Gavin Rice is Project Director of “Future of Conservatism” at the think tank Onward.
Throughout last week’s surprisingly upbeat Conservative Party conference one question dominated: who should lead the party in the fightback after its worst ever defeat?
But a second, equally important, question was less discussed. It is the essay question for the next Tory leader: why did the Conservatives get beaten so badly, losing 251 seats, returning its lowest ever number of MPs, and handing Labour their biggest ever majority?
Published on the eve of this year’s conference Breaking Blue, Onward’s major post-election collaboration study with Focaldata and JL Partners – the largest of its kind- aimed to explore what went wrong and set out the route back to power. This three-part miniseries will summarise our findings, slay some myths, and suggest a way forwards.
The instalments will focus on:
1) How the Conservative vote fragmented;
2) The voters we need to win back first, and how;
3) How the party must respond to the long term changes in the UK electorate
The result – who did we lose?
First the bad news. The defeat is even more disturbing when you examine the underlying trends. This is an existential moment for the Conservative party – it has no automatic right to exist. It could be game over if the wrong decisions are taken, but there is also a clear route back if the right voters are targeted and the right values and policies embraced.
Notwithstanding the grave errors of the new Starmer government, there is no love out there for Labour, which secured two thirds of the seats by increasing its vote share a paltry 1.6 percentage points, winning just 33.7% of the vote – less than in its 2017 loss. This is the most disproportionate Parliament since 1832 and a small national swing could result in hundreds of seats changing hands.
Yet the Tories cannot just blame the arithmetic – the fact is the 2019 Conservative vote share halved, with support splintering in multiple directions. It lost seven per cent of its vote to the Liberal Democrats (and 60 seats), 13 per cent to Labour and an eye-watering 23 per cent to Reform.
Although Reform UK took only five seats, Nigel Farage’s party sliced Tory majorities throughout the country, handing dozens to Labour and coming second in 98 seats. There is no one single reason for the defeat – like layers of an onion, the Tory support base fell apart. We will return to the policy reasons for the defeat in the next edition, but the stand-out factors are: competence and trust, immigration and public services – especially the NHS.
Given this, talk of targeting only Reform voters or Liberal Democrats – as Theresa May recently suggested – is extremely misguided. The party cannot win again with only one or the other. Nor is “uniting the right” enough – combining the Conservative and Reform vote share would have produced 302 seats – far more than the Tories achieved but well short of a majority.
Flow of the vote, 2019 vote share to 2024 vote share by party
(Source: Onward and Focaldata, Breaking Blue)
The Conservatives lost to Labour across all major demographic divides – age, education level, ethnicity and Brexit preference. The only age group it still carried were the over-64s. This is the highest “cross-over” age in history – the age at which voters are more likely to vote Conservative than not. There was also huge tactical voting, with Labour and Liberal Democrat voters willing to lend their vote to get the Tories out.
Anti-incumbency was the single most important motivating factor in the defeat.
So we should be chasing younger voters, graduates and those in urban hubs – the voters we did worst with, right? No, not really. At least – not yet.
The Conservatives must look first to the voters among which it experienced their most dramatic drop in support. These were the groups with which it usually does best – older voters in their 50s, non-graduates, C1 and C2 social grades, voters living in less dense constituencies and 2016 Leave voters. This devastating “proportional” swing caused massive losses, with the party losing not only marginals but seats that should have been comfortably held.
The Conservatives must recover their core support before they can build out, and younger.
Of course the party must rebuild its pipeline by creating an offer for those in their 20s and 30s, younger graduates and non-homeowners. This is less to win them, but rather to forge the conditions for them to switch to voting Conservative in their 40s. And without voters in their 50s, the party simply cannot win at all.
2024 vote by age group
Change in vote share by age group, 2019 – 2024
The voter group defined by Onward as “Workington Man” – older, Brexit-supporting, non-graduates in historically Labour seats including in the “Red Wall” – have gone back to Labour or to Reform. While losses on the back of Brexit among Remain-supporting Conservatives were already priced in, the drop in support from Leave supporters was catastrophic – a massive 42 point loss in vote share. The “realignment” dynamic from 2016 onwards, whereby the electorate increasingly split over Brexit preference, is still “on” – over 70 per cent of Leave supporters voted either Conservative or Reform this year. But the Leave bloc split in two.
2024 vote share of Leave, Remain and Did not / could not vote
Change in vote share of Remain and Leave voters and Did not/could not vote, 2019-24
Long, medium and short-term factors combined. The Partygate scandal under Boris Johnson’s leadership pushed the party to an eight-point deficit and fundamentally damaged trust in the brand. But it was Liz Truss’s mini-budget that annihilated the party’s reputation for economic competence, widening the poll gap to over 20 points. This made it almost impossible for Rishi Sunak to recover. The overall defeat was therefore essentially inevitable before the election was called. The campaign itself failed to improve things at all, with the news stories cutting through to voters all unfavourable for the Tories – such as Sunak leaving D-Day early or the “Gamblegate” revelations.
UK vote intention, 2020 – 24
Source: Focaldata analysis of scraped data
Failure of delivery on core policy pledges and areas of competence was also extremely damaging. Defectors to all parties thought the government had handled the salient issues of the economy, cost of living, immigration and the NHS badly or very badly. Reform voters are the most likely to say that immigration was handled “very badly”, but are similarly critical of government handling of the NHS and cost of living. Likewise Liberal Democrats are less critical of immigration than Reform or Tory voters, but they still say it has been handled “very badly”. A clue for what’s coming next in this series: these voters are not as different as they may seem, and tend to share policy priorities.
That may all seem like a depressing whirlwind. But by establishing exactly who are lost voters are, we have a glimpse of what they think. Tomorrow’s instalment will focus on the demographic groups that matter most to determining elections and therefore to winning again, as well as their values and policy priorities.
It’s a bleak picture for now, but the pathway to rebuild is fairly clear.
