the new Tory leader will be announced, will declare a new dawn on the steps of Central Office and wonder what to do.

I have served on the voluntary side. In the early 2000s I was the Midlands treasurer for six years. “A phonecall a day, a meeting each week,” was how it was put to me at my first treasurers’ gathering. This during an agreeable lunch in a private room in the now closed Shepherds, with Alexander Hesketh puffing a large cigar at the end of the table.

Things are a little more professional now, but political fundraising does still come down to a personal touch, reading the donor and knowing when, how and how much to ask. After an interlude overseeing money-raising for our local cathedral, I returned to the chore to harvest money for Andy Street’s mayoral campaigns. It helped that Andy was highly regarded — an authentic, honest politician with a certain local star quality. In the Tory deserts of Birmingham and Coventry, we raised surprisingly large amounts for his cause.

Currently I chair the Midlands Industrial Council, a body established under the larcenies of Clement Attlee’s industry nationalisations to support free market capitalism. It just so happens that most of the time our members believe that the best vehicle for this is the Conservative Party. Recently, however, you will not be surprised to learn that doubts have emerged.

Sunak and Hunt’s technocratic, centrist policies and the entirely avoidable decision to call for a July immolation was a slow-motion crash which gave ample opportunity for Reform to try and seduce us. I do not know whether any of our members gave to Nigel’s band in the end, but I am certain that most of them did not feel inspired to donate to the Conservatives in any meaningful way. I and others did, a bit, but most are still observing events with their hands in their pockets.

Reform made the understandable point that we Tories did not deserve to win the election. I have lost count of those of our people who have quietly admitted to me that they voted for them. One even used to be a Conservative MP. Each knew, of course, that to vote Reform was to let in Labour and yet their anger needed to be assuaged.

It should be acknowledged at Conference that the last government was an embarrassment — a timid, bureaucracy-captured, tired, unimaginative administration that was clearly unable to meet the nation’s challenges. The nation deserved, and party members certainly expected, better.

Each of the leadership candidates should apologise for their part in its failures. Once that catharsis is done, the members can forgive and channel their energies into rebuilding. Not to do so will mean that the anger will fester, and the new leader’s first year or so will be lost to it.

Given the weight of votes Reform accumulated, some might actually believe that the exhausted Tory Party is there to be replaced in the short to medium term. In the free market of ideas and organisation, there is no constitutional law or law of political gravity that grants political parties protection. They can die or more likely whither into irrelevance. The Social Democratic Party still exists, apparently.

Reform is not going to replace the Conservatives any time soon. It comes down to money as much as the simplicities of the first-past-the-post system. Whilst the Conservatives periodically have cashflow issues, this usually is only serious at CCHQ and has always been transitory before. The constituency associations rumble on independently; skeleton organisations existing on small revenues which provide at least some sort of a campaigning structure. It is reasonable to assume that goodwill toward the new leader will even boost membership numbers.

Whilst it is foolish to extrapolate confidently, it is worth remembering that it took Labour over a generation, from the 1880s to the 1920s, to surpass the Liberals and then took until 1945 before first forming a government enjoying a Commons majority. There should be time to reassert Conservative dominance over Reform.

Labour surpassed its established rival because, much to Liberal surprise, it outgunned them financially. Trade Union subscriptions beat the declining numbers of gentle membership dues. Nothing is certain, of course, but Reform does not have the depth of organisation or the financial support that the Conservatives should be able to re-establish. The structures establishing presence locally, and the relationships needed to nurture activists and donors, take years to become secure.

It can be a poisoned prize, to be leader of the oldest political party in the world. Labour’s supermajority might be of shallow popularity, but Starmer and his social democratic meddlers will use it shamelessly to further entrench progressive bias in the organs of state. Winning again electorally, reversing constitutional and cultural damage, and stimulating economic growth will be a mammoth task.

It can be done if the new leader can quickly gain the attention of those who otherwise only follow politics as an election approaches, which is most people. The leader will require a clarity of message to cut through to the public consciousness.

As I see it, my party has these options. It could wait for the electoral cycle’s rhythm to swing back to it as Labour reasserts its traditional unpopularity, garnering support again from the usual areas and repatriating many lost voters. This is a reliable but complacent path. Much could go awry.

It could rely on the charisma of the new leader to create, through projection of personality and policy, an opinion poll resurgence and maybe even renewed mass party membership. Stimulating and transformative as that would be, it would be harder.

Or it could solicit mass business support in ways not attempted before.

There are 4.8 million small businesses in the UK, employing about 12.9m people, and they do not speak or lobby cohesively. This most important sector is usually ignored. Small businesses constitute 99 per cent of all business in the country. They are embedded in every community, everywhere. If we want to spread Conservatism into long ignored raw towns and backwater regions, then policies advantageous to small commercial enterprises will be beneficial in manifold ways.

The Conservative message of entrepreneurialism, hard work, good financial housekeeping, low taxes, light regulation and a small state is one lifted from the instinctive beliefs of the small business owner. In many respects this group shares traditional family values. It would be a decade-long project, but if an associate business status was promoted and shared with local associations, a target of, say, one million businesses paying £100 a year would solve all financial constraints and act as a societal counterweight to the trade unions.

This should not be party membership as such, but for a subscription status of lobbying, consultation and information. It should not be beyond whoever is left in CCHQ to come up with a persuasive proposition.

To give money to a political party is a public good. Every so often there are calls for state funding. This would be a mistake, if only because removal of the need for politicians to have to appeal for funds removes a process by which parties can fail and die. The risks of cash for access or privilege are, in my experience, overstated. Most people who donate do so because they care, not because they seek nefarious influence. The law sets sensible disclosure limits. Whatever the faults of our politicians, I have not yet met one who would be materially influenced by the gift, or not, of any amount to party coffers.

Tapping into the vast pool of “small c” conservative business owners and the self-employed, who are just as business orientated, would be transformative for the Conservatives. It would root their policies and culture in reality. It would raise them the money they will need to rebuild. If they take up the initiative, I might even want to help them again.