It's the most dramatic electoral
disaster for the Conservatives in the party's history. Can the Tories survive? The 2024 general election saw
huge tracts of Tory territory disappear across England,
Scotland, and Wales, as voters turned against
the Conservative record after 14 years in government. A leadership contest looms. Rightwing politics is
in a state of flux, and the electorate
is also changing. Three of the UK's
leading political experts help me ask the question
being posed by the Tories as they survey the wreckage. What shape should the
Conservative party take now? Hailed since its formation
in the 1830s as a political organism that has always
managed to adapt and survive, Britain's main centre-right
party has moulded to new political realities and seized
the chances to get and to hold on to power. Right now, though, its
future path seems uncertain. It is important that after
14 years in government

the Conservative party rebuilds. It is a very resilient
organisation. It has shape-shifted many times. It has taken the opposite view
on different constitutional issues many times. The Conservative
party historically has been kind of
famous for being the adaptable
political party that can almost transform itself. This time, recovering
electorally will be a feat. Just look at the
electoral map: a tide of blue receded as voters turned
to anyone but the Conservatives. July's ABC election has
transformed the landscape. It haemorrhaged votes to the
left to triumphant Labour, to the right to Nigel
Farage's Reform party, and in the centre to a
recovered Liberal Democrats. Rishi Sunak, the defeated
Conservative leader and now former prime
minister, apologised. To the country, I
would like to say, first and foremost, I am sorry. Farage, now part of a
small band of Reform MPs,

threatened havoc and a continuing split on the right. It's not just disappointment with the Conservative party. There is a massive gap on the centre right of British politics, and my job is to fill it. After a catastrophe on such a scale, a party dubbed the most successful in the democratic world is in danger of long-term irrelevance. But Britain's electorate is changing. Analysts spot opportunities for a party seeking to rebuild on the shifting sands of demographic change. And, given a newly transactional relationship between the voting public and the parties, who are these voters who could come back to the Conservatives, and how could they woo them? Here's Jane Green, professor of politics at Oxford university and director of the British Election Study. The Conservative party has a choice. It has a choice of how to deal with its split on the right. Do they try to just win back those voters who have gone

to Reform UK, or do they try
to bridge support in the more moderate part of the
political centre? Making the right choice depends
on understanding what went wrong since the Tories won a healthy
majority in 2019 and, says James Kanagasooriam
of Focal Data, an expert on electoral trends
and strategy, what did not. The attitudes of the
country didn't suddenly violently shift 180 degrees
to the left with the election victory. Just like in 2019, with
a more modest victory, the party didn't take a
radical shift to the right. The reality is that in
both of those instances the leaders of the parties
very clearly stretched onto their political
opponents' territory. This territory was left
undefended by the Tories because the broad,
contradictory, and probably
unsustainable coalition assembled by Boris Johnson
after Brexit collapsed. It had brought working class
and Leave-supporting voters

into the Tory fold in
the so-called red wall alongside traditional Tory
voters in prosperous seats. The huge 2024 defeat cleared out
many of the Tories who won those new pro-Brexit
seats from Labour. It was very obvious,
particularly after the Covid period, that the interests of
these northern red wall, worse off, distrustful,
left behind voters, and the interests of your
southern Surrey suburban voters were not the same. They were not the same on
housing, public spending, and taxation. And as time went
by, those fissures tore the Conservatives
apart internally. The counter-narrative is
that voters felt worse off and were alienated by a
government they concluded was incompetent and self-serving. Across the so-called blue
wall seats in the south, research for the FT showed
that with these voters, it was rundown public
services and the economy and a lack of
probity by ministers that pushed voters away.

And in these places, a newly powerful sort of voter now dominates, a group repelled by the very messages that might tempt back Tory supporters seduced by Reform - the graduates. Rob Ford has been mapping the shifting demographics that are changing the British electorate. He says the Tories need to understand how far and how fast the political landscape is being transformed by the rise of graduates whose views diverge radically from those of the outgoing Conservative government, and their march across previously Tory territory. We're sat here, Miranda, on a university campus, the shop floor of one of the factories of electoral and social change right here. A university is pumping out tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of graduates every single year. And if you accumulate that process over decades, what you can see is the share of graduates in the electorate rising and rising and rising. Those people will tend to be much more liberal, much

more outward-looking,
much more pro-Remain, much more likely to focus on
social equality issues, gender equality, ethnic
and racial equality as being big, important
things to them. And they are everywhere. In 2019, the number of young
people in England attending university passed the 50 per
cent mark for the first time. Rob's projections
show how and where the number of constituencies
with a greater concentration of university-educated adults,
the darker green areas, are expected to spread across
the country, potentially right up to the next general election
in five years' time and beyond. So finding a way of
winning back graduates will now become a
key Tory challenge. Whether it's Covid, whether
it's house prices, whether it's the kind of changing
political geography of the UK, graduates are moving
into more rural areas. And that has a huge effect of
basically taking Labour votes and distributing
them more equally.

