Britain’s Conservative Party, defeated by Labour in the general election, faced a rebuilding challenge on Saturday as prominent right-wing figures warned the party could face extinction if it does not listen to its core voters.
Thursday’s election results saw a record number of members of former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s top team and other prominent Tories lose their seats.
The anti-immigration Reform UK party, led by Brexit extremist Nigel Farage, maximised the damage by splitting the right-wing vote and wooing former Tory supporters in key constituencies.
Even before the election campaign ended, a former minister launched a scathing attack on the party, saying it failed to understand that “our failure to unite the right wing will destroy us”.
Former interior minister Suella Braverman, who had been seen as a leadership contender, correctly predicted the Tories would lack the votes for Reform.
“Why? Because we failed to cut immigration or tax or tackle the net-zero and woke policies we presided over for 14 years,” he wrote in the Daily Telegraph.
Acknowledging the inevitable defeat, he called for a “very honest analysis after the match”, saying it would “decide whether our party will continue to exist or not.”
The major British political parties have seen dramatic declines in their fortunes before.
In the years following the First World War, the divided Liberal Party found itself replaced by the Labour Party as the main opposition.
The party of 19th-century political giant William Gladstone and World War I leader David Lloyd George never regained its old status as a party of government.
‘New movement’
Other senior party leaders to offer a quick diagnosis of the Conservatives’ current predicament included David Frost, the chief Brexit negotiator under former prime minister Boris Johnson.
David Frost resigned from the government in December 2021, citing grievances over Johnson’s tax rises and net-zero commitments, among others.
In order to revive traditional conservative values and electoral potential “after the cataclysm”, he called for the creation of a “new movement for reformed conservatism”.
Sunak has said he will remain as party leader until arrangements are made to choose a successor, amid fears the party will now descend into bitter internal wrangling.
Potential leadership candidates who managed to hold on to their seats include former home secretary Braverman and Priti Patel. Former finance minister Jeremy Hunt became the first to rule himself out, speaking to GB News on Saturday, saying “the time has passed.”
“It’s going to be a very immediate issue how to relate to Nigel Farage,” Michael Kenny, director of the Bennett Institute for Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, told AFP.
He said a search would be conducted for a leadership candidate who could unite the party but “would not give Faraz an opportunity.”
Others may be looking for someone who is potentially “more open to the idea of engaging with reform”.
Kenny said what was unusual about this election was that the “battle for the soul of the party” had begun before a single vote had been cast.
With the Conservative Party receiving a record low of just 121 seats, Starmer’s government has a majority in Parliament of over 170, with some predicting that the Labour Party could remain in power for a generation.
‘Civil War’
However, Philip Cowley, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London, cautioned against excessive pessimism.
He told AFP that people had been “rejecting” one or more of the main parties since the early 1960s, when it was claimed the Labour Party could never win again because of demographics “but in 1964 they had to.”
Cowley said that in 1992, when the Conservative Party won its fourth consecutive term, “there was again a lot of talk about Britain becoming a one-party state, but five years later Labour won its biggest ever victory”.
He said that recently, commentators had suggested the Conservative Party would never win again, as during the tenure of former Labour leaders Tony Blair and Gordon Brown.
“And yet they did it,” with David Cameron in 2010.
Tony Travers, a political expert at the London School of Economics, said the Conservative Party was in many ways “the most durable political party in the world”, but the result was nevertheless “disastrous”.
He said that although there was “not a lot of difference” between Labour and the Conservatives on many policies, the Labour Party had managed to appear more centrist and moderate to voters.
Travers said the divisions within the party could prove to be a major obstacle to reuniting the party.
“They were divided after Brexit … there’s a civil war going on all the time, which is going to make things difficult for them in the coming parliament.”
Presenting his analysis in the Daily Mail on Saturday, former Tory Prime Minister Boris Johnson highlighted that Labour’s landslide majority was based on a smaller number of votes than they received in 2019, when the Conservatives under Johnson won a majority of 80 seats.
“We are capable of endless regeneration,” he said.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)