Still falling

If you were to believe the general mood music from the Conservative party, you’d have thought they had dodged a bullet. Despite tallying just 121 seats in the general election and a touch under 24% of the vote, their worst result ever on both measures, they seem to be feeling quite chirpy that they have avoided extinction.

I have bad news for them. They haven’t avoided extinction yet. And there’s every sign that things are going to get worse for them rather than better.

1. Their demographics are awful

Conservative voters have long tended to be older than average. This has now, however, reached extremes. The median age of a Conservative voter in 2024 was, according to YouGov, 63.

Let’s put that in context. Roughly 25% of the electorate is aged 65 or older. So roughly 12% of Conservative voters were found among the younger 75% of the electorate. That works out at 16% vote share among those of working age. That’s the same percentage of the wider population that believe the moon landings were faked. If you’re of working age and voted Conservative, you’re weird.

I’ll come back to that bit of the problem in a while, but for now I’d like to concentrate on the older 25% of the electorate. Because the problem is even worse than it sounds there. Focaldata have produced a handy chart of vote by age.

As you can see, the Conservative vote share steadily increases with age. By the time that we reach the 80 year old voters, the Conservatives are tallying well over 40% (Labour are about as popular with the crofflers as the Conservatives are with the workers).

There are roughly 3 million people aged 80 and over. Roughly half of them are aged 85 or over. Many of these people will die before the next election (roughly a million of the voters aged 80 and over will probably die in the next five years). There will be appreciable numbers of those in their 70s who die as well. Given the political skew, all of these dying voters will be very disproportionately Conservative voters.

Just under 7 million people voted Conservative in 2024. 10% of those voters may be dead by the time of the next election. As you can see from the Focaldata chart, they are being replaced with younger voters who are overwhelmingly non-Conservative.

The Conservatives’ first task will be to replace the voters they will lose in the course of this Parliament. They will start roughly 2% down from where they ended up at this election. To put that in context, a further 2% swing against the Conservatives on a uniform swing basis would see them lose a further 31 seats. As I explain later, this is the optimistic case.

2. Reform voters hate them much more than they realise

Much of the discussion among Conservatives since the election has been about how they need to unite the right. The first problem with this is that even if every single Reform voter had voted Conservative and every other vote had remained the same, the Conservatives still would not have been close to an overall majority.

The bigger problem is that was never going to happen. Even the most optimistic calculation suggests that the Conservatives would only have got 201 seats if Reform had not stood. Others have put it much lower (168 according to Robert Colville).

Reform voters are not really Conservatives on holiday. They despise the Conservatives. All the polling shows that not that many would have voted Conservative if they couldn’t vote Reform. And individual constituency results bear that out.

Kemi Badenoch’s politics, you would have thought, would be the type to keep quite a few Reform voters on board if that were possible. And her Reform opponent was disowned by his party because it emerged that he had previously advocated votes for the BNP. He still got 14% of the vote. Suella Braverman, a politician so attuned to Reform voters that she would welcome Nigel Farage into the Conservative party, saw her Reform opponent got 18% of the vote. Hard right superstar Jacob Rees-Mogg saw his Reform opponent get 14% of the vote. Jacob Rees-Mogg lost his seat.

These do not strike me as results that I would expect to see if these were disappointed former Conservative voters looking to wrench the Conservative party in their direction. These are the results I would expect to see from supporters of an insurgent party looking to displace them completely.

Now of course the Conservatives are going to need to regain support lost, and Reform voters do agree with Conservative voters on some things. But there’s also the practical problem that remaining Conservative voters stayed with the Conservative party for a reason and often part of that reason was a dislike of Reform in general and Nigel Farage in particular. If the Conservative party makes the big moves needed to attract those who voted Reform this time round, it risks losing existing supporters to Labour and, especially, the Lib Dems.

This circle may not be capable of being squared.

