The Death Throes of the British Conservative Party

Sometime before January 2025, the United Kingdom will face a general election. When it does, current polling indicates that the Conservative Party, which has ruled the country either alone or in coalition since 2010, faces not just defeat but obliteration.

The weekly poll by YouGov conducted between March 19-20 had the Conservatives winning just 19 percent of the vote, 25 percent behind the opposition Labour Party, which was at 44 percent, and barely ahead of the new right-wing Reform Party at 15 percent. That is tied with the lowest result YouGov has ever found for the Conservatives since polling began, on October 20, 2022, two days before Liz Truss resigned as Prime Minister.

After 14 years in power, the Conservatives face not only voter fatigue, but a deeper identity crisis. The 21st century has seen a global realignment as politics has increasingly polarized along lines of social values, and whether voters perceive themselves as winners or losers from the elimination of borders. The British Conservative Party, with its history of ruthless pragmatism, was initially better positioned to exploit these forces than its Liberal and Labour rivals, allowing it to pivot from championing globalization in the Obama-era to posing as champions of Brexit in the Trump age.

In the long run, such opportunism proved addictive, and then fatal. The global realignment of the 2020s demanded not an opportunistic embrace of symbolism on individual issues, but a willingness to pick sides in a zero-sum conflict. An internal culture that views committing oneself to any firm position as “unconservative” and zero-sum politics as “socialist” left the Conservative Party trying to appeal to all people and alienating everyone as a result.

Constant leadership battles undermined the party’s reputation for sound government, while the party seemed to actively welcome crises such as COVID-19 and the Russo-Ukrainian War as distractions from the need to govern. Ultimately, the very things that allowed the Conservatives to dominate for over a century are now threatening to render them an anachronism in the 2020s.

There are two things the British Conservative Party is known for: a history of political survival over two centuries, and a ruthless willingness to do whatever is necessary to adapt to changing circumstances by eliminating liabilities, including its leaders. Andrew Bonar Law in 1922 and Stanley Baldwin in 1937 were arguably the only two Conservative Prime Ministers since 1901 to depart the leadership without being forced, and Bonar Law did so by dropping dead while in office. Every other Prime Minister has been forced out, either directly through a challenge or under the threat of one.

Since 2010, the Conservative Party has provided the United Kingdom with five Prime Ministers: David Cameron (2010-2016), Theresa May (2016-2019), Boris Johnson (2019-2022), Elizabeth Truss (2022), and Rishi Sunak (2022-present). Each of the first four was removed or resigned when their positions became untenable. Unsurprisingly, rumors have swirled around Westminster of plots to remove Rishi Sunak, with some arguing that replacing the unpopular Prime Minister is the only path to salvation, while others argue leadership instability is itself the problem.

Both arguments confuse cause with effect. The historical strength of the Conservative Party has not lain with a willingness to dispense with individuals but rather with ideas, and changes at the top merely enabled these shifts.

Replacing Neville Chamberlain with Winston Churchill allowed the party to pivot from appeasing Hitler to resisting him at all costs. Similarly, replacing David Cameron and then Theresa May with Boris Johnson allowed the party to pivot from being a Romney-esque party of the center-right to a populist Brexit party.

Neville Chamberlain was not removed because he had failed, but because his policy had failed, and it would not be credible if he sought to carry out a different one, nor fair to ask him to try. Similarly, the decision to replace Ted Heath with Margaret Thatcher in 1975 was a decision to opt for “a choice, not an echo.” In turn, Margaret Thatcher’s removal in 1990 represented a strategic choice to end the “revolution” in favor of a Thermidorian consolidation.

Resorting to these leadership and policy U-turns once every generation qualifies as placing the national interest above personal or ideological considerations. A need to reverse course every three to five years, however, implies something is deeply wrong with whomever has been in office for the past fourteen. If, as Rishi Sunak’s government argues, immigration is out of control, Britain remains under the thumb of the European Union, and the treasury is empty, just who is responsible if not the Conservatives?