And that's where the
Liberal Democrats really hit the Conservatives in 2024. And so clearly they're going
to have to accommodate to that. Losing these graduate voters
has been a recent phenomenon, though. If you look at the David
Cameron Conservative electoral coalition,
education doesn't predict support for the
Conservatives at that point. Conservatives there look
like Conservatives did in Margaret Thatcher's time. They're better off. They're middle class. They are free market
right-wingers. They want lower tax, and
that's what they're voting on. But this changed with
the Brexit referendum. It's truly a watershed. Look at how graduates' support
in these graphs went up sharply for Labour and down
for the Tories. The flip side is the
decline of a category of voters who have long been
a dominant voting force - those who left education
before attending university. Their numbers are going
down across the country

at the same time as the
population with a degree has been rising. Just down the road
from Manchester is the constituency
of Leigh and Atherton. The Conservatives successfully
took this area from Labour in 2019 after historic
entrenched Labour dominance during Boris Johnson's
Get Brexit Done campaign. Then Labour seized
it back in 2024. But these places are
changing really fast. Between the 2011
and 2021 census, the proportion of people
here who left school at 16 went down from 59 per
cent to 45 per cent. That means the same sort
of political messaging will not work here
in the future. So the Conservatives
aren't going to be able to pull
the same trick off again because the
seat is changing, and it will never be that sort
of skewed towards the school leaver electorate
as it was back then. The factors that enabled a
win for the Tories in 2019

had vanished by 2024, leaving the party propped up by elderly supporters. Its abandonment by young people is part of a trend, as you can see, that we can trace back to the 1970s but made much worse by Brexit. So it's a hard tide to swim against. But these trends don't mean an automatic win for centre-left parties if the Tories can construct a platform that convinces the young, both graduates and those who don't attend university, that they are on their side. Age and education is starting to matter more. But that doesn't have to always be the case. It could weaken again, and that really depends on what the choices given to voters are, whether or not parties are appealing to young or old or higher educated, lower educated. I don't think anything's political destiny, really. Graduates have a different worldview, a different set of values, but they are not partisan.

They are, as it were,
critical shoppers. They're not going to be sort
of married to the Labour party for life. If an offer comes from
the Conservative party that they find
attractive, they may well be willing to consider it again. University affects one set
of values very profoundly. It affects people's
social values. It doesn't affect their
economic values at all. Graduates are just as likely, if
they earn a good income and own their own house, to favour
tax cuts and a small estate as non-graduates are. There is a narrative there,
a very traditional narrative, that can still appeal
to those voters. Reconnecting with
younger voters is part of a wider
challenge for the Tories of needing to find an economic
message that works for a much broader swathe of the public. Jane Green's research shows
bread and butter issues still matter to the way people vote. As many as 18.5mn people
feel economically insecure.

That's more than a third of voters worrying about the cost of living, rent, mortgage, childcare, social care, and a safe level of pension. And many of those are of working age, not retirees, and have families. The Conservative party has had a huge problem with its ageing electoral base, and the Conservatives are not going to win elections appealing to a small minority on sort of cultural issues or immigration. I think they're going to broaden their appeal by addressing economic insecurity and economic concerns across the electorate. These are the issues that I think would bridge divides on age and education basis but also essentially allow the Conservative party to start to build up a much larger but also much more moderate coalition. So how should the Tories start this painful process of rebuilding? When you've lost that badly, you've got a lot of voters to get in order to build the kind of vote share that you need to win durably, which is between 35 per cent.

