Perhaps it is naive of me, but just as I believe that you should not stay with a partner you can no longer trust, you should not vote for a party that you do not trust to govern you. 

According to Lord Hannan in the Telegraph, there is no “rational” case for the impending Labour landslide. I tend to agree with him — the reason for Tory defeat will be largely emotional and in that sense, understandable and justifiable. After 14 years together, Tory party voters are finding their relationship with the Conservatives under great strain. The party is over, the lights have come up, and after a wild time snogging low tax, low immigration, big society boys, the right wing voter has been left with the dregs who hung around the dancefloor for long enough.

Whilst there is still a loyal group of “ride or die” constituents, according to the Financial Times the party has lost 32 per cent of their support since January, and a recent YouGov poll indicated that less than 6% of under 25s plan to vote for them. It seems that after being talked into bed by charming Etonians, the subsequent mistreatment by a series of ever more embarrassing cabinet ministers and leaders, has tipped the right-wing electorate to becoming more hateful towards their former MPs than they are frightened of a place in the opposition benches.

Now, when faced with the possibility of losing the house, and knowing that the kids don’t want to live with them, what should the Conservatives do to avoid further tragedy? According to the team behind Rishi Sunak, as well as multiple Conservative pundits, the natural answer is to finger wag at the silly public for daring to consider a rebound with the grey-haired opportunists in teal or red. Their message is that we will destroy this country if we leave it to the centrist Dads or are foolish enough to trust a populist. In the words of Lord Hannan, our annihilation of the Tory party will transform Britain into a one-party state, and as Nick Timothy puts it, if we hand a win to Labour we will receive the opposite of what we truly want for the country.

Rather than going on a charm offensive, it seems that the party has decided to assert dominance by getting the least charismatic man in the world to talk about how he is different from the previous leaders of the party. He took precious time in a recent ITV Leaders debate to point out that he had resigned from Johnson’s government as an act of integrity, and asked the audience to judge him on his actions since coming to power in 2022. Setting aside the fact that these previous leaders were all winners of some sort of selection process and he categorically is not, I see two fundamental flaws in this approach. 

The first is that it mocks the faith that voters have previously placed in the Tories by affording them a 90 seat majority — which is a level of functional control of the Commons that few governments have achieved. Although political nerds would like to pretend that the public is as wrapped up in the logical tactics of voting as they are, for a great deal of people, politics is indeed an emotional process. Whilst we cringe at the attempts that politicians make to show that they’re normal, in a world of constant communication people do have a growing need to feel that they know their leaders and see them as human too. I would not go as far as to say that Ed Davey needs to continue to throw himself off of paddleboards, but I think the Liberal Democrats’ video of him talking about his childhood and the bond he has with his son, is a compelling use of media. Farage too, has clearly trusted a young team to capitalise on his humour, opting for Eminem’s “Without Me” as the theme tune of his campaign. By contrast, Sunak fails to connect, either rephrasing questions he receives during debates, or sounding stunted and unrelatable by seemingly having no educational or hobby-based crossover with the average man. His distance from any normal way of life acts as an unhelpful barrier, and so he continues to stick to his lines about measuring him by the five pledges he made back in 2023. But, by insisting that voters consider only the last two years of the party’s work, Sunak betrays those who received promises back in 2019 and who have not seen them fulfilled, and it is those voters that will turn away from him.

Sunak’s cabinet … has no sense of cohesive identity that allows the public to assess it properly

Then is the sneakiness of the two year framing. Sunak’s cabinet is reactive — it has no sense of cohesive identity that allows the public to assess it properly. Without vision, too, it focuses on gimmicks. The Rwanda policy is an unserious attempt to show decisiveness in the face of record immigration. National Service appears to be a shiny object of nostalgia to reel in the old reliables who might drift over to Farage. Sunak’s mission to halve inflation, although noble and important, is not a brand or a distinctive promise. Any party will have to bring inflation down because of how high it rose under the Conservatives.

This may not add up to a logically compelling reason to move away from the Tories, and indeed I am not trying to convince you to do so. As someone who voted these guys in, I really do want them to tidy up the mess they have made, rather than hand it over to someone who I have no experience of. However, it is important that people do not misconstrue the shift away from the Tories and towards Labour, Lib Dem, and Reform, as a flip based on single policies. At this point, it is not that people are misunderstanding the risk of letting Labour in, it is that they do not know what to expect of the Conservatives. 

Many previously dedicated voters are embarrassed and have lost confidence in a party that they trusted to make life better. It is with that mindset that they will walk into the polling stations next week, and it is the fault of the Conservative Party for doing nothing to inspire them.