Rather than confront the damage to their brand by identifying an ideological position and sticking to it, Conservatives have exacerbated their problems by removing leaders not in pursuit of a clearly defined ideological reset, but in the hope that merely changing a few faces will negate any need to develop an actual platform.

The removal of Boris Johnson was motivated not by the desire for an ideological reset, but rather by personal discontent and factional rivalries that did not extend beyond the Westminster bubble. On the day Johnson resigned, the Conservatives trailed Labour by six percentage points, far less than the sometimes ten percent margins by which Cameron trailed during 2013-2014, and well within the midterm norm for any government.

The Sunak-Truss feud took on an even more farcical nature, as both camps reversed decades of long-held policy positions to wage what was a personal vendetta. The anti-Brexit former Liberal Democratic Liz Truss reinvented herself as a populist conservative who would unilaterally tear up the Northern Ireland agreement with the E.U., ruthlessly cut taxes, and close the borders. Sunak, who had supported Brexit, backed concessions to the European Union, along with balanced budgets, despite having paid 70 percent of the salaries of every British worker for over a year during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

Under David Cameron, the Conservatives presented themselves as a socially liberal, fiscally conservative party, and introduced same-sex marriage only to embrace “anti-woke” politics under Liz Truss and then try to straddle the two positions under Sunak.

Opponents of Brexit have never forgiven the party for abandoning its traditional role as the bulwark of the establishment in favor of carrying through Britain’s departure from the European Union.

Supporters of Brexit, meanwhile, grow increasingly frustrated at the loss of interest by the government in trying to exploit the opportunities offered by Britain’s departure in any way. Liz Truss’s limited tax and regulatory reforms have been abandoned, while London remains under the thumb of European courts, which recently blocked planes set to take asylum seekers to Rwanda from taking off.

The British Conservatives have to their credit won four different elections, but they have done so on four different appeals to different electorates.

In 2010, they offered compassion following Labour’s failure to deal with the 2008 financial crisis, with David Cameron promising to “hug a hoodie” to show that even criminals could expect sympathy from the new Conservative Party.

In 2015, they ran on a platform of globalization-driven growth aimed at the “haves” of London and the financial industries.

In 2017, Theresa May promised to prioritize the forgotten people of Britain over the “citizens of nowhere” whom her predecessor had hailed as the future a mere two years before.

In 2019, a Tory wave swept dozens of seats in the industrial belt of northern England which had voted Labor for a century as Boris Johnson promised to get Brexit done. He then promptly locked down the country for the better part of two years, forgetting along the way to do anything about the jurisdiction of European courts.

In short, there has been little reason for anyone who was brought into the coalition in one election to stick with it for the next.

This has allowed the new Reform Party, the successor to Nigel Farage’s old U.K. Independence Party, to sell itself as a credible conservative option on Brexit, social issues, and economics. Notably, in February, Lee Anderson, the former deputy chair of the Conservative Party, defected to the Reform Party. Anderson is a former coal miner and local Labour councilor who, after defecting, became the first Conservative MP elected in a general election for the seat of Ashfield.

Ashfield had voted 70 percent for Brexit, and Anderson’s victory symbolized the new coalition brought about by global realignment. His defection, in turn, is a signal that the Conservative Party may not be the vehicle to carry it out.

Asking whether Rishi Sunak should be replaced poses the wrong question. The party needs to answer not “who” but “what” and “why.” What do they wish to stand for and why?

Absent that, they will merely be replacing one opportunist with another, each tasked with a hopeless mission to woo the electorate with mad-libs, desperately praying each night for a COVID-24 to appear and maybe, just maybe, give them something to do.

A Conservative Party that has nothing to conserve should expect disaster. A party of government that is stuck seeking salvation in a national calamity deserves what it will get. The British Conservatives need to rediscover what actual conservatism is, or risk annihilation.

Walter Samuel is the pseudonym of a prolific international affairs writer and academic. He has worked in Washington as well as in London and Asia, and holds a Doctorate in International History.