and 45 per cent. At this year's election,
the Conservative party lost a quarter of its
2019 vote to Reform, to the right, and nearly a
quarter to parties to its left, including even the Greens in a
couple of rural constituencies. Can enough people be tempted
back from all quarters by a reinvention matching some
of its great transformations of the past? To their advantage, the
voters are much less tribal and are willing to switch. 2024 saw a record number of
people changing their vote since recent elections. You can see this volatility and
the opportunities for a party that's down but not out played
out in Labour's astonishing dash to victory only five years
after a crushing defeat. I think our politics has greater
potential to be unpredictable. So over time more voters are
switching between parties, voting different ways
in different elections. And over time, fewer people
have strong, deep attachments to political parties. And what that means is when
these big moments come along,

what we call electoral shocks,
such things like a Covid pandemic or a cost of
living crisis. That shifts voters. There's
greater potential then to lead to bigger
swings, bigger changes. We've seen some fairly wild
changes, surprise victories, surprise majorities, one big
Conservative majority, and a very substantial one for Labour. To cope with that volatility,
parties kind of need to know who their
core voters are. They shouldn't take
them for granted. And James believes that in their
traumatised state post-defeat, this means the Tories
staying close to the low tax, rural, less ethnically
diverse voters in their geographical heartlands
who stuck with the party this year or abstained. Last out, first back in. Then, recovery
means building out a bit to what he calls lookalike
voters, the most similar to your loyal adherents. Has there ever been
a political party

that's been defeated that didn't
reach out to its core voters first? Raised the bar amongst the 30
per cent of the country that looks and sounds most like it? But this time,
there's a problem. Competition for lookalike
voters from a lookalike party - Reform UK, which split
the Tory vote everywhere. This is new. This is different. In 2015, when David
Cameron won 37 per cent of the vote and Nigel
Farage was on 12 and a half per cent, the Conservative
party was different enough. Its core voters were
different enough. But what happens when you have
to live alongside a party that looks and sounds and
feels a lot like your own, where it borrows voters? Those fights with Cameron
were under the banner of Ukip, but some see Farage's
latest vehicle as an existential challenge to
the Conservative party, and even some younger voters
who did not turn out.

particularly among non-graduate
young men, are Reform-curious. If they were to turn
out on polling day, the picture might look very
different in future elections. There's a big chunk of younger
voters who leave school at 16 with a few GCSEs or
whatever. They're pretty socially conservative. But why are they not there
in the electoral figures? Because they don't
vote, and that makes them potentially a
force for disruption. But at the same
time, it also makes it very difficult
for the parties because they don't really
know how to mobilise them. Farage believes he can
overtake the Conservatives. Some Tories want to merge
or ally with Reform, and the electoral
dilemma for the Tories as they try to
recover is stark given the way that the
electorate is changing. They have to really
make a choice. Are they going to try and
be a nationalistic, socially

Conservative party,
or are they going to try and be a more moderate
brand of Conservative focused on, say, economic values? They cannot be both. And I think one of the lessons
for them of demographic change is the horse to pick is
the one that's going ahead, not the one that's
going backwards. Jane Green warns that
making peace with Farage or adapting their message and
policies to imitate Reform won't help the Tories. Across western Europe we've seen
mainstream centre-right parties really grapple with the
challenge of populist parties or radical right parties. And what actually you see is
the more those parties look like those radical
right populist parties, the less well they do. And that's because essentially
they're appealing to smaller groups of voters on the right,
and they're losing the support of those voters in the centre. The march of the graduates
and the loss of young voters may continue to depress
Conservative fortunes.

particularly if they flirt
with or compete directly with Reform on the right. But there's another
element in play, too. Labour has always been able to
count on ethnic minority voters. But analysts are picking up
signs they could peel off - if, that is, the Tories
can appear more welcoming and find that sort of economic
message with broad appeal that Jane Green argues for. I think, if you can even imagine
a Conservative party being re-elected again,
when it next comes to power, will probably
do so on the backs of far greater ethnic minority voting
than has been the case before. Ethnic minority voters
look pretty much like otherwise similar
white voters in terms of their economic vote. So why, then, are they all
set in the Labour camp? It's because when push has come
to shove, the Conservative party, from the time of Enoch Powell
onwards, has always favoured the interests of white voters
who fear migration and ethnic change.

But if these voters no longer
perceive the Conservatives as hostile, then it opens
up potentially a lot of votes in this group. James Kanagasooriam points to
the example of the ethnically diverse industrial
town of Slough, where Labour's vote went down,
and affluent neighbouring Windsor, with rising
graduate numbers, where the long-dominant
Conservatives saw their votes slide. I've always talked about with
friends the Slough-Windsor dynamic. Many people think of that as
a kind of right-left axis - Windsor, the seat of the queen
- Slough, ethnically diverse. But actually, those
seats might flip. One day, the seat
of the queen might belong to the party
of progressives, and Slough will probably at some
point be a Conservative seat. James is sceptical about how
resilient some of the election-winning coalitions
can prove given the inherently risky
nature of reaching out.

