The Tories will not recover by working with Reform
4 min read
History shows that the Conservatives succeed when they focus on the economy and the centre ground.
The 2024 general election was a shattering defeat for the Conservative Party, and recovery from a political disaster on that scale takes time. After Tony Blair’s landslide win in 1997, it took years, not months, before voters were willing to listen to anything the Conservatives were saying.
By sheer force of personality, Kemi Badenoch pushed her personal poll standing higher than any of her rival party leaders. A reputation for honest answers and plain speaking is a big political asset. (While Andy Burnham, benefiting from a political honeymoon, now rivals her ratings, we will have to see whether his popularity survives difficult budgetary choices in the months ahead). But the Conservatives lag well behind their leader in terms of public opinion.
To return to government, the Conservatives have to win back the support of millions of people who stayed at home or voted for other parties in 2024.
Doing that will indeed mean regaining the confidence of large numbers who abandoned the Conservatives for Reform. But that will not be enough.
Two years ago, roughly equal numbers of 2019 Conservatives defected to a more left-wing party – Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens – as shifted to Reform. A further large number of former Tories stayed at home and did not vote.
In 2019, 17 out of 21 constituencies in the three Thames Valley counties (Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire) returned a Conservative MP. In 2024, only three out of 24 constituencies did so. The 2024 election saw the number of Conservative MPs in Surrey drop from eleven to six. Those lost seats are not going to be won back by trying to outdo Reform or Restore.
Badenoch’s forthright and repeated rejection of any kind of pact or deal with Reform, whether before or after the next general election, is therefore both principled and politically wise
Voters are individuals. You can’t just add up the votes of rival parties and assume that an alliance between them would deliver the sum of those voting totals. This is where the theory that British politics these days is about voter movement within either a left or a right bloc breaks down.
Again and again, polling shows that a big chunk of Reform voters would never support a Conservative candidate. Likewise, not only opinion polls, but actual votes cast in the recent Greater Manchester mayoral by-election show that many Conservatives reject the idea of transferring their support to Reform, even as a second choice, and a sizeable minority of Tories are willing to opt tactically for a Labour or Lib Dem candidate to stop Reform winning.
Badenoch’s forthright and repeated rejection of any pact or deal with Reform, whether before or after the next general election, is therefore both principled and politically wise.
Winning back votes from both left and right certainly looks a tall order. But it is far from a hopeless cause. For example, a study by the think tank Onward shows that former Conservative supporters who went Reform and those who switched to Lib Dem both wanted to see effective immigration controls.
Nor is it an accident that the rise in Badenoch’s personal ratings began with her 2025 conference speech, which focused almost exclusively on the economy. There is a tremendous opportunity for the Conservatives to re-establish themselves as the party that champions wealth creation, enterprise, limited but effective government, personal responsibility and equality of opportunity. The Tories can contrast such an approach with Labour’s naive faith in state intervention and Reform’s incoherent approach to economic policy and preference for performative anger over practical solutions.
A clear and sustained focus on economic policy – provided it is combined with a willingness to be frank about the difficult choices and trade-offs that will be necessary to promote economic growth, and equip us to adapt to the technological revolution that is transforming industry and employment throughout the world – is what will give the Conservative Party its best chance to regain public trust.
The keys to Tory survival and success over more than two centuries have been their ability to adapt to social and economic change and their skill in building a broad coalition of supporters stretching from the centre to the democratic right.
That is what we need to do again.
David Lidington is a distinguished fellow at RUSI and a former Conservative MP and Cabinet minister
