Voters of Britain, ask yourself this: if the Tories promised so much and delivered so little in 14 years, why would things be different now?
This is a question that is asked frequently and is used by critics of the Conservative Party as a sort of verbal baseball bat, not subtle or sophisticated but blunt and effective. And it’s true that the Tories crashed to an ignominious defeat in July 2024 ushering in a massive Labour majority and the drab disaster of Keir Starmer. What’s also true is that in February 2020 the Conservative Party held a 15 point lead over Labour and was polling at 47%. You can argue that decisions and choices made before the beginning of 2020 were terrible and laid the ground for the collapse in Tory support but I’ve a feeling this is a misplaced analysis.
The real reason for the collapse in Tory support was firstly the Covid pandemic and then the seemingly interminable bunfight over whether Boris Johnson eating cake constituted unacceptable partying or not. We can trace most of the current ills to the pandemic and to the manner in which the government responded to the pandemic - the surge in immigration, higher inflation, higher energy bills and the explosion in mental health derived benefits dependency. When you shut down the economy for months and use public borrowing to cover people’s loss of earnings it is hard to see any outcome in the medium term other than much higher public debt and inflation.
This doesn’t excuse the worst of the panics that came from the pandemic (and especially the largely unnecessary lockdowns associated with the response to Covid) or, after we emerged blinking into the sunlight, the decision by the government to allow immigration to surge:
“In total, three-quarters of the 4.2 million individuals granted visas or claiming asylum over the four-year period to 2024 remained in the country as of the end of 2025, according to the most recent figures.”
At the same time as we witnessed this record-breaking increase in immigration, we also witnessed a doubling in the numbers of people applying for, and mostly receiving, sickness benefits. Prior to the pandemic the numbers on assorted sickness benefits had been stable at around 250,000 for some long while. In one year 2022-23 the numbers soared to 500,000 and have remained at this elevated level ever since. It could be that the population suddenly became more ill but this seems unlikely. More likely is that remote assessment and a lot more new diagnoses for mental health conditions (especially assorted ‘neurodiversities’ like autism and ADHD) is the primary cause for the increase. Given that the ‘Boriswave’ brought in 4.2 million largely working age people, it is quite noteworthy that there are now 4.3m working-age people claiming health-related benefits.
The reason for the collapse in Tory support wasn’t the long list of sins during their period in government from 2010-2024 (seven years of which were, of course, in coalition or minority government) but the fallout from the pandemic, the decision to let immigration rip and those Tory MPs who tore the party apart to chase their own ambitions, exact vengeance on Boris Johnson or Theresa May, or enjoy the vanity of the media attention ‘rebels’ get. All followed by Liz Truss and the ‘mini-budget’ that saw an already collapsing Tory support plummet faster. On top of a perception of disunity and a legacy (largely unjustified but that changes nothing) of sleaze, the Conservative Party lost its economic credibility.
We can write a list - quite a long list - of policy failings during the “Tory Years” but there’s not a great deal of evidence that, beyond the shameless post-Covid witch hunt, the ‘Boriswave’ and the Truss budget, these policy mistakes damaged the party brand or undermined its support. The reality was that the Conservative Party lost credibility with the electorate as a result of its behaviour not because of its policy choices. There has been a great deal of post hoc rewriting done but the deep truth is that the Tory disaster was down to just four things:
The post-Brexit split in the party. Not just during the May premiership but under Johnson there were just too many Tory MPs willing to wield the knife as revenge for Boris’s support for leaving the EU
The Covid pandemic. The biggest problems here weren’t excess deaths or arguments about epidemiological models but the terrible and negative impact of lockdowns on both the economy and the population’s mental health. Plus the hideous media and parliamentary witch hunt targeting Johnson.
The ‘Boriswave’. The seemingly deliberate choice (in the case of Hong Kongers and Ukrainians largely justified) to allow immigration to let rip and subsequent, repeated, failures to control both the impact of this surge and the continued high levels of migration.
