Move over weird JD Vance, you’ve got company.
The Conservative party in the UK is going through the leadership search process after the shellacking they got in the last general election. It turns out that in some surveys, voters see them as being a little weird.
Conservative politicians have started to be seen as “weird”, and few members of the public – even including the party’s own voters – are able to identify the Tory leadership candidates, research suggests.
…The research by More in Common said the party struggled with relatability, particularly in Liberal Democrat areas, by focusing on topics “which excite the base, or the highly politically engaged” but were distant from ordinary people’s lives.
In a similar vein to the attack that US Democrats have levelled against Republicans, especially the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, the research found “there is a danger that the Conservatives have started to become seen as ‘weird’”.
…It said that in seats won by the Lib Dems “voters would explain that they were voting Lib Dem in these traditionally Tory strongholds because Ed Davey’s party just seemed more ‘normal’”.
Many well-known Conservatives who had been in the top leadership such as Liz Truss, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Grant Shapps, and Penny Mordaunt, lost their seats. Others such as Theresa May and Michael Gove chose to leave parliament and did not run again.
There are six people vying to replace Rishi Sunak for the party leadership: Kemi Badenoch, Priti Patel, James Cleverly, Mel Stride, Robert Jenrick, and Tom Tugendhat.
The expectation among a number of Tory MPs is that the first votes to whittle down the number of candidates will see Mel Stride, the shadow pensions secretary, eliminated, and possibly also Priti Patel, the former home secretary.
The initial vote on Wednesday will definitely eliminate one candidate, and could see a second depart if their share of MPs is particularly low. If not, another vote next Monday would reduce the field to four.
This field would then present themselves at the Conservative conference, which begins on 29 September, before a final two names are put to party members.
Suella Braverman, a prominent and combative party member, chose not to compete for the leadership. The former Chancellor of the Exchequer (seen as the second most important position in government) Jeremy Hunt retained his seat but with a smaller majority. He also declined to contest for the leadership, even though it would seem he had the inside track. Was he seen as tainted by too close an association with Sunak and Truss? Perhaps those readers who are from the UK could provide some insight.
Whoever becomes Conservative party leader already had a tough job coming back from such a big defeat. Being seen as weird is not going to help.
I’ll take a punt.
The ones contesting the leadership now are the ones who can’t wait to be leader -- who have the clueless arrogance to think they can turn things around before 2029. They can be filed alongside William Hague, Ian Duncan Smith and Michael Howard, footnotes in history.
Suella Braverman and Jeremy Hhhhhhhhhhhhhunt-you-have-to-be-so-careful are, like Alexander “Boris” Johnson before them, both conniving and patient enough to recognise that if they want to be Prime Minister, rather than simply leader like the ones listed above, then they need to keep their powder dry. They’ll come back later, when the time is right. Watch what they do now to see if you agree with me.
Also, I think Braverman at least is counting on the country veering more to the right. Now, after a Labour landslide that might sound like a counter-intuitive thing to say, but happy as I am that the Tories were trounced, I’m painfully conscious that it wasn’t because everyone in the UK suddenly saw sense and voted Labour. It’s just that really quite a lot of constituencies had the right wing vote split between the Tories and the even more rightwing Reform Party led by Nigel Farage, the provocateur of Brexit. In many, many constituencies if Reform were not on the ballot, the Tories wouldn’t have lost. I haven’t crunched the numbers, but Liz Truss for one would still be an MP if it weren’t for Reform.
So I think they’re playing the long game, on the reasonable assumption (I think) that Labour will be in power for ten years (at least).
I pretty much agree with sonofrojblake@1, except that voters who saw sense of course voted Green, not for Starmeroid Tory-lite Labour. (Rachel Reeves, the Chancellor -- i.e. the effective number 2, despite Angela Rayner having the empty title of Deputy PM -- has promised to co-design the government’s policies with big business.)
Oh -- and I think Braverman is also keeping open the option of defecting to Reform Party UK Ltd, if they look a better bet than the Tories in a year or two.
Hmm. In a proportional system, a principled vote for Green rather than the compromise of Labour is certainly valid. I’d certainly consider doing it myself, assuming after some research my principles aligned better with the Greens than with Labour.
