"The Tories have failed to adapt to Britain’s seismic political realignment"
The Critic: 1st December 2025: PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, writes for the magazine examining the real reasons behind the Tories 2024 election defeat and continuing slump in the polls and what they need to do to correct that.
"The Conservative Party is teetering on the brink. After its worst ever general election result last year, its support has — remarkably — plummeted still further. Whether the most successful political party in democratic history can survive in any meaningful form is now deeply questionable.
Our electoral system means that UK-wide parties which drop much below 30 per cent of the vote tend to be brutally punished in terms of their representation in the Commons... If an election were held today, with the party consistently in the sub 20 per cent zone, the Conservatives would be eviscerated.
To understand if there might be a way back for the Conservatives, one needs a theory of how they came to be in such a parlous state. In these pages last month, Paul Goodman suggested the principal reason was losing a reputation for competence. Liz Truss and her Chancellor’s ill-fated mini-budget are, for Paul, the defining moment at which the public’s faith in Toryism evaporated.
I don’t buy into this analysis. I think something much deeper is happening and that the ramifications for the Conservative Party — and British conservatism more generally — are enormously more profound...
...The truth is that Liz Truss failed — at speed — in piloting through a platform because the Tory party was hopelessly divided. Incredibly, of the five consecutive prime ministers from 2010 to 2024, she was the only one actually to reduce the overall tax burden, albeit only by a smidgen...
Her successor, Rishi Sunak, avoided exposing the deep divisions in the parliamentary Tory party through the imaginative strategy of doing nothing...
...If the underlying problem for the Tories was that they were unleadable, divided and prone to backbiting, a year of tranquillity under Kemi surely should have gone some way towards lancing that boil. Why, then, have poll ratings not improved?...
...Over the last decade, the key aligning force that determines your political tribe has shifted from the “economy” to “identity”. Basically, how do you approach nationhood, culture and history?... Economics still matters in this new alignment, but it is only the secondary aligning factor... If the main parties of the old alignment wish to flourish under the new alignment, they will need to adapt and change almost beyond recognition...
...The plight of the Conservative Party is not due to the Truss mini-budget, nor to Kemi Badenoch not being on television enough. It is not even because the electorate think the Tories are incompetent or untrustworthy. All of these things may have had some sort of electoral impact but none of them are key...
The central issue is that the political terrain has shifted, and the Conservatives have refused to shift with it. This leaves them stranded in no-man’s land..."