The political disaster of the Liz Truss government. It isn’t that Truss was wrong in her assessment of the problem, she wasn’t. It is that Truss tried to force through her changes while borrowing untold billions to reduce energy bills. Not only a contradiction to her analysis but a recipe for more inflation and soaring borrowing costs
These are the issues that made the Conservative Party unpopular but recognising the causes is not sufficient for a recovery because the world has moved on. Critics of the Party point to a long list of problems and policies that weren’t remotely responsible for the Party’s predicament, everything from housing and planning through to the Equalities Act and assorted issues broadly under the banner of ‘woke’. Meanwhile the Labour Party, despite its massive majority, has seemed incapable of answering the big questions Britain faces - a struggling economy, perceptions of increased crime, mass immigration and the poison of diversity, too few houses, an inability to build new infrastructure, and drab, crumbling public services.
Just as the Tories were reminding the public about the 1978/9 ‘winter of discontent’ even into the 1990s, Labour (and other parties) will continue to reference the four issues above. Any Tory economic policy will see opponents shoehorning ‘Liz Truss Mini-Budget’ into their response, any immigration strategy will see the reply of ‘why didn’t you do that when you were in government’, and any mention of sleaze by a Tory will result in cries of ‘Boris Johnson Partygate’. If the Party gets enmeshed in explaining or excusing these mistakes there will be no recovery but, while talking about now and the concerns of today is right, the negatives from these issues will remain and will affect - negatively - electoral chances.
Today the public associates the Conservative Party with problems and policies it doesn’t like (even when, as with Net Zero for example, those policies were popular at the time of introduction). There are three important areas where the Tories need clear policies but can expect negative responses:
Controlling immigration/integration & asylum
Energy policy and Net Zero
Economic growth
For the first two Kemi Badenoch has the basis for a believable policy but is still a long way from a credible economic strategy not least because the Party is back in its core suburban demographic which is very antidevelopment. It may be that Labour’s planning reforms and especially weakening Green Belt protections will be enough but I suspect business is looking for firm promises to undo the worst of Labour’s anti-growth policies: the National Insurance hike, the union-friendly ‘workers rights’ laws, the attacks on private renting and all round high taxes on doing business.
Beyond these areas the Conservatives need to look at policies that aren’t necessarily popular but which require attention. These include:
Welfare reform. Getting people with health conditions back into the jobs market will require some tough choices not least being freezing welfare payments
Pensions. Two issues here - the spiralling cost of the old age pension as a result of the ‘triple lock’ and the similarly out-of-control public sector pension systems
Defence spending. Vague promises of x% of GDP on defence are fine but Britain needs a programme to rebuild its navy and air force, increase the size of the army and embrace new technology. Probably need a cyber-defence system too
Foreign policy. This needs disconnecting from domestic party political concerns, we’ve spent too long setting policy on the basis of pleasing British voter blocs rather than serving the national interest
I’m sure others will have their own lists - there’s something very wrong with the NHS (regardless of how our health service should be organised), social care needs fixing (but not with the expensive gimmick of a National Care Service), and there’s probably a case for unravelling the tentacles of the regulatory state (do we really need a football regulator?). But the bedrock of any recovery doesn’t lie in endless apologies for getting things wrong ten or fifteen years ago but in getting credible policies to control who lives in Britain, how we power our lives and how we help business and individual enterprise make us all richer.
Most observers (or at least the ones not fully paid up members of the “Boys Who Hate Kemi Club”) suggest Kemi Badenoch has made good progress, made slightly easier by Keir Starmer being so awful. But there are still huge holes and inconsistencies in the Party’s approach, the policy leadership seems to take the support of people like me for granted, assuming that our distaste for Nigel Farage and Reform and historic hatred of the Labour Party will be enough to do the trick. When the rusty legacy of Tory machine politics set up ‘Prosper’ as a sort of vehicle for centrist politics it didn’t set up with the aim of getting Badenoch’s reborn Tory Party elected but with the avowed aim of creating an oppositional group within the party. Moderate Tories like me were expected to flock to this group (there are according to Prosper’s vague research, millions of us) but we aren’t going to do so because we want Kemi Badenoch to succeed. For me right now though I’m in the position of Communist mayor Peppone’s wife in ‘Don Camillo’ - ‘Lord, let him win but without my vote’:
“The Garibaldi ticket has been replaced by one that bears our own symbol, but the situation is just what it was before. You can go right ahead, without any misgivings, and vote as you did in 1948.”
“All right chief,” she said, not mentioning the fact that in 1948 she voted for the Christian Democrats.”