James Crouch is Head of Policy and Public Affairs at Opinium.
Returning the Conservative Party to government seems like a daunting task. Many Conservative MPs and activists would welcome clear and straightforward answers on how the party can reverse the 2024 election result. Unfortunately, the results from last week do not present the party with such easy answers. Rather than finding some big policy offering on the right or left of the party, the starting point must be to rebuild the party’s reputation from the ground up.
Winning back Reform UK voters on immigration might seem like an obvious solution. Still, the Conservatives did so poorly in vote share – significantly worse than even 1997 – because the party is at rock bottom amongst every part of its electoral coalition. Not only did they lose the Red Wall, but they lost the Blue Wall too. This might seem obvious, but it is the final chapter in the story of a Conservative party that has spent eight years being in opposition to itself.
It’s a story we can tell by plotting the Conservative vote share across three elections. We take the Conservative vote share in the 575 English and Welsh constituencies from Cameron’s 2015 election victory, Johnson’s 2019 election victory, and Sunak’s 2024 election defeat. We then plot it on an axis of key demographic factors that describe the two very different wings of the Conservative Party: one that is more blue-collar and less graduate, the other more affluent, highly skilled, and white-collar.
David Cameron’s electoral coalition was built on a traditional Conservative coalition heavily reliant on the votes of the affluent middle-class parts of Britain. His party did best in those areas. Then the experience of Brexit and Boris Johnson saw the party seesaw in the opposite direction, winning a considerable number of votes in more blue-collar areas but losing the party many votes in its former heartlands. Sunak’s election defeat has detached Johnson’s new voters too, leaving the party a rump.
While 2019 may be the most common benchmark used, Conservatives should be in no doubt that this is not simply a story of Reform and immigration. In 2024, the party is almost equally as far away from its former affluent core (where it did best in 2015) as it is from its Red Wall voters (where it did best in 2019). The 121 seats the Tories did win were due to there being just enough retired outright homeowners in those seats to see the party scrape through.
The party’s image needs repairing before we discuss the optimum policy platform
It might be a cliché to say this after a defeat, but the polling shows that the Conservative Party needs to reconnect with all of its potential voters rather than fixating on which of these two opposite ends of the electoral map to win back.
Opinium conducted a large survey of 4,500 GB adults on polling day to explore why voters cast their ballot the way they did. We asked 2019 Conservatives who did not vote for the party this time around why they turned elsewhere, and the two most common factors were the leadership (45 per cent) and the party’s reputation as a whole (42 per cent).
It is worthwhile emphasising these are major reasons for leaving the Conservative Party no matter where the voters ended up, whether they switched directly to Labour, or they peeled away to Reform UK. The party needs a credible leader, and that leader needs to set about repairing the party’s image. The policy platform is not the first problem.
Some might argue I am ignoring immigration as a major factor in why many Conservative voters switched to Reform (48 per cent named Conservative failure here as a factor in them switching to Nigel Farage’s party). However, I would argue that as much as the question uses the term “policies,” all of our polling during the parliament suggested the problem was trust.
Nine in ten Reform voters supported the Conservatives’ Rwanda policy, but only one in ten trusted a Sunak Conservative government to handle the issue. Policy wasn’t the problem, performance and trust were. The latter cannot be solved with ever more political positioning on the issue of immigration.
Healing divisions, rebuilding the party’s reputation, and avoiding fixating on any one wing of the party
During the campaign, Opinium tracked how Rishi Sunak and the Conservative Party were viewed. If the key to the party’s electoral disaster starts here, what can those tell us about the problems the party and its future leader will need to work on?
The reason the party needs to start “reconnecting” is that the major challenge both the leader and party had was they were seen as being out of touch. In fact, on three related measures both Rishi Sunak and the Conservatives had terrible net scores: seen as being in touch with ordinary people (Sunak -54; Conservatives -50), seen as representing what most people think (Sunak -51; Conservatives -47), and having similar views to the survey participant (Sunak -46; Conservatives -36).
Simply put, the Conservatives were not where most people were, for a whole multitude of reasons, some of which are Rishi Sunak’s fault, some of which the party as a whole allowed itself to be drawn into. We do not have space to discuss them all now, but there are two key factors that the Conservatives and government can be said to have failed on.
In 2021 the Conservatives used to be seen as united and competent. To add insult to injury, the Conservatives now have terrible scores on being united (15 per cent united, 63 per cent divided) and on being competent (21 per cent competent, 57 per cent not competent).
Last week we saw what happens when a government goes into an election talking about policies miles away from where most people are, leading a party perceived as disunited and incompetent.
Healing the divisions in the party, rebuilding the party’s reputation for good governance, and broadening the party’s outlook to the ordinary voter rather than any one component of its former electoral coalition are the essential first steps on the path back to power.
