This article is taken from the November 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
For many on the Left, it was Brexit: leaving the European Union deprived the Conservatives of their real core supporters — the prosperous, established, working middle classes who do well out of life. After all, what’s conservatism for if not conserving the status quo?
For most on the right, by contrast, it was immigration: the collapse of our borders and their replacement by chaos — the origins of which, they say, lay in David Cameron’s modernisation project, also evident in the Tory approach to Net Zero, equalities and growth.
Neither of these explanations about why the Conservatives failed are true. Or, at least, neither are the whole truth nor nothing but the truth. The core reason lies elsewhere.
To find it, consider the proportion of the vote the Tories have won in each general election since Tony Blair’s landslide in 1997 until 2024. In 2001, they gained 31.7 per cent. In 2005, 32.3. In 2010, 36.1. In 2015, 36.9. In 2017, 42.4. And in 2019, 43.6, which was their highest proportion of the vote since 1979: higher, indeed, than the share that Margaret Thatcher won in her two landslide victories of 1983 and 1987.
In short, in 2019 Brexit didn’t prevent the Conservatives from winning their most emphatic general election victory in the best part of 50 years or from increasing their share of the vote in 2017.
Neither did immigration. The Tories pledged in 2020 to “take steps to take net migration back to the levels of the 1990s — tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. (Note the first three qualifying words.) In 2010, the net migration figure was 252,000. In 2011, 205,000. In 2012, 177,000. In 2013, 212,000. In 2014, 318,000. In 2015, 332,000. In 2016, 273, 000. In 2017, 230,000. And in 2018, 226,000.
In other words, the Conservatives only met the letter of their main commitment in two brief bursts — during the years immediately following their election wins of 2010 and 2015. And the spirit of it was never honoured at all.
This helps to explain why UKIP’s share of the vote quadrupled in 2015, when it leapt from 3.1 per cent in 2010 to 12.6 per cent. The rise in support for Nigel Farage’s party represented an increase in support for leaving the European Union which itself was driven, in part, by the sense that there was too much immigration.
Nonetheless, David Cameron’s Tories won that election and increased their share of the vote. So their failure to reduce net immigration wasn’t fatal to them in that contest, nor indeed in the two that followed.
So, if neither Brexit nor immigration explains the Conservative electoral record in recent years, what does?
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The answer is straightforward. Parliamentarians, think tankers and journalists tend to over-think politics (having been all three at once until recently, I should know). It’s a consequence of what we’re paid to do. But most others are not engaged by the cut and thrust of what happens at Westminster, or indeed in political news more broadly. They are too busy getting on with their lives.
The melancholy, long, withdrawing roar of disillusion with our political system is unmistakable. Only 16.1 per cent of the electorate didn’t vote in the 1950 general election (albeit the comparable figure during Labour’s landslide year of 1945 was 27.2 per cent — a surprisingly high total for which wartime demobilisation and displacement presumably supply part of the explanation).
Since then, at least one in five voters hasn’t bothered to turn out on general election day. In 1997, that proportion, at 28.6 per cent, reached nearly one in three. In 2001, non-turnout reached a post-war high: at 40.6 per cent, just two in five voters. There was less enthusiasm for Tony Blair than his fanboys and girls would have you believe.
The comparable non-turnout figures for the following six general elections are: 38.6, 34.8, 33.9, 31.2, 32.7 and 40.1 per cent. These are higher totals than any pre-1997 year. (For the EU referendum, incidentally, the per centage of voters who didn’t turn out was 27.8.)
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What of the two thirds or so of voters who do turn out? We know that older, white, better educated, politically engaged and relatively prosperous people in relatively marginal constituencies are more likely to vote than others.
If an election is both consequential and close, other voters are also likely to be drawn in. The most obvious recent example is that of 2017, where the poll gap between the two main parties closed during the campaign, and Labour had its most left-wing leader certainly since 1983 and arguably in its entire history.
