Britain does not need a new conservative party

In the local elections this month the Conservatives did very badly. Their leader’s attempt to suggest that they pointed to a hung parliament is delusional. I have heard the suggestion that they may do so badly at the next election that the Liberal Democrats will form the official opposition. The example of the Conservatives’ Canadian sister party in 1993 is quoted – they slumped from being governing party to just two parliamentary seats. The vultures are starting to circle, with at least two people (Matt Goodwin and Dominic Cummings) suggesting that a replacement party be built to cater for conservative voters, alongside the rising ambitions of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. But that is folly.

First of all, I think the Conservatives are heading for a rout in the next general election – and probably their worst ever result. Some people simply can’t believe that such a reversal of the 2019 landslide is feasible; others suggest that the polls always narrow as an election approaches. Party managers at the Labour Party and Liberal Democrats are both (rightly) anxious to suppress complacency amongst their campaigners, and are happy to promote such talk. But this is driving through the rear view mirror, and reminds me of the sort of things some Lib Dems were saying before their polling disaster in 2015. History does help us judge the future, but you should never be slave to it. The Conservatives are in a unique predicament, and show now signs of understanding a way out.

But we can dismiss talk of the Lib Dems getting more seats than the Conservatives. They did manage to win more council seats at the local elections, which was quite a feat when the councils in contention weren’t particularly advantageous to the party (unlike last year). But that’s council seats: as you go higher up the election size, the Lib Dems rapidly disappear. The Conservatives won 19 out of 33 Police and Crime Commissioners in England; Labour won the other 14, and three more in Wales, where Plaid Cymru won one. The Lib Dems were nowhere in sight. Neither was the party in contention in any of the 11 regional mayoral elections (10 to Labour, one to the Tories). This shows that there remains a massive bedrock of Tory support in rural areas, which the Lib Dems (and Greens for that matter) can only tackle in a very localised way; the Labour vote is also very patchy here. Even when the Tories are doing very badly, the anti-Tory vote is very fragmented. In order to win one of the other parties has to convince the voters that the other potential challengers aren’t in serious contention; not only is that a hard case to make in many places, but they don’t have the campaigning strength to get that message across in these often massive constituencies. There will be no electoral pacts involving Labour – and if there is one between Greens and Lib Dems (there is no such talk that I’m aware of – although this did happen in 2019) it will be very limited in scope. The Lib Dems are focusing their campaigning efforts on a relatively small number of constituencies, although exactly how many is always under review. This number is not likely to be more than 40 seats; when they targeted much more than this in 2019, the result was disaster. The polls, and the local results, show that the party has no general groundswell of support, and it will only succeed in places where it has campaigning strength. The Greens may have more of a general groundswell of support, but their campaigning strength is much weaker. If they spread their efforts over more than half a dozen seats they will be seriously wasting resources; they are in serious contention in about three at the most – one of which (Brighton Pavilion – their only existing seat) they might well lose to Labour, after the retirement of the popular Jean Lucas. The insurgent right is at this stage only represented by Reform UK, which has little grassroots organisation, and is unlikely to present a serious threat in the Conservatives’ rural strongholds either – though their presence seems to terrify many Tories. The party should secure at least 100 seats even on a very bad night – and easily enough to surpass the Lib Dems’ practical maximum of 50.

The more interesting question is what happens after the election, and whether one of the right-wing insurgents can supplant the Conservatives, now much reduced in parliament. The obvious challenger is Reform UK, which is regularly polling third in national polls, and can even surpass the Tories in some demographics. But it is hard to take this party seriously as more than a nuisance. It is constituted as a limited company, under the legal control of a tight clique, led by Mr Farage. Unlike other political parties, there is no attempt to give grassroots supporters any kind of serious say. This limits any development of a serious grassroots organisation. This might work if Mr Farage could muster the sort of charisma and wealth that Donald Trump does in America. But he is not in that class, even if he is quite successful in drawing attention so himself: at one point it was hard to keep him off the BBC. And he isn’t a team player – indeed right-wing insurgency is not a team sport.

It is also hard to take Mr Cummings seriously. He masterminded the successful Vote Leave campaign in the EU referendum, one of the outstanding political achievements in recent British political history; one feature of this campaign, incidentally, was the sidelining of Mr Farage. He actually cares about making things work and designing coherent policy, rather than just grandstanding on the latest political fad. But he is tarnished by his association with Boris Johnson, for whom he was a senior adviser, though eventually falling victim to the chaos that afflicted the Johnson regime. His lack of political skill was evident – and especially his combative style of doing business. It is hard to imagine that he could put together a successful political party.

