Why are the Conservatives ignoring the median voter?

If the candidates for the Tory leadership sound much like ministers in the last year of the Conservative government, it’s because the leadership campaign started well before Sunak lost the election. But they lost that election very badly. To many it seems odd that the leadership contenders, at least publicly, appear in complete denial about this loss, and are carrying on as if it hadn’t happened. Given the nature of the leadership election, that puzzle quickly becomes why Conservative party members appear to be in disbelief about why they lost so badly.

It is easy to say that this is what happens when a party loses after being in government for so long. Many compare the current contest to what happened after Callaghan was defeated in 1979, or Major in 1997, or Corbyn’s victory in 2015. I think these comparisons are not very helpful. Let me start with the comparison that tells us very little. Corbyn’s victory in 2015 was five years after the previous Labour government, and it happened not because the membership were in denial about why they lost power in 2010 but because many shadow ministers were in denial about the appeal of austerity.

You could argue that Labour lost in 2010 because of its large budget deficit and their failure to prioritise reducing that deficit. [1] It is certainly true that the Conservative victory in 2015 owed a lot to the almost total acceptance by the media that reducing the deficit was more important than declining living standards and a pathetic recovery from recession. Perhaps as a result, the consensus among shadow ministers in 2015 appeared to be that Labour had to accept even more of the austerity agenda than they already had.

But that consensus was wrong, and the instincts of Labour members to want a much stronger opposition to austerity was correct. As I argued at thetime, the appeal of austerity was always going to be time limited, and Labour did well in 2017 partly because it wanted a larger rather than smaller state. The reasons for Corbyn’s failure in 2019 were not the reasons why he won in 2015.

A potentially more relevant comparison is with the victory of Ed Miliband after 2010. Yet one of the big mistakes Miliband made was not to defend the Labour government’s record, which allowed the Coalition to get away with ridiculous ideas that the country had been on the brink of a financial crisis in 2010 and that the recession was all Labour’s fault.

Is Labour’s shift to the left after its 1979 defeat a better comparison? Just as Labour then was deeply split between left and centre, you could say the Conservatives are split between the right and a One Nation centre. But whereas the split within Labour in 1979 onwards was both very evident and extended to the membership, if the Conservatives are split the centre is both remarkably quiet and appears largely absent from the membership.

In addition, 1979 is very different from 2024 in terms of the government the opposition is facing. It became quickly clear that Thatcher represented a sea change in ideology on the right, while Starmer’s victory was based on ensuring that the policy differences between Labour and the Conservatives were both minimal and minor. Starmer might be bolder in government, but the extent of that is far from clear at the moment.

Such comparisons also fail because of the unique feature of both the last election and the current contest, and that is the presence of a strong party further to the right of the Conservatives. Reform showed in 2024 that it was able and willing to win large numbers of votes at a General Election at the cost of seats lost by the Conservatives.

For party members it is convenient to believe that Reform was why they lost so badly, in part because many of those members have considerable sympathy for Reform’s agenda and would quite like Farage as part of the party. Little that they read in the right wing press would lead them to ask more fundamental questions about why their party became so unpopular. In addition, the victor of the 2024 election hardly presented a radically different policy platform to the last government, which can be read (if you are predisposed to) as suggesting that there wasn’t that much wrong with what the last government was doing.

However it is too simple to suggest that the nature of the leadership contest would be very different if members didn’t have the final say, for two reasons. Many Conservative MPs appear to believe that Reform poses an existential threat to the Conservative party ever returning to government. The idea that a far right party could dominate a more centre right party is not that fanciful if you look at what is happening in many other countries. Even dominance is not necessary to prevent the Conservatives winning if Reform continues to split the right wing vote.

Of course such comparisons need qualifying for various reasons. Trump dominates the Republican party because he took over the leadership of that party, and so far Conservative MPs have been sensible enough not to let Farage repeat the same trick in the UK. The first past the post system in the UK is also pretty effective at preventing a third party replacing the big two.

