Mike Phipps reviews Collapse of the Conservatives: Volatile Voters, Broken Britain and a Punishment Election, by Steve Rayson, published by Bavant.
In March 2020, support for the Conservative government was running at 54%, 26 points ahead of the Labour Party. It was the highest Conservative poll share ever in government and its biggest lead over Labour since the Falklands War in 1982. And in the first few weeks of the Covid pandemic, Boris Johnson’s popularity would increase even further.
In May 2021, the Conservatives capitalised on their ‘vaccine bounce’ by winning 235 new seats in the local elections, as well as the Hartlepool by-election, taking it from Labour on a remarkable 23% swing, the biggest for an incumbent governing party in a by-election in the post-war period. The talk was of a decade-long Johnson premiership.
Three years and two Prime Ministers later, almost half of the Conservative Party’s 2019 voters deserted them. In the 2024 general election, they lost 251 seats, more than any party had ever lost at a general election, and their vote share slumped to just 23.7%, their lowest ever. For the first time in over 100 years, they did not win a majority of southern seats.
Things get volatile
How did it happen? Beyond the specific ‘incidents’ in the Johnson, Truss and Sunak premierships that led to this collapse, Steve Rayson’s book looks at more fundamental trends. The first is increased distrust in politicians – now at a forty-year low – which has fuelled voter volatility.
This has been developing for a while. In 2015, an estimated 43% of people voted for a different party than they had voted for in 2010. Party and class dealignment among voters have been taking place for decades, so that by 2019 Professor John Curtice could say there was no longer much of a link between party support and social class.
When people are less attached to political parties, they are more likely to vote on a short-term transactional, rather than an ideological, basis. In retrospect, t’s now clear – in fact, it has been for nearly three years – that Johnson’s big win in ‘red wall’ seats in 2019 was down to such factors, such as Brexit and distrust of Jeremy Corbyn, rather than any long-term conversion. The coalition of support this victory rested on was also inherently unstable.
“When Jeremy Corbyn was replaced by Keir Starmer and the Brexit deal was finally signed, two of the core motivations for the 2019 first-time Conservative voters supporting the party were removed,” notes Rayson. To retain their backing, the government would have to tread carefully and deliver on its ‘levelling up’ agenda. It did neither.
The money allocated to levelling up was swallowed up in the Covid crisis, But this, the public felt, was being increasingly poorly handled as it wore on – the double standard for top ministers, such as Matt Hancock, and advisors, like Dominic Cummings, who appeared to break the rules with impunity; the ‘cancellation of Christmas’ in December 2020 at four days’ notice, blamed on Johnson’s dithering; Cummings’ departure from the government and his declaration that Johnson was unfit to be Prime Minister.
Then came the Owen Paterson affair, where Johnosn imposed a three-line whip to prevent the House of Commons from punishing a minister who broke lobbying rules; ‘Partygate’; the fraud that flowed from the government’s Bounce Back Loan Scheme and its chummy and partly unlawful allocation of contracts for Covid equipment; a rising cost of living crisis; and the final straw, Johnson’s appointment to government of a man he knew had been accused of sexual assault.
By the time Johnson resigned in July 2022, public trust in government was in freefall: just 21% of people thought the Conservative Party was fit to govern. In the ensuing leadership contest, rival candidates tore lumps out of each other – Truss dubbed Sunak the “socialist” chancellor – and Labour opened up a fifteen-point lead.
The rapid demise of Truss, arguably the worst Prime Minister ever, has been explored in detail elsewhere. By the time she left office, fewer than fifty days later, more than twice as many people thought that Labour would be better at handling the economy than the Tories. Only 8% thought the Conservatives trustworthy.
The big books have yet to be written about Rishi Sunak’s premiership. Could he have rescued the Tories’ reputation? It seems unlikely, and appointing so many Cabinet members from the Johnson-Truss era did not help his cause. Nor did bringing back Suella Braverman as Home Secretary, just six days after she had been sacked for leaking restricted material – part of a grubby deal to head off a challenge from her for the leadership.
A year later, as Britian tipped into recession, three-quarters of the public thought the Tory government was handling the economy badly. But politicians of all stripes were on notice: “Almost half of people said they would ‘almost never’ trust British governments of any party to place the needs of the country above the interests of their own political party, more than ever before.”
The incompetent Conservatives broke Britain and must be punished
Another underlying trend that sealed the Conservatives’ fate was the convergence of three narrative strands about the party. The first was that ‘nothing works anymore’ – a view shared by 62% of people in June 2024 and further illustrated by polling which showed that 84% felt public services had deteriorated under the Tories. Rayson drills down into the multiple crises engulfing local authority services, health, housing, the criminal justice system, the water industry, education and even defence.
The second thread was that the Tories were incompetent – constantly changing leaders, unable to control immigration (which matters to Tory voters), economically reckless under Truss.
The central, perhaps the only, reason why the Conservatives have been re-elected to govern so often over the years is their reputation, merited or not, for competence. Once that goes – as in the 1990s under John Major – they are kicked out. By June 2024, only 8% of 2019 Tory voters, said they were satisfied with the current Conservative government.
The third strand was ‘the Conservatives should be punished’. “It was the result of growing public anger at the collapse of public services, rising levels of poverty, and the behaviour of the Conservative government, which had been marked by allegations of impropriety, misconduct, corruption, fraud, and lying,” suggests Rayson.
