The Tory party lies smashed like Humpty Dumpty at the foot of the Red Wall because too many MPs don’t understand how normal people think and feel
The Conservative Party is in a death spiral. Its MPs are divided and lost. Its activists are demoralised. Its voters are utterly bewildered.
What started, in 2019, as a masterclass in how to reinvent a political party has turned into a masterclass in how to ruin one.
In polls this week, the Tories slumped to just 24 per cent of the vote — nearly 20 points behind the Labour Party. They are now on course for one of the heaviest drubbings in their entire history.
And what has happened to the post-Brexit political realignment? The one which allowed the party to reinvent itself as the guardian of patriotic workers, Brexiteers, small-towners and pensioners?
Like humpty Dumpty, it lies smashed to smithereens — at the foot of the Red Wall.
Shockingly, the Tories have now lost more than half of the people who voted for them in 2019.
They can count on the support of just one in three Brexiteers and one in five workers. And this week, crystallising the malaise, one of their own MPs, Lee Anderson – a former deputy leader and Red Wal l rottweiler – has followed them by abandoning the party.
Anderson, a solidly blue- collar, former coal miner who went to a technical college rather than university and is a symbol of the Red Wall, has become the first Member of Parliament to defect to the insurgent Reform party.
he claims neither the Tories nor Labour are seriously interested in ‘taking the country back’ from a toxic combination of radical Islamists, the woke Left, and a ruling class that has become far too obsessed with mass immigration and adrift from ordinary people. he has a point.
But rather than address the British people’s legitimate concerns, far too many Tory MPs have preferred to mock and marginalise Anderson and the millions of working-class voters he represents.
It is telling, for example, that among the ruling class Lee Anderson has variously been described as a ‘neanderthal’, ‘thick as mince’, an ‘ utterly awful type’, ‘ stupid’, ‘moronic’, and ‘ an apologist’ for the ‘far right’ – a term that is now routinely applied to anybody and everybody who dares question immigration.
But the reality is that Lee Anderson does speak for much of the country, and he does speak for the millions of people who have been abandoning the Tories since 2019.
he represents a voice and set of values that are mysteriously absent in institutions that shape our national life, including the Conservative Party: workingclass, northern, non-graduate, shaped by a life outside politics, openly patriotic, and deeply sceptical of the liberal consensus that now pervades Westminster and our national life. The simple fact is that too many in Westminster and too many Tory MPs do not understand how normal people out there, in the country, think and feel.
This is true for Rishi Sunak, who wins applause from liberal commentators on account of his metropolitan, managerial, and diverse appearance but simultaneously irritates much of the rest of the country.
Sunak and many members of his team have followed what is now the standard route into the top echelons of politics – a top public school, Oxbridge, a stint at an investment bank, an elite business school, a life of abundance and affluence.
The Tories have lost touch with their voters because, like the political class, they have simply become too narrow, too homogenous, and too remote from the lives and concerns of ordinary working people.
They fail to grasp the fact that if they cannot appeal to the likes of Lee Anderson then they’ve got no chance at all at the next election.
This is why so many of the people who voted Conservative in 2019 are, like Anderson, defecting to the Reform party, which this week is averaging 12 per cent in the polls. And an even larger number of these 2019 Tories say they won’t bother voting at all, with this apathy an even bigger threat to Rishi Sunak than Richard Tice’s Reform party.
And what are their top priorities? They tell me, first, ‘stopping the boats’ and then, second, ‘getting (legal) immigration under control’, two issues on which Rishi Sunak and the Tories have very clearly failed.
They also want to make their own laws. And they want to teach our children that a man is a man, and a woman is a woman.
Instead, the party has been talking randomly about banning smoking, reforming A-levels, and scrapping high-speed train lines. And though the Tories promised they’d return Britain to being a genuinely sovereign, self-governing, independent nation, Sunak and his MPs have consistently refused to leave international courts and conventions that would help us achieve this, such as the european Convention on human Rights (ECHR).
Making sense of the Conservative Party’s implosion, then, is not rocket science. When you ignore the wishes of your core voters, they’ll either find another political home or they’ll simply stop voting altogether.
This is why the Tories look set to crash below 100 seats at the general election. Unless something changes fast they will be completely wiped out of the big cities and the university towns.
They will be forced to watch Labour re- emerge as the
‘The reality is Anderson speaks for millions’
‘They have become too remote from the lives and concerns of ordinary working people’
‘They must reconnect to avoid defeat’
dominant party in Scotland and extend its reach over the southern commuter belt. And they will lose every single seat in the Red Wall – including Lee Anderson’s.
After this heavy defeat at the next election the largest group of Tories that will be left on the green benches in the house of Commons will be liberal, wet, southern ‘One Nation’ types who lack genuine appeal to ordinary voters and think the answer to their party’s crisis is to simply rewind the clock to the David Cameron era, to try and woo urban social liberals.
This cannot be the answer. The only way forward for the Tories, if they are serious about avoiding this cataclysmic defeat, is to rediscover their historic power of reinvention – to find a way, somehow, of reinventing and reconnecting with the very workers, non-graduates, pensioners, and ‘small c’ conservatives who took a punt on them in 2019.
This is what other centre-right parties are doing around the world with much success, from Donald Trump’s strong numbers in America to a resurgent conservatism in the likes of Italy, Sweden, and France.
have Rishi Sunak and his allies got what it takes to end this death-spiral? I suspect not.
But by stepping back to think seriously about why the likes of Lee Anderson and so many others are abandoning their party they might yet find their way to an answer.