However, in a first past the post system, i.e. the real world, it is little more than a counterproductive tantrum. I haven’t ever bothered looking into what the Greens actually stand for in detail (despite knowing someone who actually stood for them this year -- he came fourth… but he beat the Lib Dems! That was in a constituency where exactly 50% of the vote was for the Tories or Reform… but Labour won) because ultimately if you just want the Tories to not win in the UK, you essentially have to vote either Labour or Lib Dem. Anything else is just debating-team-level point scoring on the sidelines, and I have little patience for that (outside of conversation threads under blog posts). I only hope your vote, if it went to the Greens, did so in one of the four seats they won. If so -- good for you.
Who is in government matters. I’ll trot out what I always say in these situations, paraphrasing/apologies to Flavia Dzodan: my left-wing politics will be IN POWER, or it will be bullshit.
Fortunately, such wasted votes had little effect in July because there was a far more effective tantrum being acted out on the right, with so very many people essentially “wasting” their vote on Reform out of anger with the Tories because life over the last 14 years presumably hasn’t been shitty enough, and they want it worse.
Reform deserve far more credit for the annihilation of the Tories than Labour do. I haven’t the time or inclination to crunch the numbers by constituency, but consider this: I think it’s reasonable to assume that Reform voters were almost exclusively people who, if Reform were not on the ballot paper, would have voted Tory. If so, the next question is how many votes would the Tories have got if Reform weren’t a thing? Answer: about 10.9 million, compared to Labour’s 9.7 million.
We all know that the popular vote is meaningless -- the Lib Dems got 3.5m votes and 72 seats, Reform got 4.1m and just 5 seats. But I think it’s safe to say that without Reform splitting the Tory vote, the thumping Labour majority would have been at the very least much reduced, and possibly non-existent. They’d have won my friend’s constituency comfortably, for example, and Liz Truss would definitely still be an MP -- she lost by 600 votes in a place where Reform got nearly 10,000. So, y’know, thanks Nigel, I guess.
Ye gods what a horrible thought. I wish I could ridicule that thought as delusional or wildly overestimating Reform’s chances… but I can’t. Chillingly, I think you may well be on the money. Our best hope is that Reform stick around for the next ten or twenty years, or until Farage has a stroke or whatever, and they continue to split the Tory vote in subsequent elections as effectively as last time, while at the same time remaining a sideline irrelevance. Like the Greens.
On the upside, failed Rwanda scheme architect Patel has been knocked out of the Tory leadership race, so that’s one of the more repellent ones out at least.
sonofrojblake@4,
Since it was obvious to anyone with a gram more brain than a cuckoo clock that the Tories were going to be out and Labour in after the election, your comment is simply bizarre. It was a near-perfect opportunity to vote for what you actually want, rather than for the lesser evil. (And please, don’t go with “Ah, but if everyone had thought that way, the Tories might have sneaked back in”, because we also knew everyone would not think that way.) Of course a strategic point of voting Green, or for a left independent, was to pressure the incoming Labour government -- the Greens are now second to Labour in 39 seats, and the MPs for those seats will be looking over their left shoulders as the next election approaches.
Simply false. In Scotland the most likely alternative in some seats was the SNP, in Wales in a few seats Plaid Cymru, in northern Ireland neither Tory, Labour nor the LibDems stand candidates, and did you happen to notice that two of the four seats the Green Party of England and Wales won were from the Tories? And of course in quite a few seats, if “you just want the Tories to not win” you should have voted Reform Party UK Ltd.
No, we don’t. Do you really think Starmer would not rather have had an overwhelming popular vote to go with -- and bolster -- his huge majority of seats?
As I believe I’ve said a number of times on this blog, I live in Scotland, where the political situation is markedly different from that in England. As I’ve also mentioned, I’m a member of the Scottish Green Party, and so arguably morally obliged to vote for its candidate if there’s one standing. We knew very well we weren’t going to win any seats, but stood many more candidates than in any previous Westminster election, primarily to raise our chances in the next Holyrood election in 2026 -- voting for a particular party increases the probability that a voter will do so again; and standing in an election is an opportunity to find out where your support is concentrated; for candidates, agents, etc. to gain experience; to find out what issues voters have in mind… I’d guess (I’m sure you’ll correct me if I’m wrong) you’ve never actually taken a more active part in an election than trotting along to make your mark on the ballot paper, because anyone who has would know that the fact that you didn’t win on a particular occasion does not necessarily render the whole exercise pointless.
As I pointed out @2, you didn’t get a left-wing government. You got a bunch of numpties who are planning to rerun the disaster of “austerity”, with a faint pinkish tinge. But your stance is absurd in any case. If they had agreed with you, the first Keir to lead the Labour Party would never have bothered, and we’d still have alternating Tory and Liberal governments. Parties that are not in power can still limit the freedom of action of those that are in power, and shift public opinion and media narratives (the “Overton window” in modern parlance).
