Keval Nathwani studied modern political and early modern History at university. He has worked in both Houses of Parliament and currently works for George Freeman MP.
The election was a rout. Like the baying mass at a public execution, the public smelt blood and voted in their droves to punish the Conservatives. From lowly backbencher, to esteemed cabinet minister, even to an ill-famed former prime minister, like dominoes they fell, to the beaming satisfaction of the electorate.
And so, while Labour sprawl in the warm July sun of victory and savour the levers of real power, the Conservative Party retires to lick its wounds. After 14 years in government, a once formidable election-winning machine retreats feebly into opposition.
The fight for the soul of the Conservative party has already begun. Marcus Fysh, the ex-MP for Yeovil, has declared the Conservative Party “dead”, with “no chance of ever being re-elected again”; he blames the centrism of its most recent iteration.
David Frost, the Boris Johnson stalwart and right-wing Tory peer, similarly launched an unconcealed attack on the centrist and liberal leadership of Rishi Sunak. He says that things might have been different: “if we had had a leadership that actually supported a distinct set of conservative policies, didn’t look like it didn’t like its own voters, and hadn’t dismissed Reform”.
In a league of her own, Suella Braverman launched a malignant diatribe against ‘liberal Conservatives’ placing the blame on the “lunatic woke virus” for the Conservatives landslide defeat.
The Tory right is angry. It is angry at what it perceives to be the feeble centrism of liberal One Nation Tory-ism, and it believes this is what cost them the election. That anger was not limited to parliamentary candidates but was also reflected in the surge of Reform voters in once-safe Tory seats.
Party members, and core Conservatives too are angry at the perceived inaction of the Conservative Government of the past 14 years to deal successfully with deep set structural issues resulting in high immigration, poorer public services, pallid economic growth and most will never forgive the defenestration of Johnson. People are poorer, and the Tories are held responsible.
In this landscape it seems unlikely the Conservative Party can claw its way back to victory. But no one should write off the Conservative Party, and history tells us so.
In the course of the last election many passing comments were made about the impending Conservative defeat and that of Sir Robert Peel in 1832. That was the first election fought under the newly minted Reform Act between the Whigs led by Earl Grey and the Tories led by the Duke of Wellington; the Tories managed less than 30 per cent of the vote.
Out of the ashes of electoral devastation Sir Robert, the Tory Leader in the Commons, with the unfailing support of the Iron Duke in the Lords, managed to rescue the fortunes of the Tory Party through shrewd party management combined with a mature and constructive approach to opposition.
Peel saved the Conservatives from “virtual annihilation” in 1832 through a radical reorganisation of the party, assiduous administration, and an almost brutal personal predominance in Parliament, buttressed by a progressive Conservative message. The Tamworth Manifesto accepted the Reform settlement to the Constitution, and satisfied the public’s insatiable appetite for Reform by committing to “a careful review of institutions civil and ecclesiastical in a friendly temper”.
This was seismic, and the gospel of Peelite Conservatism succeeded in its objective, widening the basis of support for the Conservative Party and paving the way to victory – and the annihilation forever of the Whigs as a political force.
Peel’s brand and personal competence in decision making and administration, independent of stubborn Tory dogma, ought to provide the guiding principle for the Tories in opposition. How the Conservative Party reforms itself now will, of course, do much to decide the next election. But perhaps more importantly, it may well redefine the British political landscape for a generation to come.
Back in the present, it now appears to be the liberal One Nation caucus who fill the majority of the 131 Parliamentary seats. They too are angry, albeit for different reasons – but will be in a stronger position to choose the candidates to be put to members in the forthcoming leadership contest as successor and leader.
Some Conservative MPs are suggesting a long drawn leadership contest into the conference season and mooting changes to leadership rules of the 1922 Committee and the Constitution of the Party. This would set the stage for a ferocious and bruising fight for the soul of the Conservative Party with blame and recrimination flung on all sides.
(A fight, incidentally, conducted out of the eyes of the public, whose attention will be fixed on the the Labour Government – a new and very challenging media environment to which the Tory opposition will have to adapt with celerity.)
Ultimately, however, the party has a very simple but existential choice: does it entrench its liberal One Nation tradition, or fall to the embrace of Nigel Farage and Reform UK?
Whatever the members choose, without a radical re-imagination and critical re-evaluation of the party’s core set of ideas and philosophy, there is no hope for the party in Parliament in providing effective opposition – nor in the next general election.
