Even in Britain’s most Conservative constituencies, the former ruling party’s attempt to elect a new leader is failing to stir enthusiasm.
For the past month, six former ministers have been jostling to replace former prime minister Rishi Sunak in the Tory party’s top job. But with their battle mainly confined to closed-door meetings among party loyalists and articles in the national press, voters in Harrow East – where more than 53% voted Conservative in the July 4 general election – showed little enthusiasm for the proceedings when contacted by Bloomberg.
Patricia Tubrit, a pensioner carrying a trolley bag as she walked to the supermarket, said: “I don’t think the Tories will win again.” After leaving the Conservative Party last month in favour of Reform UK, a right-wing rebel party, she claimed to be uninspired by the six candidates and shared her nostalgia for former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who was ousted by his own party in 2022 after a series of scandals and no longer sits in Parliament. “They are our only chance for good leadership,” she said.
The ideas that have emerged in Harrow underline the challenge facing any contender who wins on November 2. Their job is to rebuild Britain’s self-proclaimed Natural Party government from the ruins of its worst ever defeat and make it electable once again. And they have to achieve this when even their most loyal constituency voters are not sure they have found the right diagnosis of the country’s ills.
“Why would voters care? The Tories were soundly defeated in the election,” said Rob Ford, a political science professor at the University of Manchester. “When you’re in opposition, it’s a daily struggle to get people’s attention.”
The bookmakers’ favourite is former business secretary Kemie Badenoch, who is also in the starting line-up alongside former foreign secretary James Cleverly, former home secretary Robert Jenrick, former home secretary Priti Patel, Mel Stride, who held work and pensions responsibility under Sunak, and former security minister Tom Tugendhat.
But in Harrow East, the contest has failed to enthuse voters the Tories must win back across the country to rebuild their fortunes.
Dotted with retirement villages, Hindu temples, farms and curry houses, the leafy district at the end of the London Underground’s Jubilee line was the only constituency in the country where more than 50% of votes cast last month went to the Tories.
Of the 25 people interviewed by Bloomberg in Harrow, eight of whom voted Tory on July 4 and 10 who said they had chosen the party before, only one showed any interest in the outcome of the leadership race, saying they were in favour of Tugendhat. The others either declined to choose a favourite candidate or saw little chance of any winner reviving the party that has led UK governments for the past 14 years and more than 60 of the past century.
Kemi Badenoch is the bookmakers’ favourite to win the Conservative Party leadership contest.
One – who, like all eight Tory voters, requested anonymity unless she revealed her political views – said she did not think any of the candidates had what it takes. Another, who was tending some greenery near the Conservative association in Harrow East, compared the Tories to a rudderless boat. A woman who described herself as a lifelong Conservative said she did not think the party would ever win the keys to 10 Downing Street.
These sentiments reflect the scale of the rebuild expected by the Tories, who won just 121 of the 650 seats in the House of Commons on July 4 – beating the previous lows of 156 in 1906 and 165 during Tony Blair’s landslide victory in 1997.
The leadership contest is set to heat up, with launch speeches from Badenoch, Claverley and Tugendhat expected this week, while Patel delivers hers on Friday. Tory MPs will reduce the number of candidates to four and then two ahead of the party’s annual conference this month, which will go to a broad vote among grassroots members.
The winner will have to choose whether to take a right-wing stance to win back voters who shifted to the populist anti-immigration Reform UK party led by Nigel Farage, or take a more moderate stance to woo the 46% of British voters who chose the Liberal Democrats or Labour on July 4.
This tug of war can be summed up in the views of two Harrow voters: Tugendhat supporters, who described the former security minister as the only viable option because of his centrist views, and Jenny Lawrence, a lifelong Conservative in her 50s who switched to Reform this year, who described Farage’s organisation as “the only option”. She said that if the Tories failed to match their words with their actions, they had no future.
Tom Tugendhat is one of six former ministers vying to become leader of the Conservative Party.
The Tories have to win over not just those who switched parties, but also those who did not vote. Turnout was the lowest in nearly a quarter of a century, at 59.8%, as voters who did not think the Conservatives deserved another term, but were not inspired by Labour, did not vote.
James Baxter, a 76-year-old former airline employee, said he considers himself a conservative but stayed home on election day this year. “I wasn’t inspired,” he said. “I don’t think any of them know what they’re talking about.”
Harrow East was successfully defended by Bob Blackman – a Tory who has represented the area since 2010. He won the highest vote share of any Conservative, and his 11,680 majority is the party’s third-safest, bettered only by Sunak in Richmond and Northallerton and former Cities minister Andrew Griffiths in Arundel and South Downs.
Blackman’s campaign manager Matthew Goodwin-Freeman sees an opportunity for the next Tory leader in the nature of July’s election. That’s because Keir Starmer’s Labour Party won a landslide victory in terms of seats despite winning just 33.7% of the vote.
“In five years’ time when there’s a general election, the ‘I’m fed up with the Conservatives’ talk will be over because they won’t be in power,” Goodwin-Freeman said. “Don’t in any way think this is Labour’s decade.”
Starmer’s Labour Party showed what is possible in modern British politics by winning a landslide victory just five years after its worst defeat since the 1930s.
“If the Tories get back on the ground, big changes are possible,” said Ford, of the University of Manchester. “These are volatile political times.”
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
