For Britain’s Conservatives, the party may be over
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In the end, Labour’s victory in Thursday’s UK parliamentary election was not quite as historic as some polls predicted. Keir Starmer secured a thumping majority by winning 412 seats within the 650-seat House of Commons but didn’t quite surpass Tony Blair’s 1997 numbers or Stanley Baldwin’s record 1924 win that some forecast he would. Even so, it was a dramatic night for Labour, and on Friday Starmer took office as prime minister.
But history was made on the other side. Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives were trounced, falling from 372 seats to a lowly 121. This is their greatest defeat ever since the foundation of the modern Conservative party in 1834, surpassing their previous low of 156 seats in 1906. Key figures who lost their seats included Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, former Prime Minister Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt, who many thought might be Sunak’s successor as leader. This is quite a turnaround for the most successful political party in British history that has long positioned itself as the natural party of government. There are serious questions about the future and some have even suggested the defeat is so great that the party’s very existence is in doubt.
So why did the Conservatives lose, and what next? The first question is easier to answer than the second. Defeat has been forecast for years. Boris Johnson won a handsome majority with 365 seats in 2019, but his handling of the Covid pandemic cost him public support, not least after he and his staff were found to be partying during lockdown. This scandal prompted his party to jettison Johnson in 2022, but his successor Liz Truss tarnished the Conservative brand further with wild economic policies that spooked the markets and sent voters’ mortgages skyrocketing.
By the time the Conservatives removed Truss after barely 50 days in office, the party already looked doomed. Her successor Sunak steadied the ship, but he couldn’t reverse the damage to the economy, which was already struggling in the wake of Covid and the Ukraine war. Sunak lacked the charm to woo either voters or his own party, which continued to fight internally, and the writing was on the wall long before he called an election.
External causes made matters worse. Most important was Starmer himself, who, as a moderate centrist was far more appealing to voters than Johnson’s leftist Labour opponent in 2019. Another factor was the Reform Party, a populist right-wing party that drew many former Conservative voters, splitting the right-wing vote to help Labour win. But, as many commentators noted on election night, this was an election that the Conservatives lost more than Labour won. Labour’s share of the national vote did not change much nationally from 2019, but Conservative support plummeted, with former voters backing Labour, Reform or the Liberal Democrats, who came third with 71 seats.
Sunak lacked the charm to woo either voters or his own party, which continued to fight internally, and the writing was on the wall long before he called an election.
Christopher Phillips
How might the Conservatives recover? Some have hypothesized that they can’t, and the party will fade away in the coming years as centrist voters head to Labour or the Liberal Democrats while right wingers head to Reform. But Reform is a new party that lacks the national infrastructure to easily replace the centuries-old Conservative party machine. A more realistic option would be for the two parties to merge. Reform leader, Nigel Farage has previously mooted his possible takeover of the UK Conservatives in a similar manner to how Canada’s right-wing Reform party merged with the Canadian Conservatives.
But Farage is unpopular among Conservative MPs and certain parts of the public and some fear that merging with Reform would deter more voters than it would win over. Better, they argue, to adopt populist right-wing policies to win Reform voters back rather than formally bringing Farage into the fold. Former Home Secretary Suella Braverman, a possible leadership candidate, used her election night speech to urge something along these lines.
However, other Conservatives disagree. Some, such as the former education secretary, told the BBC the Conservatives needed to look instead to the political center to win back the voters they lost to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Historically more elections have been won with broadly centrist policies than those of the far right or left. After losing to Tony Blair in 1997, who himself had moved Labour to the center, the Conservatives elected a series of more right-wing leaders who all lost successive elections, before David Cameron won power in 2010 after embracing centrism. With Starmer having similarly shifted Labour once again to the center and emerged victorious, center-right Conservatives warn that embracing Reform’s agenda or even merging with Farage might consign the Conservatives to the electoral wilderness for a generation.
The counter argument made by the right wing is that this is not 1997. Starmer may have won a huge majority, but he only won 35 percent of the vote and, as in Western democracies elsewhere, faith in the established parties is at an all-time low. To avoid the fate of France’s Republicans, the traditional conservatives who have been squeezed out by Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, right-wing Conservatives may believe they must embrace Farage’s populism to survive.
These debates will no doubt rage among the Conservatives in the coming months as the contest to replace Rushi Sunak heats up. The party has survived similar, if not quite so big, defeats in the past, and found new ways to adapt. They might even be inspired by their Labour rivals who recovered after an historic defeat in 2019 to win a landslide five years later.
However, at the same time there is a sense that this election is different, with the Conservatives’ position as one of the two main parties in the UK no longer guaranteed. The Conservative party is not dead, but it is seriously wounded, and its recovery, which is by no means guaranteed, could take years.
- Christopher Phillips is professor of international relations at Queen Mary University of London and author of “Battleground: Ten Conflicts that Explain the New Middle East.” X: @cjophillips