Agreed.
That’s an untestable hypothetical. The nearest we can get to it is to look at how Reform Party UK Ltd. voters say they voted in 2019.. Apparently 3% of 2019 Labour voters (and 2% of 2019 LibDem voters) voted Reform Party UK Ltd. in 2024. But it’s quite feasible that significant proportions of Reform Party UK Ltd. voters would either not have voted if that limited company had not stood, or have voted for some other party in order to spite the Tories (e.g. for “betraying” Johnson).
You really do have a remarkably limited view of political dynamics in multi-party systems. Reform Party UK Ltd.’s predecessor, UKIP, was an important factor in bringing about the Brexit referendum and in detrmining the result, and Reform Party UK Ltd. is quite capable of poisoning political discourse with racist filth even though it only won a handful of seats. And to judge by the resources Starmer poured into trying to unseat the Greens in Brighton, and defend Thangam Debbonaire in Bristol, he certainly didn’t regard the Greens as a “sideline irrelevance”.
Since this is my third comment on this thread, you will have the last word.
I’m sceptical that Labour will be looking over their shoulder at the Greens in 39 of their over 400 seats, but I have *nothing* to back that up with, and five years from now you could be right, and in more seats than that.
I did massively generalise with the “Labour/Lib Dem is the only alternative” line, fair enough.
Well obviously, but the point was, it doesn’t *matter*. I’m sure he’d have liked for Rishi Sunak to have lost his seat, but it wouldn’t have made much difference.
I did not know that.
You’d guess more or less correctly about my level of engagement -- I vote. Many years ago I distributed leaflets for the local Labour candidate, but that doesn’t count for anything in this context.
Well, indeed, yes, sore point. But realistically the best we could hope for was “not that pack of bastards again”.
Fair point re: Overton window, but I fear the real action on that is at the right hand side, and not just in the UK.
Farage, I think, only had the success he did getting Brexit because the party in power at the time, the Tories, had a loony wing who were essentially sympathetic to his cause. He may now be, finally, an actual MP, but the party in power is very much not sympathetic to anything he represents any more, has an absolutely massive majority and can therefore justifiably pretty much ignore the official opposition, much less any fringe parties whose total parliamentary group would fit comfortably in a Honda Jazz.
I’m also sceptical about Starmer et al, but like Blair before him I think he represents the best hope for the country. Unlike |Blair, he has not inherited a country in reasonably good shape. The prospect of him/them failing over the next five years to repair the damage done over the last 14, and being voted out in favour of the Tories or Bod forbid Reform, terrifies me.
…there was a far more effective tantrum being acted out on the right, with so very many people essentially “wasting” their vote on Reform out of anger with the Tories because life over the last 14 years presumably hasn’t been shitty enough, and they want it worse.
I suspect many of those right-wingers were angry with the Tories because so-called Conservative policies simply didn’t do any good that the Tories could brag about — because such policies were never intended to do any good, they were never anything but a scam to get as much wealth as possible concentrated at the top. And most people were starting to see through the scam, so voting for the “sensible business and wealth party” wouldn’t do the actual fascists any good, so they said “fuck the sensible moderates” and voted for overt fascists and racists instead. Because they had at least delivered Brexit.
(Note that I’m not a UK citizen, I’m a US citizen, and I’m seeing all this largely through the lens of what’s been happening to our own “sensible business and wealth party”.)
Since it was obvious to anyone with a gram more brain than a cuckoo clock that the Tories were going to be out and Labour in after the election…It was a near-perfect opportunity to vote for what you actually want, rather than for the lesser evil. (And please, don’t go with “Ah, but if everyone had thought that way, the Tories might have sneaked back in”, because we also knew everyone would not think that way.)
How can you be sure the Greens are “what we actually want”? I haven’t heard any actual descriptions of what they stand for in a LONG time.
Also, you seem to be justifying voting Green on the grounds that such a vote wouldn’t actually count: both because Labour would get a majority vote anyway, and because there wouldn’t be enough other people voting Green to really make a difference in the general election. I know very little about UK Greens or the specific candidates they nominated this time around; but when I hear people saying I should vote for someone because “your vote won’t really count, don’t worry,” I get VERY suspicious. I heard almost exactly the same justifications for voting for Nader in 2000 — and other rationalizations that also amounted to “don’t worry, it won’t count” — and guess what: those votes DID count, in both 2000 and 2016, and the result was something I never intended to vote for.