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Paths to power in a First Past The Post multi-party system

Imagine for a moment that you are Kemi Badenoch. How exactly do you propose to become Prime Minister?

As Kemi Badenoch herself says, this isn’t about policies. This is about establishing a space for the Conservatives, a space big enough to take them back to power.

So, let’s map out the current terrain. Kemi Badenoch is Leader of the Opposition with just 121 seats. Not since the 1930s has the UK had such a weak opposition. She takes over the reins of a party that at the last election: lost votes to Reform; seats to the Lib Dems; and votes and seats to Labour. Fewer than one in four voters chose her party.

It gets worse. Of those voters who chose her party, somewhere between a tenth and the sixth will have died by the time of the next election. They won’t be joining her in providing a Conservative majority, they’ll be joining the Great Majority.

Still, Kemi Badenoch can console herself with the thought that while Labour may have won a titanic number of seats, they did so on an unprecedentedly low vote share of 34%. Politics has become multipolar. Four parties took a double digit share of the national vote, and both the SNP and Plaid Cymru took a double digit share of the vote in their home nation. The Greens also took a major step forward.

The Conservatives start just 10% behind Labour in vote share (less than Labour were behind the Conservatives in 2019). Labour have difficult challenges ahead of them in government and they haven’t exactly started with aplomb. Parties in government rarely put on vote share and they are especially unlikely to do so in difficult times.

So my first question to you is: what vote share should the Conservatives be aiming to achieve if they are to return to power?

You might hope for a return to two party politics. All things are possible but there is no particular sign of it since the election and prudently you should plan on the basis that the new politics is here to stay.

Let’s assume Labour tally no better than 30% at the next election. It’s not a ridiculous idea (though I suspect Labour’s vote share is a lot more resilient than is commonly believed). In that case, the Conservatives might reasonably hope that 35% or so could get them an overall majority. Even 32 or 33% might be enough for a Conservative government, depending where the votes fall.

But that leads me to my next point. You don’t win power with votes but with seats. And the 2024 election shows just what a struggle the Conservatives face. In the East of England, the South East and the South West, the Conservatives won most votes. But Labour won more seats than the Conservatives in all three regions. In fact, of the 58 seats in the South West, the Conservatives won just 11.

So the Conservatives don’t just need to win more support, they need to reduce the desire of their opponents to vote tactically against them. This applies with especial force in a multi-party world where no party has a high vote share.

Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland are impediments to the Conservatives’ route to power. Effectively they provide them with a 100 seat handicap (if you imagine that next time it might be different, consider that while the Conservatives held 13 seats in Wales before the election, they’re now only as high as second in 10 constituencies across all of Wales). In a Parliament of 650, that’s a lot.

For the Conservatives, it’s England where the next election will be won and lost. There are 543 seats in England and the Conservatives currently hold just 116 of them. Labour won 347 (a comfortable absolute majority across the whole of the UK just from English seats). If the Conservatives are going to return to power, they’re going to need to take a lot of those seats back.

Yes, yes, Alastair, you might say, but there’s no way of the Conservatives getting above 30% without getting votes back from Reform. Well that’s not strictly true — the Conservatives might fish directly for Labour voters or indeed Lib Dem or Green voters — but certainly Reform pose a substantial impediment to Conservative ambitions (they also pose an existential threat but for the moment we’re focusing on Conservative aims, not fears). In constituency after constituency, Reform took a substantial vote share. Some of those voters may never have voted Conservative but some — especially in erstwhile traditional Conservative seats — very definitely will have done. Reform’s coalition of morlocks and appalling golf club bores has disrupted the Conservatives’ own coalition. So the Conservatives appear to have concluded that there is no route back to power without first dismantling the threat from Reform.

This conclusion looks clearly correct to me. Even if just half of Reform’s 2024 vote is available to the Conservatives, that by itself would get the Conservatives towards the 30% mark. If Reform keep that vote share or grow it, the Conservatives look fated to be marooned in the low 20s or to decline further.

To achieve this, the Conservatives have been loudly signalling their sympathy with touchstone topics for Reform voters, especially immigration. This has not been going well.

So far, Reform supporters seem to regard the Conservatives’ overtures as validation of their own position. Indeed, those overtures seem only to have persuaded other voters that these subjects are salient and that Reform is best placed to address them.

The Conservatives have decided to fight on Reform’s own terrain. This is madness. The Conservatives should be setting out their own terrain, terrain on which Reform is ill-fitted to fight, and dragging Reform onto that for their battle. Right now, they are volunteering for defeat.

Worse, the Conservatives so far seem to have missed another aspect of the electoral dynamics. While it is just about possible for the Conservatives to return to power solely by taking Labour seats, in practice it’s hard to envisage them doing this without also dealing with the Lib Dems.

The Lib Dem efficiency of vote is something to behold. Their vote share barely rose from 2019. And the number of lost deposits increased from 136 to 229. The Lib Dems now have 72 seats, having taken 60 from the Conservatives at the last election. Many of these seats are surprisingly safe (a of these are held with majorities of 10,000 or more).

And the Lib Dems are not necessarily finished yet. Take a look at a list of their target seats. They have feasible Conservative targets a surprisingly long way down this list. East Grinstead & Uckfield is their 29th target. Reform didn’t stand here in 2024. If the Lib Dems can put the squeeze on Labour voters next time as Reform take a bite out of the Conservatives, you’d have thought it was in play.

What this means is that the Conservatives need to do a lot more thinking yet about what their route to power looks like. It isn’t enough to woo Reform voters if that’s only going to encourage an absolute majority in many constituencies to vote for the candidate best placed to beat you. The only way is not up.

We saw a sliver of the consequences of this at the last election. In the final run-up to the vote, the Conservatives spent a considerable amount of energy attacking Angela Rayner. To the median voter, this looked strange because (a) she was only the deputy leader (b) many people find her a refreshing change from the usual middle-class middle England management graduate politician © there was more than a whiff of snobbery and sexism about the attack. But the Conservatives were presumably focusing not on the median voter but on the median voter who was winnable for them. Such voters were far removed from the middle — a very different sort of swing voter, one who found Angela Rayner declassé and definitely not suitable for high power.

I suspect that attack was ultimately counterproductive, in that it probably reinforced existing trends towards tactical voting. In the modern political era, your messages get heard by everyone, not just those you want to hear them. That’s going to take a lot of thinking about when crafting such messages to multipolar swing voters.

So the Conservatives need to do a lot more thinking about who they are trying to reach when mapping out a path to power, how they approach them and how they craft a message that isn’t going to alienate others and provoke them. Right now, they look to have drawn one correct conclusion and then followed up with a series of blunders.

We can, however, expect to see ever more appeals to those multipolar swing voters in future: environmental messages for Labour/Green waverers; communitarian appeals for Labour/Reform swing voters; and yes, more immigration-focused messages for Conservative/Reform swing voters. All of these appeals will feel odd to those in the political centre, but as the political system stretches out and breaks into larger fragments, the centre has rarely been less important.