The Conservative Party cannot return to business as usual. Having suffered its worst defeat since the 19th century, the party needs to reckon on why it lost so soon after a generational victory in 2019.

With the Labour Party in disarray, the Conservatives were in their pomp, boasting an 80-seat majority and a plan to complete Brexit, cut taxes, cut immigration, build new infrastructure like roads, prisons, power plants, houses and railways, and restore democracy to the British state. 

Five years later, little of this has happened, and the party has paid the political price. The battle for the future of the Tories is in full swing, and its main theme has been about what to do with the voters who have left the Tories and voted Reform. 

This has split the Conservatives. Some believe the path to victory lies in persuading centrist Liberal Democrat and Labour voters, while others believe the party must focus on winning back voters from Reform, and potentially agreeing some sort of pact with Nigel Farage. This is a distraction from reality, however. Instead, the party must look at why it lost the voters it did, and what is the path to regaining them.

The Tories won the 2019 election on a right-wing platform. This won them a broad coalition of voters up and down the country, and they were subsequently let down, as the party failed to keep almost all the promises they made to the public. 

Instead of cutting immigration, the party more than doubled it, admitting more than the population of Birmingham to the country in 2021 and 2022 alone. To make matters worse, the type of immigration it has not even solved the labour shortages it was supposed to, with those arriving on work visas representing a minority of all migrants coming. 

To the other side of the immigration coin is housing. The Conservatives promised to massively increase housebuilding so a new generation of young British people can become homeowners more cheaply. This likely helped bring a wave of younger voters to the Tories in 2019, where the average age at which a voter switched from Labour to Conservative fell to 39, down from an incredibly high 47 in 2017. Instead, planning reform was essentially killed by the parliamentary party, and with it died the main reason for young people to consider voting Conservative. 

The latest example of the Tories’ failure to deliver their promises has come to light more recently. In 2019, the party pledged to increase prison capacity by over 10,000 cells by 2024. This week, it is being reported that Britain’s prisons are full to the point that a one-in, one-out policy is about to be introduced, and the Ministry of Justice may have to release countless violent criminals early. This issue had been predicted long before it came to bite, but instead of building more prisons, or deporting foreign criminals, the Conservatives preferred to quietly instruct judges to issue softer sentences considering constrained prison capacity. Much like with the failure to build sufficient housing, this was done to protect Conservative MPs from local criticism in the short term, but has contributed to their electoral annihilation in the medium term. 

This is what provoked such incredulity on behalf of the public when presented with the Tories’ manifesto this year. The majority of its proposals could or should have been done in office already, and many were the restatement of existing policies which had not been delivered — or, worse, were halfway through being delivered and cancelled by the election. Sticking to your promises in politics matters, and this should be the main lesson the party takes from its defeat.

The party must restore trust with its grassroots

Examining issues like these, and studying which promises were made, and which kept, is more important for the future of the Conservative Party than a factional fight over whether the party lurched to the right, or swerved to the left. This examination should be methodical and will take time. The party must restore trust with its grassroots.

But ultimately, the post-2024 Conservative Party needs to understand its purpose, the people who it can and should attract, and how it can campaign on behalf of the millions of right-of-centre voters in Britain. If Reform UK maintains a steady 15-20 per cent in the opinion polls for the near future, that is terminal for the Tory Party within a First Past the Post system. Chasing a crowded centre will yield few votes, and will bleed more losses to the right. Today, Reform UK are in second place in nearly 100 seats, as well as having four new MPs. This represents a right-wing power base inside and outside Parliament which will not go away any time soon. 

We are about to witness a Labour government which will indulge in some of the most radical left-wing policies in British history. From social and constitutional policy, to energy and the environment, and of course to tax and regulation, it is unclear how the Labour Party’s policies will make Britain a better place to live, to raise a family, and to start a business. Having been elected on a relatively low number of votes, with muted enthusiasm, fractures in their voting coalition may appear sooner, rather than later, as I suggested in these pages recently. The opportunities to resist it and overturn it will come from the right, and the Conservative Party must be willing and capable of taking it.