If senior Conservatives thought things couldn’t get any worse for the party after its historic defeat in last year’s general election then the past 12 months has proved them wrong. Latest Ipsos polling has the Tory party’s national vote share on just 15%. YouGov polling has the party on 18%. The last time the Conservative party polled 30% or more was in September 2022.
A party that gave people a choice at the ballot box has become a husk. It is, as a former MP colleague said to me recently, akin to an empty warehouse – the building is still there but the goods inside have all but disappeared.
And now those who have built this most unpopular version of the Conservative party are beginning to implicitly acknowledge the truth, and are coming up with the next “doom loop” step for their party. Now it’s time to “unite the right”, they begin to chatter. The logic is that bringing the votes of the Conservative and Reform UK parties together adds up to a vote-share far greater than your opponents have. Surely then, they believe, we can win again.
Yet those Conservatives wanting to “unite the right” should be careful what they wish for. For those many other Conservatives feeling queasy about that next step, they’re right. Here’s why.
It’s simplistic to think you can just add up the Conservative vote and the Reform UK vote and then it’s enough to win. For a start, it assumes the dwindling Tory vote is stable – it’s not. And in no sense is there a distinct Tory vote any more – voters have switched to Reform UK (in the north) or to the Liberal Democrats (in the south), or conventionally, to Labour.
Importantly, the reality is that the more the Tories talk about uniting the right, the more they are essentially telling all voters the two parties are now so similar that there is no real difference between them. In effect, they are either validating a pro-Reform UK voter to switch to Reform or an anti-Reform voter to switch to a different party standing against Reform. So, on messaging alone, calling for “unite the right” could be the equivalent of the Conservative party self-administering a political cyanide pill from a bottle labelled “how to get rid of your remaining voters”.
More practically, in our first-past-the-post electoral system, voters may anyhow consider that if they want to eject the Labour party from power at the next general election, they should vote for the party best able to beat it. It will be an uphill struggle for the Conservatives to persuade voters that they have a chance of winning locally in constituencies if Reform UK continues to poll so far ahead nationally.
Senior Conservatives may remember that, in advance of the 2019 general election, there was a similar clamour to bring together the rightwing vote. Then, the rightwing press successfully put pressure on the smaller of the two rightwing parties, the Brexit party, to have its candidates step aside, rather than risk a Labour government. It worked hugely to the Conservatives’ advantage. But now the tables have turned, and it is the Brexit party’s new incarnation, Reform UK, that is the dominant political force. It’s wishful thinking in the extreme that Nigel Farage and the Reform UK party will give way again.
Conversely, at the next election, it may well be the Conservative party being put under pressure by the rightwing press to withdraw its candidates, with Conservative constituency associations all over the country told: “Sorry, don’t bother selecting a candidate this time, Reform has a better chance in your patch.” That would be a sure-fire way to decimate any remaining grassroots support and Conservative party membership. Yet it’s hard to argue against that logic when there are those in the party making the argument of “unite the right”.
Is there an alternative path ahead for the Conservatives, other than continuing to follow this political death-wish cult, taking the party further into the electoral abyss? Yes, but it’s a hard one. First, all those who want to “unite the right” should be told to do that – go and join Reform UK. If they don’t think they can beat them, they should join them. At least it would remove their negativity from the party and leave it to those who still believe the Conservative party could offer something distinctive and positive to Britain again.
Those remaining could shift it to once more become a more centrist party capable of reaching a broader base of voters. But it’s a tall order. It would take time to move on from the disastrous state of the party in recent years. And there is the bigger question: if all the Conservatives who deep down prefer Reform UK joined Reform, how many would be left?
What we do know is that the polls show beyond doubt that this current version of the Conservative party has run out of road. It can change the driver at the wheel (again), but it has been the political direction and strategy that has been all wrong, not just the captain at the helm. The latest changing tack on North Sea oil and gas, with promises to “maximise extraction”, is yet more Reform-lite messing that comes over to voters as the party being a follower not a leader.
Until the Conservative party accepts this diagnosis it will continue to terminally decline. A fundamental reset is required. The party needs to reinvent and modernise, not merge. A message of “unite the right” is not what the Conservatives need, because that “unite the right” benefits only one party, and that party is Reform UK.
Justine Greening is a former Conservative minister and was MP for Putney from 2005 to 2019
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