On July 4th, the Conservative Party suffered the worst General Election defeat in its history. The bruising result has triggered a period of soul-searching for the Party which, after fourteen tumultuous years in government, now has the task of regrouping itself for Opposition and finding a route back to power.
With the Conservative brand at rock bottom, its smallest ever cohort of MPs in Parliament, and a severely depleted grassroots machine, it will be an unenviable task facing the Party’s new Leader.
The first question the Party must decide is how quickly that new Leader will be in place.
Many senior Conservatives, including Lord Cameron and Jeremy Hunt, have advocated for a prolonged contest. They argue that a calm period of introspection is needed to assess what has gone wrong for the Party and to allow for the leadership hopefuls to face appropriate scrutiny. Party Conference at the start of October, they believe, should be used as an opportunity for candidates to set out their stall to Party members. This process will help MPs to whittle the contenders down to two candidates who will be put to a vote of Tory members at the end of the year.
However, there are others arguing for a much swifter contest. They worry that a leadership vacuum will empower Nigel Farage to parade as the ‘real’ Leader of the Opposition. And with a summer that is likely to bring with it high numbers of small boats crossing the Channel, Farage will have plenty of ammunition to hurl at the new Government.
There are also doubts over whether Rishi Sunak will be willing to remain as Leader if the Party opts for a prolonged contest, with those in both camps accepting that appointing an interim Leader would be undesirable.
What is clear is that the new 1922 Executive, which appointed its chair last week, has a contentious and highly consequential decision to make in plotting the leadership timetable.
Regardless of timing, the key question candidates will have to find a convincing answer to is what to do about Reform. The election result showed that there is no conceivable route back to power for the Conservatives while the Right remains divided: Farage’s party took three of their four seats from the Tories but, crucially, in 124 constituencies the Reform vote was greater than the margin of Conservative defeat.
Candidates will likely present a range of answers, from outright opposition to a form of accommodation which has already been suggested by Suella Braverman.
But in seeking to fend off the threat of Reform, the next Conservative Leader must not lose sight of the fact that the Tories lost more voters to a combination of Labour, the Lib Dems and ‘none of the above’ (turnout of 60% is the lowest in over 20 years) – and these people need to be won back too.
Ultimately, the fundamental challenge for the next Tory Leader is to restore the Party’s credibility. Just as the Conservatives need to regain credibility on migration to take on Reform, the Party needs to rebuild its reputation for competence and economic stability to win back voters who switched to Labour or the Lib-Dems – or stayed at home altogether.
All of this will take time and requires the new Leader to mark a clear break from the Party’s record in office – which will be no small feat considering most leadership hopefuls were at one point at the heart of government.
The next Tory Leader will, counterintuitively, take some level of solace in the path to victory of their counterpart – the new Prime Minister. When the Conservatives defeated Labour in the Hartlepool by-election in May 2021, only the second time since 1982 that the governing party had gained a seat in a by-election, few could have predicted that Labour under Keir Starmer’s leadership were on course for only their third ever landslide General Election victory.
While the Conservatives have a far more arduous rebuild ahead of them, if the last decade in British politics has shown anything, it is to expect the unexpected.