Partygate in particular created a powerful sense of grievance about government dishonesty and hypocrisy at a time when ordinary people were banned even from attending the funerals of close relatives. By 2024, public anger was palpable. The Economist called the summer general election “an episode of mob justice.”
2024: maximising the Tory wipeout
The final cause of the Tory wipeout can be located in the general election campaign itself. Opposition parties leveraged the public’s willingness to engage in intense tactical voting to eject the Tories, while Reform UK’s decision to run over 600 candidates split the right wing vote.
Keir Starmer is often credited with implementing a winning strategy. He turned his back on the ten pledges he had made when running to be Labour’s leader in 2020, suspended his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, from the parliamentary Party and bureaucratically blocked a host of left wing candidates from standing, in order to emphasise his rejection of what Labou had once stood for. Supporters of the Starmer leadership have talked up the success of Labour’s electoral strategy, which focused on winning Conservative votes in marginal seats, while offering little to the Party’s traditional urban voters.
However, a price was paid for this approach, in two ways. Firstly, the scale of the defection of Labour voters to the Party’s left – including in Starmer’s own constituency, where a socialist Independent was runner-up – took Party strategists by surprise. Four Greens and five Independents, including Jeremy Corbyn, were elected, while others came impressively close, for instance in Wes Streeting’s Ilford North constituency, which the now Secretary of State for Heath won by just 528 votes. Secondly, Starmer’s “ruthless” U-turn towards the centre ground resulted in a big leap in levels of public distrust towards him.
Opinion polls shifted little in the final weeks: voters had already made up their minds. Nonetheless, Rishi Sunak’s apparent snub to D-Day veterans – he left the commemoration early to go electioneering – did nothing to help his cause. Nor did reports of his aides using their insider knowledge to place lucrative bets on a July election.
The Labour leadership too made all the wrong headlines due to its factional attempts – ultimately unsuccessful – to stop Diane Abbott from running as its Hackney North candidate. Still, the Party captured the public mood by emphasising “change”, but as Rayson notes, it “explicitly ruled out changes to income tax, National Insurance, corporation tax, and VAT, which constituted 71% of all tax income in 2022/23.” This would make change much harder to deliver when in office.
When the results came in, it was a disaster for the Conservatives – some of the seats they lost they had held for over a century. They were the preferred party only of people over age 65, while securing a mere 5% of the votes of 18 to 24-year-olds and only 10% of the votes of 25 to 34-year-olds. On competence, fitness to govern, empathy and integrity, the party’s ratings collapsed.
But Labour only marginally improved on their 2019 vote share, thanks largely to gains in Scotland from the SNP. The Party won back the ‘red wall’, but its landslide was based on just 34% of the vote. The polls had massively overestimated Labour’s support, which ended up at just ten points ahead of the Tories. Labour had fewer votes than they had achieved in both 2017 and 2019 – and it was the second lowest turnout since 1885. It’s further estimated that Labour lost a third of its support from Black and Asian communities in this election.
No honeymoon for Labour
The satisfaction rating for the new Labour government when it was elected, was -21, better than Sunak’s, but a long way from Tony Blair’s +37 in 1997. It underlined the high level of political distrust in UK politics and the erosion of traditional voting blocs in favour of more transactional voting.
In short, people voted for change. If Labour fail to deliver it, their electoral support will evaporate.
Which is precisely what is happening. Two months in, Keir Starmer’s government had a 23% approval rating, which fell precipitously after it announced a decision to means-test the winter fuel allowance. By October 2024, Starmer’s personal favourability rating had fallen to -36, the lowest since he became Labour leader.
As for the Tories, they are profoundly damaged. In November 2024, Kemi Badenoch was elected as the new leader with 53,000 votes, fewer than Rishi Sunak managed when he lost to Liz Truss. That itself is a sign of falling membership. Rayson identifies four challenges facing the party: the threat from Reform, its lost reputation for competence, its lack of narrative vision going forward and the demographic challenge that it is utterly unappealing to younger voters.
These are enormous challenges, but not insurmountable. Rayson’s book went to the publishers just as the utterly unexpected began to happen: the Tories gained twenty seats in local council by-elections in the last quarter of 2024. One analyst commented: “No party has won such a huge parliamentary victory and seen their fortunes reverse as quickly. No party that has suffered an historic defeat has rebounded as rapidly.”
Reform UK are also making gains. There is a lot of chatter in the media about whether the party might replace the Tories as the main right wing force, whether a merger of the two parties is feasible, what role Nigel Farage might play in a future right wing government and so on – but the most important point is that, on current poll ratings, all that is needed for Labour to lose office is an electoral non-aggression pact between Reform and the Conservatives.
Current poll numbers are a stark warning to Keir Starmer’s government. Its huge parliamentary majority could be a one-term wonder. As the government abandon the WASPI women, scrap hospital building programmes, allow huge water bill rises and commit to a third runway at Heathrow airport, voters who wanted change are already looking elsewhere. There was even talk earlier this year of Keir Starmer being replaced as Labour leader ahead of the next general election.
These are volatile times. Trump’s re-election in the US, the entry of billionaire oligarchs into frontline politics and the rise of the far right in Europe throw more uncertainty into the mix. This book is about the collapse of the Conservatives, but right now Labour have just as much to worry about.
Mike Phipps’ book Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow: The Labour Party after Jeremy Corbyn (OR Books, 2022) can be ordered here.
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