The doom loop of the Conservatives

The Tories are heading ever rightwards but cannot outflank Farage

It was depressing, on the morning of November 6, to discover that the US had once more elected Donald Trump. Faced with a woman and a lying braggart who tried to overturn a democratic election, US voters went for the man. But it is even more depressing, for a Briton, to discover that the Conservative party increasingly resembles the US Republican party.

The process started in the 1990s when John Major battled the eurosceptics in his party. Gradually over the next 25 years, the europhiles in the party became a minority and some were even excluded in Boris Johnson’s 2019 purge. The rot then set in when the leadership rules were changed to give the membership a greater say. Tory members - predominantly old and white - are not representative of the overall electorate. They promptly picked the charisma-free Ian Duncan Smith over the avuncular Kenneth Clarke in 2001, and later opted for the erratic Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak in 2022.

The effect is similar to the process that transformed the Republican party. Politicians must appeal to the members, who are more committed and more extreme than the voters, to rise to power in the party. This can (but not always) lead to a drift to the right; after three election defeats, Conservative members opted for the more centrist, and plausible, David Cameron in 2005. Furthermore, this drift is not always electorally toxic since the Labour party also shifted its decision-making to the members, resulting in the election of Jeremy Corbyn, who alienated voters in the 2019 election.

The Brexit referendum injected a shot of poison into the body politic. As noted in my last post, the Brexiteers adopted some of the tactics of the Republicans; branding judges as “enemies of the people”, decrying independent experts and proroguing Parliament to limit debate.

And the Brexit referendum also proved a disappointment on two counts. The first was that the “sunlit uplands” promised by leavers never appeared. There have been no roaring twenties, indeed growth was so sluggish as to doom the Conservatives’ electoral prospects in 2024. The second is that “getting Brexit done” failed to quell the popular dissatisfaction that led the public to vote for leave in the first place. The Ukip party turned into the Brexit party and now into Reform, and it seems stronger than ever.

The doom loop faced by the Conservatives is that the temptation to compete with Reform on populist issues (see the latest battle over grooming gangs) leads them to argue that “Nigel Farage is right. Don’t vote for him”. They can never outflank Farage on the right. Meanwhile, their policy drift narrows their appeal to middle-class voters, which is why, while Reform gained 5 seats in the last election, the Liberal Democrats gained an additional 60.

Historically, the Conservatives have always bounced back because they have been ruthless enough to change their policies, as well as their leaders. The party that took Britain into the EU under Edward Heath took it out again under Boris Johnson. The party that pursued austerity under Cameron and Osborne opened the spending taps under Johnson and Sunak when faced with a pandemic.

But they have gone so far down the current road that it is not clear there are enough sensible MPs left to yank them back again. They could indeed be replaced by Reform on the right and that is enough to make any moderate Briton shudder since, given the economics, it is likely that the electorate will be no more happy with the Labour government in 2029 than they were with the Tories in 2024.