Are the Tories Finished?

There’s less than a month to go before the General Election, and the Conservatives are polling more than 20 points behind Labour. Some forecasters expect them to win less than 100 seats. But losing the election – which they almost certainly will – isn’t their biggest problem. Their biggest problem is they might cease to be the largest right-of-centre party in the country or, indeed, a major political force at all.

With Nigel Farage having assumed leadership of Reform and announced his intention to stand for parliament, the Tories now face an existential crisis. Could they be supplanted by another party on the right?

Reform are hot on the Conservatives’ heels in the national polls, where the blue and turquoise lines appear to be converging. In some seats, they’re now polling even higher, leading irreverent pro-Reform commentators to say things like “a vote for the Conservatives is a vote for Labour!” and “the Conservatives are splitting the Reform vote!”

By one measure, Reform’s leader is the most popular politician in the country. This is even true among 2019 Conservative voters, who hold a more favourable opinion of him than they do of Rishi Sunak – to the tune of 10 percentage points. In fact, a recent poll found that Farage was respondents’ top pick to replace Sunak as Tory leader, ahead of Penny Mordaunt, James Cleverly and Kemi Badenoch. In the same poll, more respondents agreed that Reform should become the official opposition than disagreed.

Some Conservatives, such as Home Secretary Suella Braverman, have gone as far as saying that Farage “should be welcomed” by the party. (Others, no doubt, disagree.)

Perusing Twitter, where much of the political debate goes on nowadays, reveals further evidence of Conservative unpopularity. A frequently-seen hashtag is #ZeroSeats, referring to the Conservatives’ dim electoral prospects. What’s noteworthy, however, is that the hashtag isn’t used by Labour or Lib Dem accounts but rather by former Conservatives. This may be the first election where both the left and the right are hoping that the Conservatives lose.

If you navigate to Sunak’s Twitter account, you find that practically every tweet has been heavily ratioed. And among the overwhelmingly negative comments, there are plenty of right-wing avatars: the Prime Minister is getting ratioed by his own former voters. If you look at Farage’s account, by contrast, you see few ratios and largely positive comments.

Twitter isn’t real life, of course. Users are small and selected sample of the population. But they’re selected in an important way: for being much more engaged in politics. Which means that the most politically engaged conservatives in the Twitter-using part of the population (roughly, under 40s) are overwhelmingly anti-Conservative and pro-Reform.

One such individual, who was recently mentioned in UnHerd, is 23-year-old Jack Anderton. On June 8th, he posted a video of himself endorsing Reform, which went viral and got over 12K likes. “The Conservatives will lose and lose big,” Anderton notes. “The real fight is what happens after the election”. He then rattles off a list of Tory failures before getting to the nub of the issue: the Tory Party “has no credibility left”.

And he’s right. The Conservatives have been promising to bring immigration down to the “tens of thousands” since they first got into power in 2010. And when Boris won a landslide in 2019, voters assumed they would finally get round to doing it. Instead, net migration doubled. Where’s your credibility after that? If Sunak pledged tomorrow to adopt the strictest migration policy in British history, it wouldn’t matter; no one would believe him.

Meanwhile, the Tories have barely confronted the ‘Diversity and Inclusion’ racket. Do a keyword search on the main government jobs website, and you will find dozens of listings for jobs like ‘Diversity & Inclusion Lead’. Why do these jobs exist when public finances are under such strain? They are basically just sinecures for Labour-supporting bureaucrat-activists. Why do the Conservatives let this happen? (The phrase “utterly useless” comes to mind.)

So is this the end of the Conservative Party is a major political force? In truth, it’s still too early to say. But the trends don’t look favourable.