Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
After conference season, the cold hard light of day. For Labour: the realisation that the attack on Reform UK has backfired. For the Liberal Democrats: the sad deflation of the usual conference bounce. And for the Conservative Party, buoyed by that speech: the search for signs of lasting recovery.
There’s encouragement to be had from the first few polls since conference. Find Out Now showed the Conservative vote share up by three points. Opinium recorded an eight point improvement in Kemi Badenoch’s net approval rating.
There’s also the vibe shift: a newly positive tone from the media, plus a sudden stop to speculation about an impending leadership challenge.
So that’s good. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the first set of local by-election results since conference. Last week, the party lost both the seats it was defending: Skelton East on Redcar and Cleveland Borough Council and Bretforton and Offenham on Wychavon District Council. In both cases, we slumped from first to third place – and in both seats the winner was Reform. In Skelton, the Reform candidate won with a crushing 65 per cent of the vote.
The fact is that, whether he wants it or not, the North belongs to Nigel Farage now, as does most of middle England. So for all the much-needed encouragement of last week’s party conference, it doesn’t change the fact the Conservative Party stands in the shadow of an unprecedented political realignment.
In the months and years ahead we will need more than a few tender green shoots to hold on to. We will suffer other electoral defeats, further defections and, possibly, a leadership challenge or two. The nerves that were steadied last week may start fraying again. So let’s list some reasons to disregard both triumph and disaster – and keep faith with the Conservative Party:
Firstly, a capacity for improvement. Badenoch’s conference speech is proof that the Conservative top team can do better. Indeed, when we try we can still be the best. Alone of all the party leaders this conference season, Badenoch stood out as prime ministerial. Contrast her performance to Starmer’s desperate accusations, Davey’s unbearable lightness and Farage’s standard-issue shtick and it’s clear that the Conservative Party retains a measure of that most precious political commodity: potential.
Secondly, we’ve got ideas. The success of the speech wasn’t just based on the speaker’s bearing and delivery, but also its content. Of course, we shouldn’t get carried away here; we’re still a very long way from articulating a policy programme capable of rescuing our country from ruin. For example, though abolishing Stamp Duty would get rid of a bad tax that gums up the property market, it won’t get Britain building again nor will it make home ownership any more affordable.
Yet along with the big announcement on the ECHR, the new policy does point to a new willingness to understand and re-engineer the failing machinery of the state. The clearly signalled ambition to dismantle what doesn’t work in the Blair “settlement” was refreshing and holds out the hope that, one day, we might apply the same intellectual rigour to the Thatcher settlement too.
If one looks beyond the official structures of the Conservative Party and across the wider array of right-leaning think tanks and campaign groups, almost all the interesting thinkers in British politics today are either Tory or Tory-adjacent. That doesn’t mean that the party will take or keep the intellectual initiative, but if it wants to, it can.
Thirdly, we’ve got options. Badenoch deserves the praise she garnered last week. However, no Conservative leader can be safe with the party’s poll ratings at their current level. If those don’t improve then change at the top is inevitable.
But contrary to the doom merchants who warn that yet another leadership contest would ensure the party’s demise, we should take heart from the fact that we have options. While it’s impossible to imagine Reform without Farage, there are at least three senior Conservatives (Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat) capable of taking over right now. Furthermore, there’s also the panic button option of a Boris Johnson comeback.
It’s not having an indispensable leader like Farage that guarantees a party’s long-term survival, but the ability to keep rolling the dice.
Fourthly, we’ve got time. This is an obvious one, but it bears repetition. We’re not much more than a year into the current parliament. When you think how much has changed since July 2024, despair isn’t just lily-livered, it’s pathetically unimaginative.
Fifthly, we’ve got nothing to lose. Given all that time and the possibility of a new leader or two, might we end-up making things worse? Well, yes – we could. After all, we’ve yet to hit those single-figure poll ratings.
But don’t forget that we’re already on the brink of extinction as a major political party. Just plug our current poll ratings into the Nowcast or Electoral Calculus models to see how few seats we end up with. What’s more, in the longer-term, we’re facing a generational collapse in support for the Conservative Party.
The good news is that there’s freedom in this situation. We’re not in government and we don’t have a general election to fight, so let’s experiment. If that means tearing the party apart and, eventually, putting it back together, then so be it. There are no guarantees of success, but it’s better to go down fighting than wait uselessly for the end.
Sixthly, we have a purpose. Reform may be fated to replace us as the main party of the Right, but we are – for the time being – the official Opposition. In other words we have a job to do. Furthermore, unlike William Hague, who had to do his best against an impregnable Tony Blair, the current Leader of the Opposition faces a Labour Party that is falling apart despite its three-figure majority.
Farage lacks the parliamentary numbers to push against this government’s rotten timbers and Ed Davey lacks the motivation. Only the Conservative benches have both. Of course, the task of opposition is complicated when a party was so recently in government. Exposing Labour failure also means facing up to the legacy of Tory failure. That will be uncomfortable; but I refer you to my previous point about having nothing to lose.
Seventhly, we still command millions of votes. As is quite right and proper, our electoral system hands out harsh punishments to declining political parties. If we dip below 20 per cent or so at the next general election, we won’t just lose some of the 121 Seats we won in 2024, but most of them. That opens up the following scenario for 2029: Reform wins a Commons majority, Labour or the Lib Dems form the official opposition and we have to slum it with the Greens as a minor political party. Humiliating!
And yet a vote share between ten and 20 per cent still comes to millions of votes. That could matter a great deal, because if a Reform government secures its majority on, say, a third of the vote, the Left will say that Farage lacks the mandate for radical changes like withdrawal from the ECHR. The charge would be amplified by every part of the liberal establishment, and used to justify obstructive tactics in Whitehall, in the House of Lords, from the unions and, potentially, mass protests.
If, however, the Conservatives provide selective support for the new government’s key reforms, then the wrecking argument would be weakened. If the Left wants to count votes instead of MPs to delegitimise change, then they’ll have to count ours too.
Eighthly, we must be ready to replace Reform. There are other plausible scenarios in which a much diminished Conservative Party could still play an important role. For instance, Reform UK – a party without deep roots and held together by the charisma of just one man – could blow its big opportunity between now and 2029.
Alternatively, Reform could make it into government but then fall to bits under the strain. In either case, the Conservative Party needs to be around to resume its traditional role. Something similar is happening at the moment in the Netherlands, where the Christian Democrats have come roaring back from the margins after the collapse of a populist government.
Ninthly, Labour could introduce PR. It all depends on the exact distribution of votes, but changing the electoral system from first-past-the-post to a form of proportional representation could mean that we get a left-of-centre coalition instead of a Reform-led government. At the very least, PR would reduce the number of Reform MPs. Of course, to change the rules before the next election without a manifesto mandate or a referendum would be outrageous. But would you put it past a desperate Labour Party? No, me neither — and especially not if Starmer is replaced by Andy Burnham, a long-term advocate of PR.
So, yet another possible future in which a battered-and-bruised Conservative Party could still make all the difference.
Finally, we’re conservatives (or ought to be). I don’t know about you, but I’m a conservative Conservative. That’s means I believe in conserving things – especially things that have been around for a long time. If that doesn’t include the oldest political party in the free world, then what’s the point of us?
