The problem for the Tories is that they are, increasingly, being pulled in two different directions. Right now, almost 40% of the Conservatives’ 2017 voters say they plan to vote for Nigel Farage and the Brexit Party at the next general election. These disillusioned Tories, along with one in 10 of Labour’s 2017 voters and a handful of Lib Dems, explain why Farage is sitting on between 20-26% of the national vote.
But to bring down the Tories, he doesn’t actually need this level of support. With, say, 10-15% he will easily throw dozens of marginal seats, such as leafy Richmond-upon-Thames, into Lib Dem hands, and others to Labour. If he is slightly stronger than Ukip were in 2015, then the Rochfords start to fall as well.
The Brexit Party is a big reason why, at elections to the European Parliament last month, the Tories slumped to 9.1% of the vote, their lowest in history. Data compiled by Lord Ashcroft suggests that more than one in two of the 2017 Conservative voters who turned out put a tick next to the Brexit Party, slightly more than what we see in Westminster polls. Only one in five Tories stayed loyal.
As in Rochford, the Conservatives were obliterated across much of Leave Land. Aside from the territory of Mark Francois, Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt would do well to pay these places a visit if they are serious about winning back Leavers from Farage: Arun in West Sussex, Torbay and Torridge in Devon, Swale in Kent, Rother in East Sussex, South Kesteven in the East Midlands and Scarborough in Yorkshire. These are the places where Farage is strongest and where the Tories haemorrhaged around 20 percentage points.
Unless Johnson or Hunt deliver a meaningful Brexit, then their party will continue to inch closer and closer what I call the ‘Canada 1993 scenario’. Canada’s federal election of 1993 is an incredibly rare example in a first-past-the-post system of a socially liberal ‘progressive conservative’ party being effectively replaced by a socially conservative populist right party.
In one election, in one fell swoop, Kim Campbell’s Progressive Conservatives shed 27 percentage points and 154 seats while Preston Manning’s Reform Party gained 17 points and 51 seats. A governing party, with a majority, was almost wiped completely off the political landscape. Could it happen here? It feels unlikely – but then, again, nobody really knows.
But it is also true that the Brexit Party is by no means the only problem for the governing Conservatives. Cheering about a No Deal Brexit might be popular among grassroots associations; but there is another dynamic playing out and which is reflected in the Richmond-upon-Thames of the world.
Surveys carried out since the European election suggest that about one-quarter of the Liberal Democrat’s support came from disillusioned Conservatives. So while the Tories are right to prioritise Leave Land, the next leader would also be well advised to take a walk through places like the City of London, Vale White Horse in Oxfordshire, affluent Bath and Winchester and South Oxfordshire. It was here where the Lib Dems performed strongly while the Tories fell off the map.
If the Conservatives aren’t careful, the Lib Dems will grow stronger, potentially form an alliance with the Greens and start to eat into pro-Remain voters on both sides, Labour and Conservative.
There are other worrying signs for the Tories. Turnout, for example, was higher in Remain areas and, given the broader fragmentation of Britain’s party system, there are probably more coalition options for Labour, the Lib Dems, the SNP and Greens than there are routes into power for the Conservatives. Unless, that is, they want to start thinking about a formal pact with the Brexit Party.
This is all a part of the continuing polarisation of British politics – the consolidation of a process that really began with the Brexit debate and was then entrenched by the outcome of the 2017 general election. Theresa May’s assessment was that her path to power not only ran through the retention of the Conservative Party’s seats, including the nearly 250 that voted Leave, but also by capturing a good number of the nearly 150 Labour seats that had also voted Leave. Conservatives would raid Labour’s Leave territory, while defending seats in more affluent, middle-class and urban areas, like Richmond-upon-Thames, that had voted Remain, or at least that was the plan.
As we now know, that strategy failed. The Tories made their biggest gains in areas that had given strong support to Leave, where UKIP suffered major losses, and in districts which had large numbers of people without degrees, working-class voters, pensioners and white voters. But these gains were simply not enough.
In Leave seats, the Conservatives averaged an increase of 15-points. But Labour’s vote turned out to be more resilient than May and her team had estimated – it went up too, by 7 points. This put lots of seats out of Tory reach. In the end, the Conservatives only captured six pro-Leave seats from Labour. And look at pro-Leave Conservative seats like Rochford. There, the Conservatives added just 2 percentage points to their vote while Labour’s vote increased by more than 12.
Why? Combine disillusionment with Brexit and a desire for greater economic redistribution, something that Jeremy Corbyn is banging on about, and you have your answer.
Meanwhile, the Tories suffered costs that we continue to see. They made no progress or went into reverse in areas that were young, ethnically diverse, had lots of graduates and middle-class professionals. In the most strongly pro-Remain seats, Labour’s average vote jumped by 13-points while the Tories’ crashed by three points. Zac Goldsmith was rather lucky in Richmond-upon-Thames but next time will, I suspect, be much harder for him.
Whether Boris Johnson or Jeremy Hunt becomes leader, he will inherit a political party that is now losing ground in Remainia, especially in areas where the Lib Dems surge, and which is also now in reverse in Leave Land, where Farage has reappeared and rekindled his relationship with Eurosceptic Tories.
The delivery of a meaningful Brexit will help to hold up support in the Rochfords; but the next Conservative Party leader will also need a message for those places like Richmond-upon-Thames, not least given the failure of a decidedly pro-Brexit campaign to deliver a widely anticipated majority at the 2017 general election. Eurosceptic Tories are walking away from their party but so too are around six in 10 pro-Remain conservatives.
The next Conservative leader will need to deliver Brexit, to satisfy Rochford, but they will then need to pivot quickly and speak directly to the people of Richmond-upon-Thames. None of this will be easy. And because we’ve never been here before, it’s not entirely clear whether it is even possible.
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