Britain’s Conservative Party faces up to its mortality

Grief purportedly has five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. With a general election coming in 2024, the Conservative Party will run through them all.

Denial will come first. Whatever the date of the election, the campaign will kick off at the start of the year. Rishi Sunak is seen as the Conservatives’ best hope. The plan is still for a presidential campaign, with Mr Sunak facing off against Sir Keir Starmer, the Labour leader. But if he is a president, he is an increasingly unpopular one. Mr Sunak was once more popular than his party; by spring, he will comfortably poll below his party. All is not lost, Tory spinners will insist. Events happen. Wars break out. Something may turn up.

When nothing does, the anger will begin. The Conservatives once bridled at their reputation as “the nasty party”. In 2024 they will embrace it. A pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights will form the centrepiece of their manifesto. Sir Keir’s record running the Crown Prosecution Service will also feature. When Boris Johnson wrongly accused Sir Keir of personally failing to prosecute Jimmy Savile, a celebrity paedophile, Mr Sunak distanced himself from the comments. Now Sir Keir and Savile are regularly mentioned in the same breath by party apparatchiks. (Labour will repay the favour by digging into the finances of Akshata Murty, Mr Sunak’s wife, who is a billionaire.)

Bargaining comes next. Things have improved, Tory MPs will argue. When it comes to the economy, they will be half-right. Inflation, which peaked at almost 11%, will fall to a far more digestible level. That will mean strong real-wage growth, an all-too-rare treat for British voters in the past 15 years. But there will be no electoral dividend for the Tories. Wages may be going up, but so are mortgage costs for the swing voters who helped the Tories to victory in 2019.

After the election, in which Labour will win its first big majority since 2005, depression will set in. Rather than fight on, Mr Sunak will resign. It will be little solace that his position was close to impossible. Politics is often about punishment rather than policy. Voters discipline parties when they screw up. When Liz Truss’s chaotic 49-day tenure as prime minister ended, so did the Conservatives’ chances in the election. This will not stop her launching an ill-fated bid for the Tory crown during the autumn leadership contest, however. (Some people never move past denial.)

Acceptance is the final stage. Opposition can be an opportunity, if handled well. The party’s remaining MPs will face a choice: to appeal to their party or to the country. Sir Keir, the new prime minister, will have shown it is possible for a party to recover from a big defeat in just one parliamentary term. The speed of the Conservative recovery will depend on whether, for new leader, they opt for one of James Cleverly or Tom Tugendhat, two moderates; or Kemi Badenoch, a culture warrior; or Suella Braverman, a nativist.

The fragile hegemony of the Conservative Party, which lasted from 2010 to 2024, has shattered. Obituaries for the Tories will be written, just as they were in the mid-noughties, when Labour was utterly dominant under Sir Tony Blair. The obituaries were wrong then, and they will be again. Political parties may decline, but they can always reinvent themselves. ■

Duncan Robinson, Political editor and Bagehot columnist, The Economist