to groups with
different interests, particularly as the
electorate fractures away from the two main parties. He calls this
sandcastle politics, flimsy constructions built of
layers and disparate elements. He warns it can wash away like
a sandcastle with the tide. This happened to Conservative
voters between 2019 and 2024. It could happen to
Labour too, he warns. So the Tories should be ready. We don't think of trying to go
for a large majority as a very perilous act, but it is
because what you're doing is you're stretching the
internal tension of your party. You're making it more heterodox. You are introducing
dissension and intellectual and cognitive and
demographic and geographic diversity where it
didn't exist before. The search for victory,
to stretch a coalition, to stretch a group
of people, can often be the seeds behind
its downfall. For the Conservatives who
spent most of the 20th century

and much of the 21st so
far arguing that they were the natural party of government,
this electoral vulnerability must feel new and unwelcome. That most useful of
Conservative traditions has been a simple one - winning. But a major block to
their recovery this time will be repairing the damage to
any reputation for competence after the tumult and
confusion of 14 years, five prime ministers, and
the constant psychodrama of a revolving door
in Downing Street. The competence issue
is where I'd actually be most pessimistic about
Conservative prospects. Once a solid
judgement has formed in the minds of the electorate
that a party really messed things up while it
was in government, that can stick around
for a long time. Memories of why they
turfed a party out can remain potent
in voters' minds. This may be the toughest element
of any Conservative recovery, warns Rob Ford. After Boris Johnson's
lockdown parties,

the Liz Truss mini-budget,
the post-Brexit chaos in parliament under Theresa
May, and Rishi Sunak's failure to offer a fresh
start. These competence shocks, as Jane
Green calls them, disrupt stable
political allegiances. It takes time to forget. It takes time to renew. It takes time to
prove competency, particularly when you're
outside of government and you don't have
the levers of power. But Westminster is no longer
the only game or the only town. Revival and repairing
the party's reputation could be nurtured in the
new political fiefdoms of the mayoralties, where more
competent moderates like Andy Street, former West
Midlands mayor, could prove they can
deliver in government. Are you worried about
the Conservative party drifting to the right? I would definitely
not advise that drift. I mean, the psychology
here is really very straightforward, isn't it?

This is the youngest,
most diverse, one of the most urban
places in Britain, and we've done, many
would say, extremely well over a consistent period. So the message is clear. Winning from that centre
ground is what happens. There's more opportunities
for recovery, more opportunities
for leadership, different figures,
different people. So that's an opportunity for
the Conservatives as well. It is. I mean, not just
an opportunity - it might be where
they have to start. Does the future of
the Conservatives lie in appealing to a broad
coalition of voters built on a patched up
reputation for competence and the sort of
compelling argument on prosperity that could unite
disparate demographic groups, the red wall and the blue
wall, the old and the young? Or will Britain see
a radical realignment of the right, a merger
or some sort of alliance? Rob Ford says a swing of only
6 per cent at the next election

would be enough to demolish
Labour's landslide. The opportunity is
there for the Tories to win again if they are
in a fit state to take it. Just look at the example of
Labour's rapid recovery from brutal defeat under Jeremy
Corbyn to electoral triumph under Keir Starmer. This shows how quickly
political fortunes can change in this turbulent
new political climate. I absolutely believe that the
Conservative party can rebuild. I recall very vividly the state
of the political discussion in the wake of
the 2019 election. The consensus view was Labour
were out of power for another generation now, and within five
years everything had changed completely. Our electorate is less
fundamentally tribal than the electorate used to be. That is another vital
demographic fact because it means
however far you fall, you can still climb
back up again. If you have a greater propensity
for switching in electorates and you have major
events that happen

that cause people to switch, and political failures and difficulties that mean people want to desert parties, then there's greater potential for those big change elections to happen more frequently, really for nothing to be a given. I mean, every political party in this context really has to, really has to work hard for every vote. The battle over the direction of conservatism had begun even before the scale of this defeat was confirmed on the 4th of July. But reports of the party's imminent demise may have been exaggerated, says James Kanagasooriam. It is a very resilient organisation. It has shape-shifted many times. But my instinct is that almost every other party has been written off over the last five years, from Ukip to the Labour party to the Liberal Democrats. And they're all still here, and they're all thriving. A split on the right could leave Labour in power for a decade or more, or the Tories could find ways to reach out to voters.

who might smile on them
again and tempt others to try their wares for the first time. But with the electorate
undergoing such changes in worldview, in
what they care about, and in their willingness
to switch allegiance at election time, the stakes
have never been higher.

Can the Conservative party survive defeat? | FT Film

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