Malcolm Cupis: ‘Broad church’ politics is now teflon, not glue. Salvation is dependent on service not rule

Malcolm Cupis is a public relations consultant, strategist and writer. He stood as a Reform UK candidate in the 2024 general Election and was a constituency chairman. He resigned from Reform UK in February 2025 and has since rejoined the Conservative Party. 

Earlier this week I had a call from a friend who is a former Conservative MP who I hadn’t spoken to for a few months.

A few years ago we engaged in regular political and philosophical debate over more than a few glasses of red wine, often long into the evenings. The interesting thing was that even though we regarded ourselves as occupying slightly different pews in the broad church of conservatism (he has always seen me as more right wing than he is, and thought of himself as more centrist) we invariably found that we vehemently agreed with each other on all the main substantive issues.

He was moved to call me after reading the article I wrote on here a few weeks ago, lamenting some of the developments in the Conservative Party that had left me, once again, feeling unable to support it. The interesting thing was that he clearly contacted me to try to assuage my concerns and reinforce why I should remain loyal to the party. But, once again, when we debated the issues we found that we had identical concerns about what has taken place and were left with identical feelings as a result.

This left me asking a fundamental question about the way that politics has fragmented and polarised in the last few years, and the internecine divisiveness that has resulted between people who, I think often quite arbitrarily, decide that they occupy one specific tribe and that other tribes must be regarded as their enemies.

I think this division has been artificially constructed and propagated by the media and the direct result is that we find ourselves with a Socialist government wreaking dreadful social and economic harm on the nation on less than 20 per cent of the popular vote, which has been directly abetted by the great majority of the British people being preoccupied with being engaged in petty warfare with each other over mainly peripheral matters.

We agreed that if you were to ask the vast majority of people who support or vote for the parties which occupy what is traditionally the right of British politics, they would all have similar instincts, fears and aspirations on all the biggest issues that the nation is confronted with. This includes our constitution, the economy, immigration, the NHS, energy, farming and food production, culture wars, law and order, transport and defence.

Having agreed this, we asked what it is that is causing division rather than creating unity among all of these people, and what has caused so many to abandon the Conservative Party, which for so many years dominated this sphere and successfully operated as a broad church to bind it all together? Sadly, even the most committed Conservative Party supporter has to face up to the fact that during its 14 years in government it simply failed to deliver on many of those key issues. If it had delivered, there would have been no space and no demand for Reform UK and we would probably still have a Conservative government now.

The irony is that the broad church approach of the party that had been instrumental in bringing different factions together with such great success for so many years became a significant contributory factor in tearing it apart.

A polarised electorate no longer sees a range of opinion in the party as being a strength, they see it as a threat and a weakness. This was greatly emphasised by what happened after Brexit, when a Parliamentary Party that was diametrically opposed to the view expressed by the majority of the British electorate unashamedly and openly sought to frustrate them and deny their clearly stated democratic preference.

I think the most significant failure of all the failures of the Conservative Government was in not delivering the public sector reform that it promised.

To reverse the open politicisation that Blair instituted throughout it, in education, the NHS, in Police, judiciary, the armed forces and all the institutions of Whitehall and beyond, in national and local government.

Empowering public sector unions to the degree that Parliament became essentially powerless and was ruled by the civil service, rather than the civil service being a politically neutral army employed to enact government legislation. That politically aligned civil service was utterly opposed to Brexit and, working alongside a Remain focused Parliamentary Party, I think deliberately sabotaged it to a guarantee that it would not be successful.

So the failure of the Parliamentary Party to tackle the politicisation of the civil service feels like an act not of complacency or cowardice, but of complicity. To those voters, a broad church Conservative Party now means that they are promised one thing and the Parliamentary Party then ignores them and foists its own preference on them and the nation. The fact that they succeeded in this and that Brexit was compromised and is increasingly now viewed as a failure, as they wanted it to be, has been a disaster for the reputation of the party, and one that may well not be recoverable for very many years.

If the Conservative Party is serious about regaining what is lost I think this is what it has to directly face in order to regain the trust of voters. But I don’t think it can do it alone.

The broad church is dead but the factionalised groups that are left are too intent on pointing fingers at each other. The beneficiaries are the Socialists, the Globalists and the Social Democrats and the victims are the British people whose dismay is increasingly turning into frustration and anger as they feel helpless, not just ignored but actively attacked by a Government that barely any of them voted for.

To reverse this we must see a new unity between the fragmented groups. A recognition that they share the same political ambitions on all of those substantive issues and that they need to focus on those shared views, fear and ambitions, rather than on the minutiae of peripheral matters that drives them apart.

And this is what is fundamentally wrong with Reform and Nigel Farage. His absolute refusal to understand the need for unity and his insistence that anybody who does not fall behind him must be treated as an enemy to be attacked and destroyed.

Hope may lie somewhere else.

Advance UK has been formed and is being run by mainly disillusioned Reform emigres, many of whom were previously Conservative emigres. Membership is increasing exponentially, and is now well past 30,000 as voters find out the authoritarian truth about Reform and Nigel Farage and seek a more libertarian and democratically accountable political home.

Advance UK refuses to accept the historical left/right political axis. It demands the restoration of our Christian constitution and sees the future of British politics as determined by personal freedom, democracy and equality under the law. Not by insistence on conformity behind historical social and economic political dogma.

Advance UK has made it clear it is collegiate and will work with others who share the same objective of doing what has to be done to put the nation first and to represent the needs and aspirations of the British people. In doing so it makes itself entirely set apart from Reform UK and a very natural collaborator for those in the Conservative Party who share all those same core concerns.

Meanwhile the Conservative Party has to recognise that the broad church approach is no longer glue, but teflon. It has to decide if it is going to be a servant to voters and restore core conservative values or if it is going to opt to continue along the path of social democracy in search of a constantly shrinking political centre.

I fervently hope for the former. T

That it can remember the words of Margaret Thatcher – that if you stand in the middle of the road you get run down by traffic moving in both directions. That it can face up to the desperate need to depoliticise the institutions in order to restore conservatism and deliver for the people, and wake up to the fact that it has to work beyond its own boundaries to unite people who are understandably disaffected but who share all of the most significant fears and aspirations.

This is, I believe, the only remaining path to our political salvation.