Malcolm Cupis: The past week has shaken my faith in the Conservative Party to its core

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

You would have to be a one-eyed ostrich not to recognise that this has been a dreadful week for the Conservative Party. It started with the startling and truly shocking revelations about the data leak that led to the Taliban being able to access the personal information of members of the Afghan defence force, civilians who had assisted the British army and even our own Special Forces operatives.

It is human to err and no matter how intelligent, diligent or well-trained people are, humans always will err. To make the mistake was explicable. What we have now learnt that took place subsequently was neither explicable or, in fact, forgivable. Wilful decisions were clearly taken to cover up the error at any cost, financial, political or social.

In support of this, further decisions were then apparently made which snowballed completely out of control. Those judged to be at danger were allowed to come to this country in their thousands and were given priority housing.

However, this seems to have included extended family members, and insufficient rigour was applied to the process enabling very significant numbers of opportunists to benefit. That there is clear evidence that some of these may even have been members of the Taliban.

We find that the Government calculatedly hid the truth by lying to the British people, to Parliament, and to the financial markets, because declaring the expenditure of the billions this has cost would have put the whole business under a bright spotlight; and then, apparently, legal injunctions were taken out to prevent the truth from being told.

The taxpayer was unknowingly obliged to finance the whole shabby arrangement at a cost of billions and deal with the resultant social consequences without warning or protection – and anybody who got wind of it and suggested something untoward was happening was smeared as a racist.

I simply cannot believe that a Conservative government behaved in this manner, and I genuinely believe that the perpetrators of this deception should be facing the courts to answer for their actions.

I expected there to be a clear statement made by the Party leader in the face of these revelations to explain exactly what had happened, how it had happened and what the full implications were; to offer an apology with an explanation and a pledge to undertake a full, transparent review and put measures in place to ensure nothing like this could never happen again. But all we have been met with is a deathly silence.

This mirrored the silence that followed the recent announcement that a group of Conservative MPs, led by Kit Malthouse MP, had written to the Prime Minster, demanding recognition of a Palestinian state.

The fact the party apparently made no effort to slap this down, or even disassociate the party from it, wasa real shock to me. Having lived in that region for several years, I know that a Palestinian state would have no intention of living peacefully alongside Israel; recognition of a Palestinian state means de facto support for the eradication of Israel and the genocide of the Israeli people.

Then we heard about the party reshuffle and the main headline from this was the announcement that James Cleverley has been brought back into the cabinet as Minister for “levelling up”. I’ve met James on several occasions and I have no doubt that he is a lovely man, and is greatly talented, but…

The days of broad church politics are dead. One of the greatest destructive forces on the Conservative Party in the last few years has been disunity, brought about by fundamental disagreement over political direction and policy within the parliamentary party. Very many voters perceive, rightly in my view, that an ideological faction that fails to represent the views of an overwhelming majority of not just party members and supporters, but the wider British public, have held sway over the parliamentary party as a result.

This has meant that voters have voted Conservative believing that this reflected their opinions on key matters, such as membership of the EU, immigration, culture wars and even economics, and have then found that the party in government has ignored them and wilfully headed off in its own direction.

I’m afraid that Cleverley is directly associated with this and just to confirm it, on the day of the announcement of the reshuffle, he was asked if he supported Kemi Badenoch’s view that we should leave the ECHR, and he pointedly refused to do so.

To the voter the message is clear: the party has learnt nothing. It still cannot be trusted to deliver what voters, supporters and members expect it to deliver. It remains internally riven by an ideological divide.

The final epitaph to a dreadful week was the start of the Online Safety Act, legislation that was drafted by the Conservative government and has now been brought into action by a Labour government eager to reduce freedom of expression to the barest minimum.

I’m sure this legislation was well meant when it was initially discussed. Nobody wants children to be able to access inappropriate material.

This is a hill I have personally died on: I attracted national headlines in the general election campaign last years when tweets I made years previously being rude about pornographers targeting children were dredged up and repeated out of context. I refused to apologise because I stand by the cause and I suffered the significant consequences of a media mauling as a result.

However, as is often the case, well-meaning legislation can have unintended consequences and that has been immediately proven in this instance. It is now required that adults wanting to freely access legal material on the internet now have to offer their personal information to do so, and that publishers have to enforce the legislation or face swingeing penalties.

As ever, this will only have an effect on those who are minded to act legally and who have something to lose, and none on those who have no regard for the law. It will also fail, in truth, not stop tech-savvy youngsters from accessing inappropriate material.

No sooner had the announcement been made than we then learnt that the Labour government has immediately followed it by assembling an “elite team of Police Officers” to scour the internet for instances of anybody making statements they judge to be “anti-migrant”. This is deeply, deeply insidious; criminalising the expression of legally held opinions that counter the position of a government is the epitome of banana-republic totalitarianism.

We have to face that the authors of this were Conservatives. I rejoined the party earlier this year in hope after feeling a strong sense that under its current leadership it was committed to returning to traditional core Conservative values.

That hope now feels extinguished by what we have learned in the last few days. I have ended the week feeling a sense of helplessness and dismay, knowing that I am unable to continue to put my name to what has taken place.