Patrick English: The general election was a disaster for the Conservatives – but things have got much worse

Dr Patrick English is Director of Political Analytics at YouGov, and their spokesman on political research.

The 2024 general election was nothing short of a disaster for the Conservatives. This was not the conclusion you might have drawn from the rather upbeat mood at the party conference in Birmingham which followed the July vote, nor the seeming lack of urgency with which the newly elected leadership has set about trying to find and fix the leaks in the proverbial boat. (A boat which once contained a near-landslide winning voter coalition of own.)

Almost a year on, and the 2025 local authority and mayoral elections provided two very clear messages, among many individual side plots: first, Reform UK is a serious, undeniable political force, and the upper bound of their current measured support in the opinion polling is probably about right; second: things have gotten worse for the Conservatives since July 2024. Much worse.

Of course, Thursday 1 May’s results were hardly upbeat for Labour either. Quite grim, in fact, despite hanging on in three mayoral races and not taking the same headline-defining levels of seat losses as the Conservatives. The electoral problems for the current party of government were clear for all to see.

But it was so much worse for the Conservatives. To demonstrate, I’ll take Lincolnshire as an example.

Last July Reform UK won one Lincolnshire constituency in Boston and Skegness – the scene of the highest vote to Leave of any constituency back in 2016. Across the rest of the county, outside of the urban centres of Lincoln, Grimsby, and Scunthorpe, the Conservatives swept the board. Despite falling to 121 seats nationally from a total of 365 the election before, here they lost only four from the total 11 they held going into July last year.

Fast forward to 1 May. If the public had been voting in a general election, and if they voted the same way in that as they did the council contests (which is a big if), then the swings from 2024 to 2025 suggest that the Conservatives would have won just one Lincolnshire constituency – Rutland and Stamford – with Reform winning the remaining ten. Labour would lose all their Lincolnshire seats.

If the Conservatives would struggle to hold on to deepest-blue Lincolnshire, where exactly would they be winning?

Some may be tempted to point further South, toward some of the party’s more affluent, financially-secure heartlands. Not even there, however, would they find much hope: the Liberal Democrats once again swept across councils in the backyards of London and university cities, along with in their old stomping grounds of the South West.

There is nowhere, anymore, across the entire electoral map, that you can turn to and effectively bank for the Conservatives.

Yet or a party facing an existential threat, staring square in the eyes a genuine prospect of getting replaced on Britain’s political right, the Conservatives are certainly not acting like it.

They are facing a similar, multi-dimensional squeeze as they did back in July of last year, only this time Labour is providing little to no pressure on their political left. That lack of threat from the government appears to be driving what looks like a miscalculation over actually quite how serious, and how urgent, are the problems they face.

Of their 2024 voter coalition, which delivered them those 121 constituency wins on 24 per cent of the vote share, the latest YouGov polling data suggests that only half (50 per cent) of even that much-reduced voter based would stick with the party if a general election were being held tomorrow.

Against that, 26 per cent tell us they’d instead vote for Reform UK, a further five per cent say they’d switch to the Liberal Democrats or Labour, and 15 per cent pick no party at all.

There is of course not a general election happening tomorrow. Nonetheless, the current polling figures are further stark warning to the Conservatives that 2024 may not have been rock bottom for them.

But while Labour works desperately to curry the favour of the British voter using the machinery and arms of government, and each of Nigel Farage, Ed Davey, John Swinney, Rhun ap Iorwerth, and Adrian Ramsey and Carla Denyer position their respective parties to feast at the banquet of British voter anger, frustration, and disquiet, the Conservatives continue to offer practically nothing on any of the issues which British voters actually care about.

It is of course sensible for a party reeling after an electoral hammering to spend time reflecting, introspecting, and debating its political positions and prospectus.

But if the Conservatives continue to essentially ignore the median voter, they may well find that they when come back from the planning and processes aabout which Kemi Badenoch and her team talk so much, there’s barely an ear ready and willing to listen to them.