The End of the Party

On July 4th, the British Conservative Party fell to its worst election defeat since it emerged as a major political force in the early 1800s. After an unhappy, unproductive, and turbulent period in office, encompassing fourteen years and five prime ministers, the Conservatives lost 251 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons in one night. In these hugely reduced circumstances—with just 121 seats on a vote share of 24 percent, and pushed almost entirely back to its rural heartlands—the party will struggle not just to be heard but to be taken seriously in the years ahead. Meanwhile, Kier Starmer’s Labour Party now holds 411 seats, with a 174-seat majority over all other parties, which is close to absolute power in the British system.

Conservatives seeking comfort might observe that we’ve been here before. After all, the party bounced back from seemingly apocalyptic defeats in 1830, 1906, 1945, and 1997. Just as people who suffer near-death experiences can feel strangely euphoric, some leading Tories have interpreted the 2024 blowout as though it presents exciting new political opportunities. Thus, former Prime Minister Boris Johnson has produced a “ten-point guide to bashing Labour and getting back into power.” Suella Braverman, a leadership contender from the right of the party, argues for a strategy of confronting the “lunatic woke virus.” 

Perhaps these rapid responses will deliver success. More likely, the magnitude of the defeat means that the Conservative Party faces a long journey of rebuilding its donor and activist base, reestablishing credibility in Parliament and the media, and reconnecting with the vast swaths of the country that have decisively rejected it. There are 92 professional soccer clubs in England and Wales: only one is now located in a Tory district. Among voters under age thirty, the Conservatives have collapsed to fifth party status, with a vote share of just eight percent, trailing Labour, the Liberal Democrats, the Greens, and even Nigel Farage’s populist Reform Party.

For nearly two hundred years, the Conservative Party has been an extraordinarily successful election-winning machine because it demonstrated an appetite for power, embodied the innate conservatism of the British people, and adapted itself to changes in British society. I’m not sure it is still able and willing to perform these functions, and so my own view is that the party’s survival is in doubt. There is no law of nature that requires its continued existence. For now, it might reflect that it suffered a landslide election defeat because it abandoned its historic commitments to prudence, moderation, and competence.

Prudence

In the past, the Conservatives have flourished in a country that values stability and continuity. Yes, its leaders might have been unlikable, but they were generally seen as prudent administrators of Britain’s economy and security. But somewhere along the way, the 2010–2024 Conservative government abandoned prudence—the ability to distinguish between wise and reckless acts—and exposed Britain to astonishing levels of political turbulence. Predictably, the public grew weary of the rolling turmoil.

Was the 2016 Brexit referendum the turning point? In the preceding six years, David Cameron led the Tories through a period of relative calm, focusing on deficit reduction in response to the financial crisis. Following the Brexit vote, which prompted Cameron’s resignation, the Conservatives descended into vicious infighting, burning through four leaders in eight years. Theresa May failed to implement Brexit; Boris Johnson pushed it through, only to be forced out of office for violating his own Covid lockdown rules; Liz Truss lasted only forty-nine days (the shortest-ever UK premiership) after her proposed budget of unfunded tax cuts alarmed the financial markets; and Rishi Sunak failed to salvage anything from the wreckage.

In truth, the Conservative appetite for ill-advised risk-taking predated Brexit, which was actually the third high-stakes referendum that Cameron had approved, following the 2011 vote on changing the voting system and the 2014 vote on Scottish independence. Ironically, he argued for the status quo in each case but produced lasting disorder in the form of disruptive referendum processes alien to the British parliamentary tradition. For scholastic philosophers, prudence is not just knowing the right things to be done, but also the right way of doing them. In other words, the means are as important as the ends. Conservative goals will not be achieved via unconservative methods, or by substituting serious governance for stunts and shortcuts.  

After Cameron’s carelessness, Boris’s rule-breaking, and the Truss debacle, Starmer has wisely positioned Labour as the party of prudence. In his first speech as prime minister, he pledged to “end the era of noisy performance” and “tread more lightly” on the lives of the British people. Treading lightly, operating with the grain of British political culture, and choosing the right means for worthy ends: all would be useful starting points for Conservative recovery. The good news is that prudence is a virtue that can be cultivated over time. Whether the party, in its divided and demoralized condition, will commit to this task remains an open question.