But what makes people plump for one party rather than others? Each of us must hazard his own answer, and mine is: the average voter will back what he believes to be the most competent party. Let me rephrase. The average voter will back what he believes to be the least incompetent party: that is, the one least likely to damage his or her standard of living and quality of life.
In 2010, David Cameron didn’t convince enough voters that the Tories were such a party. But since no party can govern indefinitely, and Gordon Brown failed to persuade even fewer of the merits of Labour, Cameron and the Liberal Democrats were able to cobble together a government with a convincing majority.
Once in government, the Conservatives became a target for discontent, as all parties in government duly do. But they gained, by way of compensation, the status that parties in government automatically command: they became, from the point of voters, what is.
One shouldn’t add, in the words of Alexander Pope’s An Essay on Man, that “whatever is, is right”. But holding the whip and reins of government gives those who hold them a rough, ready means of authority — even if, as in the case of Sir Keir Starmer, they haven’t a clue what to do with them.
And in 2015, the people decided, in broad terms, that David Cameron and the Tories would be less incompetent than Ed Miliband and Labour (and, furthermore, that if you were going to vote for the Liberal Democrats and get Conservatives leading the government, you might as well not vote for the former).
2017 saw a temporary reversal of the fragmentation that began with the Orpington by-election of 1962, in which the Liberals gained their first significant breakthrough outside their nonconformist-flavoured redoubts in the south-west of England and in Wales. The identification of the Tories with Brexit, the collapse of the Liberal Democrats, the emergence of Jeremy Corbyn and the closeness of the campaign pushed the turnout and Conservative per centage up — for the fifth general election in a row.
The Tories had yet again been judged to be, in the balance, the least incompetent of the main parties. The electorate reached the same view in 2019 in spades.
Why? First, because more voters had sussed out Corbyn. Second, because the Conservatives were fronted by their most effective campaigner in recent history. And, most importantly, because of exhaustion. People who had voted to leave the European Union wanted to leave the European Union.
Of those who had voted to Remain, a significant slice either thought that the referendum decision should be honoured in principle, or met in practice, or both. So the least disruptive course to take was to vote for the Tories. (Labour’s policy was to renegotiate Brexit terms and hold a referendum at which voters could choose either those terms or to remain in the EU.)
Yet again, the Conservatives seemed the least incompetent option. And, yet again, their share of the vote rose.
When Rishi Sunak followed Liz Truss in October 2022, the Tory rating had slumped to just 23 per cent
What happened next? Politico’s poll of polls tells the story. The Tories hit their highest total since the poll opened in 2014 on 25 March 25 2020 with a 50 per cent share, whilst Labour was on just 29 per cent.
On 5 July 2022, two days before Boris Johnson announced his intention to resign as prime minister and Conservative leader, Labour led the Tories by 41 per cent to 32 per cent.
On 7 September, when Liz Truss succeeded Johnson, the position was much the same: Labour 42 per cent, Conservatives 31 per cent. But by 24 October, when Rishi Sunak followed Liz Truss, Labour’s rating had soared by ten points to 53 per cent and the Tories’ had slumped by 18 to just 23 per cent.
The evidence is incontestable. Truss’s government’s mini-budget, or the U-turn which followed it, or both — take your pick — trashed the Conservative claim to be the least incompetent of the two main parties. What followed was a race to the bottom. By general election day on 4 July last year, Rishi Sunak had raised the Tory total by a single per centage point. But Labour came in on only 34 per cent — the “loveless landslide”.
The gap between Labour’s notional rating on 20 June (the last date before election day that one can read on the poll of polls) and its actual share on 4 July is a reminder of the fallibility of polling evidence: the polls have a tendency, from time to time, to over-state Labour’s share. Nonetheless, they are a useful indicator of the general direction of travel. They can’t tell us whether Johnson could have recovered the Conservative position by December 2025 had he not been forced out.
On this counterfactual, your guess is as good as mine. For the record, those figures of 5 July 2022 (Labour, 41 per cent; Tories, 32 per cent) translate, when punched into Electoral Calculus, into 30 more Labour and 22 more Conservative seats than those parties actually won last year.
