George Osborne has said the Conservative Party must resist chasing Reform voters and instead move back to the political centre ground if it wants to return to power.
The former Conservative Chancellor claimed going after Reform supporters would only lose the Tories the support of ‘moderate’ voters. He told his Political Currency podcast:
It is a very hard tactical choice, for the new leader, which is the obvious thing to do if you look at the maths is to say “let’s go and get the 14 or 15% who voted Reform, add it to the 24% who voted Conservative and we’re ahead of Labour, it is easy, job done” without noticing really what I think is the central challenge which is the Conservative Party over a number of years vacated the central ground of British politics and allowed the Labour Party to move from the Corbynista position it was in to the centre ground.
It allowed the Liberal Democrats to get the largest number of seats they have had in a century and decimate the Tories in places like the West Country.
And if you don’t win back that centre ground, frankly you may get some of those Reform votes somehow… and you will lose more of your centre ground support in doing so and there is nothing that says the Labour Party is stuck on 34% of the vote.
There is no reason why they couldn’t go up higher and deprive you of the majority even if you managed to get some of those Reform people on side because they have expanded their position in the centre ground.
The idea that the Tories have “vacated the centre ground” is nonsense of course. Yes, Tory rhetoric and election pledges have often been Right-wing. But the actual way the party has governed has frequently been centre-Left if not outright Left-wing, with extraordinary levels of immigration and tax, a fanatical commitment to the anti-capitalist Net Zero agenda and only a very limp-wristed effort at reining in the spread of wokery across the public sector. The country is clearly far more Left wing than it was in 2010 when the Tories came to power, and the party’s only claim in mitigation could be that it is slightly less so than it would have been under a Labour Government.
But leaving that to one side, Osborne’s argument that there is a large pool of centre ground voters who have gone over to Labour and the Lib Dems and could be wooed back with a solid dose of Cameronism is pure fantasy. This pool simply does not exist.
The Lib Dems may have gained 64 seats (taking them to 72, up from eight) but they only gained 0.6 percentage points in vote share compared to 2019, and crucially, because of the dire turnout (59.8%), lost over 177,000 votes (3,519,199 in 2024 vs 3,696,419 in 2019).
Labour, similarly, may have gained an extraordinary 218 seats, but that was off the back of a gain in vote share of just 1.6 points and, furthermore, a loss of over 564,000 votes (9,704,655 vs 10,269,051).
The Tories lost 7.1 million votes (6,827,311 vs 13,966,454) as their vote share plummeted 19.9 points, but it’s clear from the drop in votes for Labour and the Lib Dems that at maximum only a small number of these voters could have moved over to the “centre ground” parties of Osborne’s imaginings. Those parties didn’t gain votes, so there simply cannot be a large pool of ‘moderate’ Conservative voters ready to be lured back with some good old liberal Toryism.
In 2019, Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party won 644,257 votes and in 2024 Reform U.K. won 4,117,221, nearly 3.5 million more. That is clearly a large pool of voters who opted for a Right wing party with a Right wing manifesto who could, in principle, be attracted to an actually conservative Conservative party, assuming trust could be restored. Yes, that is only half of the voters the Tories lost (and not all of Reform’s new voters will be ex-Tories), so there is a question of where the other at least 3.5 million went – many of them presumably didn’t vote at all, or may have gone for one of the many independent candidates or minor parties.
But wherever these other ex-Tory voters went, Osborne’s advice is plainly wrong. He appears still to be oblivious to the fact that the Tory majorities of 2015 and 2019 were achieved not because of some under-appreciated genius in Cameron’s soggy centrism, but because of manifesto pledges respectively to hold a Brexit referendum and leave the EU.
In a voting system that rewards a united Right and severely punishes a divided one, if the Tories listen to Osborne they will be in opposition for a long while indeed.
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