Before we wallow in the frantic final fortnight of the election, let us step back and place the drama of the coming Conservative defeat in its wider context. 4th July will be more than a moment when a revived Labour party seizes its opportunity. It will be the culmination of a decade when the Tories fought an extended war on two fronts, and ended up losing on both.
The chart below shows how the divisions over Brexit continue to shape the electoral battle. It compares how Leave and Remain voters have moved since Boris Johnson secured his 80-seat majority in 2019.
The shifts among Remain voters look like those in a normal general election: each party is up or down a few points. The biggest shift is a seven-point drop among Conservatives. (It’s worth noting that Labour’s support among Remain voters is the same as in 2019: 49 per cent. Labour’s increased overall support comes from Leave voters, and those who were too young to vote in the 2016 referendum.)
In contrast, the shifts among Leave voters are way off the scale for any group at any modern election. At the last election, YouGov found that 74 per cent of Leave voters backed the Conservatives. The figure has now collapsed to 27 per cent—a fall of 47 percentage points—while Reform has overtaken the Tories, up 31 points from the Brexit Party’s 4 per cent in 2019 to 35 per cent today.
When I see poll movements like this, my first instinct to ask if it can really be true. On this occasion, I am sure it is. I have used YouGov’s data because its panel, built up over two decades, allows it to follow the same voters through time. Most of the respondents whose views are summarised in the chart are the same people today as in 2019.
Things might of course change between now and 4th July; but unless the Tories crush Reform in the next fortnight, the story is likely to end up fairly similar to that shown above: most of the voters who backed Johnson to “to get Brexit done” have lost faith in the Tories. Between 2015 and 2019, the proportion of Leave voters who backed the Conservatives jumped from 45 to 74 per cent. The Tories seemed to have built a new coalition of voters that redefined the party’s appeal and allowed it to win a swathe of seats, notably in the “red wall”, where it had never succeeded before. That coalition could have reshaped British politics for decades to come. Instead, it has simply collapsed.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives have suffered on the other front: Remain voters. The election-to-election figures are less dramatic but, cumulatively, just as significant. Instead of Tory-supporting Leave voters following a Matterhorn-shaped trajectory—sharply up, then sharply down—Remain voters have travelled more like passengers leaving a bus at each stop as it approaches its terminus.
These are the figures for the numbers of Remain voters backing the Conservatives at each of the last three general elections: 2015, 30 per cent; 2017, 25 per cent; 2019, 19 per cent. YouGov now puts the mid-campaign figure at 12 per cent. Five years ago, that erosion of support was masked by the jump in Tory support among Leave voters. Now it is contributing to the party’s collapse.
All in all, far from shrinking, the shadow that Brexit casts over Conservative fortunes has continued to lengthen. But something more seems to be happening. Until David Cameron allowed himself to be sucked into holding a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union, his party had made broadly the same pitch to voters for many decades. It offered economic competence, broadly based prosperity rooted in private enterprise, national cohesion and a welfare safety net—all linked by a form of patriotism that sought strong trading relationships with our closest friends, especially in Europe.
Debates about the credibility of these commitments are for another day; the point here is that from Churchill to Thatcher, via Macmillan and Heath, the brand remained broadly the same, even the specifics changed and ignited vigorous arguments within the party from time to time.
Brexit has undermined all that. By holding Britain’s economy back, it has undermined faith in the party’s economic competence. Taxes have gone up, living standards down. The party’s balanced patriotism has been shattered by the clamour for a narrow nationalism from its right wing. The two promises that Brexit’s supporters believed they had been offered—lower immigration and a better NHS—have both been broken. The Conservatives have become the party that delivers neither private prosperity nor efficient public services.
This goes beyond the problems caused by Covid and the spike in inflation caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. The Tories have lost not just the nationalists who think the government has screwed up Brexit; they have also progressively lost the one-nation pro-Europeans who didn’t want Brexit in the first place. Voters have plainly lost faith in the Conservatives’ recent record; but more than that, they have no real idea any longer what the party stands for. Brexit has been part cause and part symptom of this deeper malaise.
Putting that right will be the most important task facing the Conservatives once they return to opposition. Conventional wisdom is that the party will need a new leader who can heal its internal divisions. Most parties need such leaders most of the time. But sometimes clarity matters more than consensus. So let me ask my Tory friends a simple question, for them to ponder once the election is over. If the Conservative party didn’t exist, why would it need to be invented?