Nevertheless Conservative MPs may feel that they have to at least match the Reform offering on immigration and other socially conservative issues, so voters where these issues are a priority will go back to voting Tory once memories of the failures of the last government fade away. If the Labour government becomes unpopular enough, then the Conservatives can persuade potential Reform voters that they need to vote Conservative to get Labour out. This might work if enough disillusioned Labour voters switch to the Greens or LibDems.

Even on its own terms, the strategy of following rather than confronting Reform has significant problems. Reform will always be able to outflank the Conservatives on immigration and other issues because they can suggest policies that are even more fanciful, which can survive because the party is subject to less media scrutiny than the Conservatives. (They also survive because media scrutiny can be pretty poor - see Rwanda - and the political right is increasingly able to ignore evidence - see climate change.)

In addition, Reform has Farage (Reform is Farage!), and a strong charismatic leader has particular appeal to socially conservative voters. None of the current Conservative candidates can match Farage in this respect. In addition, some analysis suggests that among all potential Tory voters, those voting Reform are more difficult to win over than those who switched to Labour, the LibDems or who did not vote at all. Finally the emphasis given to very socially conservative policies may alienate some traditional Blue Wall Tories.

An equally significant problem is that this strategy ignores economic policy. Where the current Conservative party really appears to be in denial is its faith in the appeal of low taxes, its silence on how to improve public services, and the failures of Thatcher’s privatisation policy. It is the unpopularity of these policies that require the Conservatives to emphasise issues like immigration in the first place, which in turn gives credibility to the likes of Farage. Some Conservative MPs must understand this, but the wishes of the right wing press, party donors and members prevent those MPs even suggesting a move to the centre on economic issues.

As a result basic questions remain unanswered, or their answers can only be voiced in private. How can you be a tax cutting party when the health service continues to require a larger share of total national resources (GDP) over time? The only answer the Conservatives have is for the NHS to become a bare bones, inferior service which the majority of the middle class opts out of, but that answer is electoral suicide. How can you insist on cutting red tape when that leads to tragedies like Grenfell and a water industry exploiting both its customers and the environment. The only answer the Conservatives have is that these are acceptable costs in order to free the burden on business, but again saying this publicly would be electoral suicide. They have no answer to how can you cut immigration without damaging industry, universities or the public services, or how ‘taking back control’ has led to less international influence and power (as well as economic harm) And most fundamentally of all, how did fourteen years of a policy supposedly designed to help business thrive lead to the worst period of UK economic growth since WWII?

The best comparison for the Conservative party today is what happened after Major’s defeat in 1997. It also failed to ask whether some of its Thatcherite/neoliberal economic policies might have been responsible for its defeat, and relied on issues like immigration to attack Labour. That strategy failed in two general elections, and eventually Shadow Chancellor Osborne was forced to move to the centre by accepting Labour’s public spending levels. They only just won in 2010, but even that was largely down to luck (Labour being blamed for the Global Financial Crisis) and disastrous opportunism (convincing both the media and voters that reducing the budget deficit should become the country’s macroeconomic priority).

In 2024 the state of the public services is far worse than in 1997. In addition, the privatisation of rail companies is ending and the privatised water industry is a national scandal. Simple median voting models imply that being so far to the right on both social and economic issues compared to the views of the average voter should condemn the party to perpetual opposition. Does denial by the Conservative party of the unpopularity of its economic policies condemn it to indefinite opposition?

That ignores a key lesson of 2024, which is that the popularity and competence of the government matters more than the policies of the opposition in influencing votes. It ignores that Labour too need to worry about losing votes on both flanks thanks to the success of the Greens in 2024. It ignores the lessons of 2010 and 2015, which is how easily the wider media can be manipulated. For these reasons, even a party in denial about the unpopularity of its policies can win elections. For this reason it will take more than one election defeat for any party leader to challenge the views of party members, financial donors or press barons, and attempt to move the Conservative party away from the ideological cul-de-sac it now occupies.

[1] I have argued the opposite: that the Treasury persuading Darling to put deficit reduction on a par with recession recovery played into Conservative hands.