Had Johnson both stayed on and, say, then recovered the Tory share by three points, with Labour experiencing a commensurate drop, Electoral Calculus suggests Labour’s majority would have been 68 — with Sir Keir’s party on 359 seats and the Conservatives on 233. (I appreciate that Electoral Calculus is not an exact science, and that all this is imaginary water under an equally phantasmal bridge.)
At any rate, the polls certainly tell us that Truss left the Tory position far worse than she found it. And that Sunak failed to rescue it. What then?
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What followed the collapse of the Conservative claim to be the most competent of the main parties is vividly illustrated by some verses from the Gospel of St Matthew. The Authorised Version puts it as follows:
When the unclean spirit is gone out of a man, he walketh through dry places, seeking rest, and findeth none. Then he saith, I will return into my house from whence I came out; and when he is come, he findeth it empty, swept, and garnished. Then goeth he, and taketh with himself seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter in and dwell there: and the last state of that man is worse than the first. Even so shall it be also unto this wicked generation.
The progress described is recognisable, whatever one’s religious views. Once the Tories’ house was empty — in other words, once the party’s reputation for competence, or for being less incompetent than others, had vanished almost completely — someone or something else was bound to “enter in and dwell there”, since nature abhors a vacuum.
I’m not suggesting that this someone was Nigel Farage, together with “seven other spirits more wicked than himself” — though the Reform leader has undoubtedly invaded and conquered Conservative space. After all, Farage was not the house’s original occupant.
Rather, the “unclean spirit” takes me back to where I started. For some, that spirit was Brexit. For others — and I’m amongst them, for what it’s worth — it was the scale of immigration under first New Labour and then the modernised Tories. Its consequences would doubtless have caught up with the Conservatives sooner or later. But it was the Ukraine war, Covid, Johnson’s failures and then the Truss experiment that emptied the Tory home, and allowed the Conservative migration failure to “enter in and dwell there”. Once voters were left to mull the the Tory failure to control migration, their thoughts turned to the next frustration … and then the next.
Older voters mourn a more cohesive past. Younger ones are anxious about the future, believing they will have less opportunity than previous generations to earn well, buy a home and start a family. Those in between feel their quality of life fall. The persistence of worklessness, the fragility of growth, the rise in taxes, the hesitancy of investors — all came home to roost. Here are the “seven other spirits more wicked than himself”, or at least just as bad.
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Cameron-era Conservatives claim the party has moved too far to the right. Others, too far to the left (a persistent strand of thought running from the era of the League of Empire Loyalists to the present day). A further subset blame a departure from the 2019 manifesto and “levelling up”. Others still, the abandonment of the market and an embrace of the state.
Certainly, the Conservatives have not been well served by having six successive leaders who have held, in many cases, starkly different beliefs: compare and contrast Theresa May, lauding “the good that government can do” with Truss’s parodistic Thatcherism.
But one can easily become so bewildered amidst the maze of Tory factions as to lose one’s sense of place, direction and proportion. The evidence is unambiguous. It wasn’t Cameron who wrecked the Conservatives. Nor was it Brexit. Nor even immigration. It wasn’t “levelling up”. Nor was it failing to level up. It wasn’t abandoning one group of Remainery votes to embrace Leaveish ones. Or even hesitant attempts to move the other way.
It was the most extensive plague since Spanish Flu, the most devastating war in Europe since 1945, the personal and political failures of Johnson … and, perhaps above all, Liz Truss and her mini-Budget. If it was such a great achievement, why did she sack the Chancellor who delivered it?
The most elemental case for the Tories for at least the last century has been that their hearts may not always be in the right place but their heads usually are: that, when the chips are down, they are the people least likely to damage your lives and livelihood, and most likely to protect the property on which social order and economic freedom depend. Lose that reputation, and you lose everything.
It took the Conservatives the best part of 20 years to recover from the tax rises that followed Black Wednesday under John Major. How long will it take them this time round — if recovery happens at all — with Reform knocking at the door?