Matt Goodwin, whose name repeatedly comes up on these pages, is altogether more interesting. He is not the damaged goods that both Mr Farage and Mr Cummings are. He also applies an academic’s discipline to his thought and research. He runs regular polls and focus groups to give him a good understanding of potential supporters and resonant messages. This, apparently, has enabled him to find financial backers, and he is increasingly open over his plans to build a new political movement. His organising theme is his anger at political elites, whom he accuses of trying to impose their liberal values onto a majority of people, who don’t share them. In policy terms his main focus is on excessive immigration, but he also turns his ire onto multiculturalism, wokism and Islamic minorities. As an academic, he lives and works amongst these liberal types, and is very familiar with their complacency and limited vision (“luxury beliefs”) – and his academic research shows how much this is at odds with what the public at large thinks. He further points out that support for liberal policies tends to be in metropolitan areas, and concentrated in an electorally inefficient way. He thinks that this adds up to a political opportunity for a new conservative movement – citing Mr Johnson’s landslide in 2019 as proof that conservative voters form a substantial electoral majority. But that government, he says, was taken over by the liberal elites, and betrayed its voters, for example by opening the floodgates to immigration.

But life is hard for insurgent parties in British politics. It is commonplace to condemn the complacency and out-of-touchness of the existing political parties, and to say that there is an opportunity for a new movement – only for the whole thing to fizzle. None has succeeded since the rise of Labour more than a century ago – and that took a world war. There are three big challenges in particular: first is assembling a winning coalition of support; second is campaigning infrastructure; and third is developing a coherent policy programme.

I have talked about electoral coalitions before – with my image of a kaleidoscope. It’s all very well finding majorities to agree to particular polling questions on immigration, say, but political success means holding together disparate groups. It is not nearly enough to find disaffected voters with lower educational qualifications in the ex-industrial heartlands of North England, the Midlands and Wales. Mr Johnson succeeded because he managed to add these to more liberal metropolitan types wanting to end the Brexit chaos and assuaged by his greenery, and to the retired mass-affluent traditional Tories in the wealthier areas, and so on. This required a combination of political skill and charisma. I don’t see any of the putative Tory rivals providing this.

Then there is campaigning infrastructure. It is just about possible for a small but focused organisation to find 600 parliamentary candidates and get them nominated at election time. Rightwing insurgents have an advantage in that there are likely to be plenty of volunteers, but less so in that they are likely to be a fissiparous and ill-disciplined bunch – one reason for reform UK’s highly centralised power structure (which followed the chaos of Ukip, Mr Farage’s previous vehicle). Creating an organisation able to carry out campaigning – such as door-knocking and leafleting – in a wide enough number of seats is daunting. Campaigners imagine that they can make up for grassroots weakness with canny social media and publicity strategies, but that is an uphill fight against established parties who have the local organisation. The nearest any new movement that has come to succeeding here was the SDP in 1981 (which I was part of) – but this allied with an existing party (the Liberals), used many experienced politicians, and attracted higher-skilled liberal types with strong organisational competence. Current conservative insurgents lack these advantages, unless they can secure mass defections from the Tories, and then ally with it. And the SDP ultimately failed in its aim of replacing the Labour Party in spite of impressive polling numbers in its early days.

And then there is a coherent policy programme. In a political culture that seems to value winning elections (or referendums) more than governing or implementing viable political programmes, this might seem superfluous. Mr Johnson did not have it in 2019, and neither did Donald Trump in 2016 – and he still doesn’t. But you can’t succeed in government without it, unless you resort to repression and corruption. If electoral success depends on building a disparate coalition, unless they unite around a viable programme, this coalition cannot hold – and such a programme offers credibility. Mr Goodwin talks of the Tory government of 2019 betraying its voters – but that was always going to happen as it promised so many incompatible things. A central theme was cutting immigration to move towards an economy where lower skilled wages weren’t being undermined, and so creating a more equal society. But higher wages for less skilled people (and this did start to happen in the early days of the government) leads to inflation and puts pressure on public services, major employers of lower-paid people. That puts pressure on interest rates (and hence mortgage costs), and taxes and public services. The government was simply not ready for this dilemma, which meant betraying other parts of the coalition, and quickly buckled on immigration policy. I don’t actually think that Mr Johnson’s idea on low immigration was necessarily a bad one – but it needed to have coherent planning behind it, and answers to the resulting dilemmas. Mr Goodwin’s policy ideas seem to be similarly based on focus groups and polls, and not on any serious understanding of the practical trade-offs.

Even a charismatic and well-funded person such as Donald Trump, with considerable, if unconventional political skills, chose to co-opt the established Republican Party rather than set up in parallel with it. The conservative insurgents have no such leader, and even if a new party has strong initial success, it surely cannot succeed in the longer run in competition with the existing Conservative Party. They would only serve to offer a lifeline to a new Labour government, who might well find themselves struggling rather quickly.

It is much more viable for conservatives to bend the Conservative Party to their liking, and to promote a comeback as spectacular as Labour’s. Mr Goodwin suggests that the rump Tory party left after an electoral rout will be too dominated by Oxbridge types from the old elite. But the grassroots are more radical, and a strong conservative agenda offers a pathway back to power. The next election may over bar the voting – but the election after that is very much in play.