Jack Clapper: Is the Conservative Party facing a Liberal-style collapse?

For most of our lives, Britain’s two-party system has been taken for granted. But it has not always looked as it does today. Just over a century ago, the Liberal Party was the primary party of the left. By the 1924 general election, however, it had fallen from 397 seats at its pre-war peak to just 40. In its place emerged the Labour Party – which has occupied that space ever since.

Many treat the Conservative Party’s current crisis as merely cyclical: a heavy defeat, followed by the usual recovery after a few years in opposition.

But times change.

The collapse of the Liberals is no exact blueprint for the present, but it does suggest that dramatic political change is possible.

If Britain is now entering another period of structural political change, the question is whether the Conservatives could face a similar displacement – this time at the hands of Nigel Farage’s Reform UK.

The Liberal collapse cannot be explained away as a matter of bad luck or poor leadership. It reflected something deeper: a transformation in the structure of British politics. The Representation of the People Act 1918 nearly tripled the electorate. Overnight, Britain moved from a locally rooted political system, dominated by the middle classes, to a mass democracy. As the influence of locality waned, class identity began to shape party alignment. The Liberals lacked the centralised organisation needed to compete with the rising Labour Party in this new era.

A different, though comparable, shift is under way today. The franchise has not changed, but traditional voting habits have weakened. Class-based voting is steadily losing relevance, and party loyalty is thinner than it once was. The electorate is more volatile, more sceptical, and more distrustful of established institutions. The Conservatives, meanwhile, have struggled to adapt, still leaning heavily on an old reputation for competence, familiarity and organisational stability.

Politics is increasingly shaped by identity and protest voting. This anti-incumbent mood was plain in the 2024 general election, which handed Keir Starmer what many described as a ‘loveless landslide’. Labour won two-thirds of the seats on little more than a third of the vote – less because of any great enthusiasm for Labour than because it was seen as the ‘least bad’ option. As with the Liberals a century ago, there is a growing risk that the Conservative Party’s structure is no longer suited to the electorate it seeks to represent.

As history repeatedly shows, systemic weaknesses often remain hidden until a crisis exposes them.

The decisive shock in the Liberal collapse was the First World War. The wartime replacement of H. H. Asquith by David Lloyd George in 1916 split the party into rival camps – Asquithian Liberals and Coalition Liberals. This division went beyond ideology and seeped into the party machine itself: rival Liberal candidates contested seats, finances were split, and local associations drifted apart. The result was enduring confusion over Liberal identity, leadership and legitimacy.

The Conservative Party has not experienced a single equivalent crisis, but it has gone through an unusually long chain of political shocks. From the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis to Brexit, Covid and the endless carousel of scandals, the party has spent much of the last decade in near-permanent crisis. Like the Liberals during the war years, these pressures have deepened factionalism and leadership instability, making it ever harder to present a coherent idea of what modern conservatism is.

Those internal divisions are now beginning to show externally. Recent defections to Reform UK – from both prominent national figures and local councillors – have created the unmistakable impression that parts of the right no longer believe the Conservative Party can recover its authority.

However, no party can be replaced without a viable challenger capable of occupying lost political territory.

The evolution of the Labour Party by 1924 was staggering. The party shifted from a small parliamentary pressure group representing trade union interests into a national political force. A movement that had once stood aside for Liberal candidates in many constituencies began to sense an opening. As trade union membership and funding increased, Labour established itself as the political voice of the working class. The 1918 Labour constitution helped crystallise that transformation, setting out a programme and presenting Labour as a plausible party of government. In doing so, it gradually squeezed the Liberals out of the space they once dominated.

This is where the modern comparison becomes most striking.

Over the past year, Reform UK has sought to recast itself from a vehicle for protest into the broader political home of the right. Electoral Commission figures show that in 2025 it received more donations than any other British party, while opinion polling over the same period has consistently placed it ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives. As Labour did after the war, Reform now has a clear platform, a recognisable leadership team, and is beginning to sketch out what government on its own terms might look like.

The final step in any party replacement is electability – the belief that the insurgent can actually win.

Under first past the post, British elections are ruthless. Once a party is thought to have no real prospect of power, voters quickly begin to look elsewhere. That dynamic proved fatal to the Liberals. In 1924, despite winning 17.8 per cent of the vote, they took only 6 per cent of seats. Faced with a choice between Labour and the Liberals, many left-leaning voters opted for the party they believed could actually defeat the status quo.

The Conservatives may now face a similar danger. If right-leaning voters, confronted with a choice between the Conservatives and Reform, conclude that the Conservatives no longer represent the future of their side of politics, the party could suffer the same fate. Electoral decline can be far swifter than Westminster often imagines, and Reform’s perceived viability may prove the decisive factor in any Conservative collapse.

A glimpse of this dynamic was visible in the Gorton and Denton by-election. The Conservative candidate won just 1.9 per cent of the vote and lost her deposit, while Reform secured 28.7 per cent. Once the Conservatives ceased to be seen as serious contenders, their support simply melted away.

History does not repeat itself exactly. But it does offer warnings.

None of this means Conservative collapse is inevitable. The party remains deeply embedded in Britain’s political institutions and enjoys administrative advantages the Liberals, even at their peak, could scarcely have imagined.

That said, the rise of Reform UK represents a serious threat.

The lesson of the Liberal collapse is that no party is permanently safe in Britain’s political system. The Liberals did not vanish overnight, and nor would the Conservatives. What ultimately doomed them was not a single defeat, but something more fundamental – the loss of their status as a plausible party of government.

The Conservatives will not die simply because they lose. They will die when voters stop believing they can win.