I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. (Kemi Badenoch/Instagram)
Less than a century ago, Birmingham was a Tory fiefdom. As the annual party conference draws to an end in the city, the true-blue Brum of the Thirties seems like an exotic historical curiosity too bizarre to process. The city now has just a single Conservative MP, and that is in the well-heeled suburb of Sutton Coldfield. The Tory domination here — a legacy of the extraordinary hold that the Chamberlains exercised over the city, and the appeal of Stanley Baldwin’s canny brand of popular conservatism — was substantially broken in 1945 and eroded further over the postwar period. Now, the Conservatives look likely to become the city’s third, or even fourth, most popular party.
Their near-total annihilation in urban Britain now, however, seems like the least of their problems after their 2024 omni-battering. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the bizarre air of complacency that hangs over their conference, which apparently hasn’t been much dented by John Curtice telling them that they have made no progress since their 2024 hammering, and indeed are actually doing worse. The submerged theme of the conference is that even their natural heartlands are slipping away from them. Worse, neither Kemi Badenoch’s decent personal ratings nor MRP polls showing the Tories reaching the giddy heights of 130 MPs can really cover up this still-ongoing destruction.
Take where I live, a fairly affluent village in rural Cambridgeshire. Over the course of this year’s local elections, not a single leaflet or communication of any kind from the Tories materialised. Indeed, one would have had to have been a detective of considerable ability to uncover any evidence of a Conservative Party activist — a living one anyway — within many miles of my home. When the vote duly came, the Tories came a bad third in my ward, only beating the Greens by 60 votes.
Until perhaps a decade ago, places like this were rock solid for the Tories. Now, though, they’re pretty much a one-party Liberal Democrat state. There are now just two Conservative councillors left on the South Cambridgeshire district council, compared with 43 Lib Dems — who also comfortably won both of the local parliamentary seats in 2024. It wasn’t close, with Ed Davey’s party sweeping my constituency of St Neots and Mid-Cambridgeshire by over 5,000 votes. Since 2024, there has been almost no sign of a Tory recovery.
To be frank, if the Tories are still the political walking dead in St Neots, of all places — where there are more Green district councillors now than Tories — then anything they’ve said this week in Birmingham is probably a colossal waste of time. This is doubly true because the Tory collapse is not just a result of the short-term impact of Bojo’s travails, or even the Liz Truss debacle. Though 2024 represented a dramatic culmination of Conservative failure, it was not a sudden process.
Cambridgeshire is again a good example. As Cambridge became ever more expensive, the rest of the county has attracted more and more house-price refugees. Most are graduates; many are academics; and others work at tech start-ups in Cambridge Science Park, or at Addenbrookes Hospital. These educated, mostly socially liberal voters have transformed local politics. The farmers, the culturally conservative old rural middle class, the self-employed tradesmen and so on — they no longer dominate, and even many of them presumably couldn’t stomach voting Tory in 2024. Jeremy Clarkson may finally have shown up to their conference, but the people he speaks for are not those that the Tories need to win in their former seats. This new demographic intake is as likely to set up a local Orange Order and hold a “No Popery!” riot as they are to ever vote Tory.
So when I hear breathless online Tories talking up the “Kemi bounce” and the supposed Tory come-back, I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. Yes, Badenoch has relatively good personal ratings; yes, Reform has clearly had a bad summer as Farage’s clown-car by-election backfired and his party’s backbiting intensified. One or two polls even suggest that the Tories may reach the lofty heights of second place.
Yet none of this can alter the underlying truth: that in large swathes of Britain, the Tories essentially no longer exist, because they have a small and contracting social base, which is itself vulnerable to Reform. They no longer retain a comfortable baseline of support anywhere, apart from places with very specific characteristics: non-urban; on average low educational attainment; elderly; white. The only one of these populations that is growing is pensioners, and even among them, polls often show Reform in the lead. That’s even as cohort effects — with whole generations that have no history of voting Tory soon coming of pensionable age — mean retirees are less likely to show loyalty to the party over the longer-term.
Meanwhile, across England’s affluent south, prosperous places that would previously have been Tory shoo-ins are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities: Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, or abolishing Net Zero, or withdrawing from the ECHR. How much future is there for a Tory Party that faces an uphill struggle to remain relevant in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, where they now have respectively one and two MPs?
Tory “moderates” such as Andy Street and Ruth Davidson like to claim that these places can be won back by changing tack on “culture war” commitments, and making a socially liberal, economically centre-right pitch. But why the middle classes of Surrey, Cambridgeshire or Hertfordshire are going to favour nicey-nicey Cameroon redux politics rather than sticking with the more socially acceptable Lib Dems isn’t clear. Many of the upwardly mobile younger couples living in the affluent home counties who might in theory be attracted by the Tories’ promise on removing the £100,000 threshold on free childcare are those who have a rigid cultural taboo against voting Tory, even if such a policy would benefit them. They live in a world of engrained cultural assumptions and status dynamics that make voting Tory an unthinkable solecism.
Even if struggling graduates in these places could be persuaded to vote Tory on a pro-growth platform, there is another obstacle. These same constituencies are also stuffed with older Nimbies, and if they do anything to annoy pensioners, the Tories might equally wave goodbye to their only remaining reliable voter bloc: the grey vote. This is why we have had to endure the contemptible spectacle of CCHQ attacking Burnham as some sort of granny-killing maniac for suggesting a tiny reform to a policy — the Triple Lock — that most senior Tories privately acknowledge is unaffordable. Perhaps such industrial-grade hypocrisy is the price of maintaining any activists at all: a Tory agent told me recently that their party membership is literally dying. Looking at the “deaths” column of a local newspaper is generally the most reliable way to keep their membership records up to date.
In short, it is still hard to see how the Tories can get out of their current dilemma, no matter how many infatuated young Tories write Katie Lam’s name on their pencil-box, and how sharp Badenoch may prove in PMQs. The underlying logic of polarisation — between the left-behind provinces, and Home Counties progressivism — hasn’t gone away: and the Tories are still ill-positioned to capitalise on either side of this divide.
What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue-collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform. Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base. And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge” — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.
Much clearly depends on Andy Burnham. If he turns out to be Keir Starmer with a guitar — which is still possible, his fluent conference speech notwithstanding — then the main winners will be Reform. Certainly, it would take a singular collapse indeed to render Farage as unpopular in the Red Wall as the Tories are now; let’s not forget that the Conservatives lost their deposit in the Makerfield by-election. If, on the other hand, Burnham succeeds in sustaining a meaningful Labour revival and the Reform wave subsides, there will be only marginal benefit to the Tories.
Given all this, it still seems that even in the best-case scenario, all the Tories can hope for is holding onto their meagre 2024 seat haul and perhaps slightly increasing their presence in the Commons. The only viable course for survival would probably be some sort of merger between the Tories and Reform, but even that is extremely hazardous for either side, bedevilled by personal resentments and the emotional fallout from recent defections. Bitterness means that such mergers tend to take a long time to happen: it took the Canadian Right a decade to unite after the main centre-right party was near-annihilated in the 1993 election.
For now, the horrible truth for the Tories, irrespective of whatever optimism might be generated at their conference, is that their fate isn’t in their own hands. They have to hope that they can pick up enough scraps in forthcoming electoral scrambles to keep themselves alive. Their survival, let alone their existence as a major party, remains very much in the balance.