Tories search for answers after election drubbing

Opinion polling suggests the party’s support saw two big drops in the years after its election win in 2019.

The first, around the time of the Partygate scandal, saw Labour overtake the Tories in terms of overall national popularity. This lead then widened significantly in the wake of Liz Truss’s mini-budget.

“You can’t ignore the Covid parties and the mini-budget,” former Treasury minister Laura Trott conceded at one panel discussion.

Speaking alongside her, ex-cabinet minister Michael Gove said the mini-budget had dealt a “toxic” blow to the Tory brand, adding it had given voters the impression the party was “experimenting” on them.

Veteran MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who saw his majority slashed in his previously safe North Cotswolds seat, said the legacies of Johnson and Truss had made Sunak’s job “extremely difficult”.

Sunak’s decision to go for an early poll, he added, likely came because he concluded “things were only going to get worse”.

Away from the ups and downs of British politics since Covid, activists and politicians were also mulling longer-term trends.

How to recover the party’s declining vote share among younger voters, a constant theme at Tory conferences in recent years, was also much discussed.

Penny Mordaunt, another cabinet minister ejected from Parliament in July, has been drafted in to expand its membership base, promising the “largest outreach programme” in British political history.

Making their pitches to members at the end of the conference, all four leadership contenders said they believed the party could turn things around in time for the next election, but needed to change course.

The diagnosis of defeat they subscribe to will be crucial in determining how they set out to find a cure.