Moderation

The second principle for the Conservatives to rediscover is moderation. Following the election defeat, there are powerful voices that advocate doubling down on the priorities of the party’s base, such as combating immigration and wokeness. Shouldn’t it reach out to—maybe form an alliance with—Nigel Farage’s Reform Party? Aren’t we in a new era of populist politics in Europe? In fact, didn’t Margaret Thatcher win three victories on a platform of right-wing radicalism?

This strategy would be to misread the political environment, both past and present. Margaret Thatcher secured power in 1979 not as a revolutionary, but as a moderate problem-solver who hoped to soothe Britain’s social divisions and reverse its economic stagnation. She began her premiership with a Christian prayer of peace, often misattributed to St. Francis of Assisi: “Where there is discord, may we bring harmony. Where there is error, may we bring truth. Where there is doubt, may we bring faith. And where there is despair, may we bring hope.” I admire Thatcher’s achievements, but the myth of an uncompromising leader of ideological purity continues to distort the party’s self-image. (Liz Truss saw herself as a Thatcherite. In reality, Thatcher’s 1979 platform contained few hints of the economic reforms to follow in the 1980s, which became politically viable because Labour had drifted into extremism and irrelevance.)

Today, a brief look at the balance of power in Parliament should disabuse the Conservatives of the notion that entrenchment rather than outreach is the way to go. Labour holds 411 seats in the Commons; Reform holds five. It would be perverse to stumble around in the fog of populism for limited gains when there is significantly more upside to reaching out to voters who crossed over to Labour and the Liberal Democrats. This will require the Conservative Party to moderate its tone, curb its policy excesses, and focus on issues of broader public interest, such as healthcare, infrastructure, and education. Starmer forced the Labour Party to undergo a similar process of moderation, and the results speak for themselves. He understands his predecessor Tony Blair’s view that “power without principle is barren, but principle without power is futile.”

As a recent symbol of the Conservatives’ turn away from moderation, we might consider Sunak’s election proposal to fly illegal immigrants to Rwanda, a policy that was incredible—in the negative sense of that word. Impractical, irresponsible (the planning cost over $400 million), and abandoned by Starmer on his first day in office, the policy was truly immoderate, in the sense that it did not make reasonable use of resources or control for ideological excess. Immigration is certainly an important issue for voters, who blame the Conservatives for presiding over spiraling numbers of both legal and illegal new arrivals. But the best way to reassure voters is not through ill-conceived gimmicks (like Cameron’s 2010–15 failure to meet his own arbitrary net migration targets) but by demonstrating competence.

Competence

According to one post-election survey, most British people believe that the Conservatives lost the election because they were too incompetent, rather than too left- or right-wing. If the Tories failed to control the border, they also failed to manage the NHS, Britain’s overburdened and under-resourced healthcare system. As with prudence and moderation, they traditionally benefited from a reputation for competence and efficiency: they could build, act, and get things done. Inexplicably, the party forfeited this advantage over fourteen years of ineffectual rule.

For conservatism to work, there must be something to conserve: families, homes, institutions. Yet the Conservatives did very little to help build or sustain any of these things. As Miriam Cates (a Tory politician who lost her seat in the election) has observed, few British people can afford to have children without extensive government support. The UK fertility rate (1.56) has almost halved in sixty years and is lower than that of France (1.83) and the U.S. (1.66). The country’s acute shortage of homes represents a crisis that is, in the words of a leading politician from the last Conservative government, even “worse” than widely believed.

It’s not just families and homes that Britain struggles to build: its public institutions are also in urgent need of renovation. With nearly 800 members, its bloated House of Lords, the upper house of Parliament, is the second-largest legislative chamber in the world, eclipsed only by the Chinese Congress. We might also doubt the unity of its constituent parts (England, Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland), its long-term relationship with the EU and the US, and even the viability of its royal family, which of course recently lost its longest-serving monarch. As the party of national unity (its official name is the “Conservative and Unionist Party”), the Conservatives ought to (and yet often fail to) play a key role in the reform and revitalization of British democracy.  

The dilemma for the Conservative Party is how to demonstrate competence out of office. Without being able to change the country, it must focus on changing itself. It should give new forms of expression to prudence and moderation, and it should enthusiastically commit itself to building (or rebuilding) the institutions of a free and flourishing society. Having experienced landslide defeat, the party finds itself teetering on the brink of irrelevance. If it refuses its duty to be a credible party of opposition, it will find that its story ends in extinction.

Image by IRStone and licensed via Adobe Stock.