Andrew McHugh was a former British and Omani Army officer. He is now a Cherwell district councillor and treasurer of the North Oxfordshire Conservative Association.
In 2019 the party polled 13,941,086 votes. In 2024 we polled 6,755,953 votes. Our vote collapsed by over 51 per cent; we lost more votes than we retained. We now need to calmly and dispassionately ask ourselves the reasons why.
The election in 2019 was in many ways a special case. It was effectively a single-issue election fought on “Get Brexit Done”, and many non-traditional Conservative voters lent us their votes in the hope that we would do just that.
Earlier this month, I received an invitation to attend the Popular Conservative (Pop Con) meeting in central London on Monday 8 July. I was not sure what to expect, and was surprised to leave the meeting, if not with a song in my heart, at least with a spring in my step.
It was not a council of despair but an uplifting attempt to articulate the scale of the problem facing us and to set out how to regain power.
Speaker after speaker explained the reason for our electoral collapse. We had lost votes across all demographics. We were elected to control our borders, deliver Brexit and financial stability, and reduce both the size of the state and the burden of taxation.
We did none of that. Instead, we rolled out a programme new Labour will be happy to adopt, with some our candidates being Conservative in name only.
Instead of being the party of personal freedoms we proposed a risible smoking ban and increased regulation. On prisons, we talked big but did nothing. We changed leaders in quick succession without reference to the electorate, and did little to counter ridiculous woke ideology.
Sir Keir Starmer didn’t win the election. The electorate rejected the Conservative Party’s record in office and its flabby mishmash of a manifesto based on sub-socialist ideas. The electorate is never wrong.
So why did it all go so badly wrong? Were ministers incompetent, or lazy? Probably not. Several speakers highlighted the issue of parliamentary supremacy – or the lack of it. Parliament must be supreme. It has a democratic mandate from the people and yet many of the levers of parliamentary power have been devolved to unaccountable organisations.
In 1997, Gordon Brown removed the power of the chancellor to set interest rates. In 2005, New Labour legislated for the establishment of the Supreme Court, which has since fuelled judicial overreach. It ruled on the competency of the prime minister to prorogue parliament and legality of government action about climate change.
Meanwhile the High Court has prevented the deportation of foreign national criminals ordered by the Home Secretary, and repeated attempts to deport illegal immigrants to Rwanda have been thwarted by the ECHR.
The Civil Service is increasingly politicised with a left-wing bias. Sue Gray’s Partygate report, instrumental in bringing down Boris Johnson, is a case in point, given that she then went on to become Sir Kier Starmer’s chief of staff. One of the speakers, a Conservative peer and minister, said he felt the entire Civil Service machine was there to thwart the will of ministers.
Disastrously, the party decided to move to the centre ground of British politics. In doing so it created a political vacuum on the right. Nature abhors a vacuum; politics even more so. That vacuum was filled, gleefully if incoherently, by Reform UK. We thought our traditional voters had nowhere to go; they disagreed, and decided to stay at home.
The Conservative Party, like many other parties in a first past the post system, is a broad coalition. We have the One Nation Conservatives on the left and the European Research Group on the right. Unfortunately, it appears this broad coalition is just too unstable. There are too many mutually incompatible ideas.
In 324, the Emperor Constantine was faced with a similar problem, a schism in the early Christian Church resulting from, like today’s Conservative Party, two mutually incompatible theologies. To settle the matter, he convened the Council of Nicaea. The result of that Council was the Nicene Creed, the bedrock of Christian faith across the globe.
It is now time for us to convene our own ‘Council of Nicaea’, with the intention of defining what it means to be a Conservative. I would suggest the following as a good start.
I believe in The Conservative Party, a broad coalition of the centre right.
I believe in the supremacy of Parliament over judges, quangos and the civil service.
I believe in a small state and low taxes.
I believe in the constitution of the UK and freedom of speech guaranteed under common law.
I believe in a strong economy and a strong pound.
For nearly two centuries, the Conservative Party has been the most successful political organisation in the world. It may feel that we are currently staring into the abyss. However, we have faced oblivion before and survived. We will do so again, as long as we recognise who we are – and select candidates who reflect our values.
