The end of the Conservative party

The decline of Great Britain continues with economic woes, restrictions on free speech, continued colonial thinking globally and in Ukraine, and a complicated political scene with an unpopular Labour PM, a disappearing conservative party and an overall sense that the UK is heading in the wrong direction. The new Reform UK party has grown as a result and they are now having their American style party conference. Party leader Nigel Farage vowed to start preparing for government, saying the nation’s two main parties were in meltdown and only his Reform UK could ease the anger and despair plaguing the country to “make Britain great again”.

To a prolonged standing ovation by a crowd at the annual party conference, Farage for the first time offered a vision of how Britain would be under a Reform government: He pledged to end the arrival of illegal migrants in boats in two weeks, bring back stop-and-search policing and scrap net zero policies. Despite having only four lawmakers in the 650-strong British parliament, Farage is becoming increasingly confident that his party can beat both Labour and the Conservatives, basically sacking the Conservatives as the main opposition party, taking the initiative on every issue from immigration to free speech.

Unveiling a new senior defection to Reform from the Conservatives, former culture minister Nadine Dorries, Farage said he was setting up a department for the preparation of government and appointing ex-Reform chairman Zia Yusuf as head of policy. Loved or loathed after being instrumental in winning the 2016 Brexit referendum to get Britain out of the European Union, Farage knows how to campaign and says by bolstering his team of officials, the party will be a fighting force well before 2029.

Farage has also orchestrated a debate about freedom of speech in Britain, criticizing arrests of people for making comments on social media deemed to incite violence. A friend of Donald Trump, Farage went to Washington this week to urge U.S. politicians to persuade Britain to put an end to what he called a North Korea-style clampdown on free speech, before visiting the U.S. leader in his Oval Office.

The defection of Nadine Dorries from the Conservatives to Reform is significant. Dorries served as culture secretary and as a health minister under Boris Johnson, of whom she was a close ally. She is the latest in a string of defections from the Conservatives to Reform UK, including former Welsh Secretary David Jones and ex-Tory Chairman Sir Jake Berry. Dorries stepped down as an MP in 2023, after 18 years in the House of Commons, with an attack on then-Prime Minister Rishi Sunak. She has since been critical of current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch.

Regarding the Conservative party, it takes real effort to kill a political party that has been around for nearly 200 years and is the most successful in Britain’s history. But at the very least, this version of the Conservative party is dead. The BBC’s projected national vote share for the Conservative party is around 15%. The party has no winning majority in any age group of voters other than those over 70. This is no basis for a successful electoral strategy

Unlike in the past, it’s not as simple as waiting for the pendulum to swing back towards the Conservative party. There is no pendulum. Arguably, there is no such thing as a core voter any more. Those days of predictable votes in predictable places are gone. In today’s Britain, voters act the way they do as consumers. If they vote for a party that fails to deliver on its promises, then they simply choose a different one the next time an election comes around. And why not? Why should political failure be rewarded? Yet this losing version of the Conservative party, with its blinkered, ideological, culture-war preoccupations and entitlement syndrome, has failed to grasp this crucial change.

This version of the Conservative party is finished as a political force. For the first time, even a change of course may now not be enough to improve its fortunes. The party’s joyride down its political cul-de-sac has not just been a flash in the pan. It has been a long one, over the best part of a decade. Whenever the next election will be, the Conservatives will have no chance to regain power. They will need a major strategy chance to regain trust and it will take a long time or they will just disappear as a political party. It is more likely that the voters will move on and support the Reform UK party.