3. The Conservatives don’t have the glimmerings of a strategy to get voters back from Labour and the Lib Dems

If the Conservatives are ever going to win an election again, they need to get votes from Labour and the Lib Dems. This is something that simply has not been discussed by Conservatives since the election. Liz Truss’s diagnosis is an extreme case but she appears not to have noticed that well over half of all votes were taken by Labour, the Lib Dems and Greens. She seems to regard this as having been some form of lava eruption caused by angering the electoral gods, irrelevant to the more important argument about how to deal with right-wing concerns. The idea that those votes need to be won back is too absurd to be discussed.

Labour will screw up in government, sooner or later. There is no particular reason to assume that it will be the Conservatives who profit electorally from this. Other parties will put forward their own diagnoses of how Labour have failed when they fail. In the Conservatives’ much-reduced state, voters have serious options when they decide to look elsewhere.

Many of those of working age will simply not consider the Conservatives now, and the Conservatives are likely to keep reinforcing this. For many, Brexit is a shorthand for the bad judgement of Conservative politicians. It is seen as a commonplace that Brexit was a bad idea executed badly. Yet in the medium term Conservative politicians are likely to trumpet as an article of faith whenever the government looks like being pally with Brussels that it was the finest British moment of the 21st century and should not be jeopardised. They will look crackers.

Many of those who still support Brexit will discard the gateway drug that is the Conservative party and go straight for the opioid that is Reform. After all, weren’t they the ones that betrayed Brexit by failing to implement it with true purity?

Put another way, the Conservatives face the same challenge that M&S clothing faced, where consumers decided that the designer clothes were nicer and one-wear fashion was cheaper, meaning that the middle ground was the worst of both worlds.

This is not the only way in which the Conservatives are being pulled apart in the middle. Take a look at this chart from Alasdair Rae:

Labour and the Lib Dems have neatly carved up the Conservatives from above and below. Labour are overwhelmingly the party of the most deprived seats. The Lib Dems have an absolute majority of the decile of least deprived seats.

As a result:

4. The Conservatives are very vulnerable to further tactical co-operation between Labour and the Lib Dems

I have already written about how the extreme extent of the tactical voting by Labour and Lib Dem voters in 2024 surprised me. However, the results point to how that trend might easily continue. By and large, Labour and the Lib Dems did not compete in 2024 and they aren’t particularly likely to in 2029.

Here’s a list of Labour’s most vulnerable seats in 2029. Notice something? The first one that is on the Lib Dem target list is Burnley, number 83. Here’s a list of Labour’s target seats in 2029 (don’t laugh, this may be more relevant than you imagine). The first Lib Dem-held seat on this list is Brecon, Radnor & Cwm Tawe, number 73. The Lib Dems simply aren’t that relevant to Labour’s chances.

It’s a bit muddier if you look at it from a Lib Dem perspective. Ten of their top 50 target seats are Labour-held. But they were third or worse in six of those. Once again the Lib Dems will be gunning for the Conservatives.

And in many of those seats the tactical choice is now clearer. Central Devon has a Conservative majority of 61 over Labour. There were over 8,000 Lib Dem voters. Next door, in Torridge & Tavistock, the Lib Dems will have an easy sell in 2029 to the 10,000 Labour 2024 voters. This is the Conservatives’ 57th safest seat.

This doesn’t require any express agreement between Labour and the Lib Dems. What to do is obvious.

5. No Conservative politician is talking about any of this stuff at all

There seems to be an assumption among Conservative politicians of all stripes that the pendulum will swing back inevitably. The worst that any of them are contemplating is a period in the wilderness as happened after 1997. But that to me seems to significantly underplay the risk that they will be displaced as opposition.

The Liberal party was displaced by Labour after the First World War. But at the election that really did the damage, 1918, there were still more Liberal MPs than Labour MPs. That only changed in 1922.

The Lib Dems are now breathing down the Conservatives’ necks, in seat counts if not vote share. They are in opposition too and can eat into the Conservatives’ centrist support. All the signs are that the Conservatives are just going to sit back and let them do it. The Conservatives haven’t stopped falling yet.