How the Conservatives lost touch with England’s prosperous south
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
From the gleaming financial towers of Bishopsgate to the discreet town houses of Mayfair, the parliamentary constituency that goes by the name of Cities of London and Westminster houses some of the world’s wealthiest corporations.
The residents, some of whom live in the capital’s most coveted real estate, include a number of the richest people in the world.
And on July 4, if the opinion polls are correct, they will do something they have never done before: vote Labour.
Rishi Sunak’s Conservatives are bracing for a hammering in the UK election. Recent polls suggest that Labour is on course for a victory of historic proportions. There are millions of undecided voters and there could still be some tightening in the last 10 days of the campaign, but the polls consistently put Labour comfortably ahead of the Conservatives.
One of Labour’s paths to victory is to take back many of the predominantly working-class constituencies in the north of England which the Conservatives won in the last election in 2019. Many Tories admit that defeat in those seats is now inevitable.
More worrying for Sunak, however, is that the Tories also look set to lose seats across their southern heartlands in and around London — the sorts of places that are inhabited by ambitious graduates and professionals, many of whom work for Britain’s globally connected businesses.
Losing to Labour in the opposition party’s northern “red wall” is one thing. But for Conservatives to lose rock solid seats like the Cities of London and Westminster or comfortable commuter towns like Royal Tunbridge Wells would be an existential challenge.
Or as one Conservative candidate grimaces: “How did we stop being the party of successful Britain?”
In the last election, when Boris Johnson was the Tory leader, the electoral map shows just how remarkable the Conservative victory was. The party managed to seize swaths of Labour seats in the north of England, while stacking up the votes in traditional Tory seats in the wealthier areas. Across the south and east of the country, the map produced a sea of blue, interrupted by only a few red Labour splodges.
Fast forward to this year’s general election and a number of so-called MRP polls — highly detailed constituency-level surveys — paint a picture of devastation for the Tories in some of the richest areas of Britain, including the London commuter belt. In the capital itself, a wealthy European megalopolis, the Tories face an almost complete wipeout.
Opposition parties are trying to exploit resentment towards the Conservatives. Sir Ed Davey, whose centrist Liberal Democrats hope to be the beneficiaries of Tory woes in the south, tells the Financial Times: “The Tories are anti-university, anti-business, anti-London.” He adds: “It’s a really negative message.”
David Gauke, a former Tory cabinet minister, agrees: “The impression the Conservative party gives at the moment is of being hostile to young people, international business and often hostile towards London and its metropolitan values.”
For Paul Scully, minister for London from 2020 to 2023, it is not surprising that people who live and work in the capital are turning their backs on the Tories, given that the party appears to have prioritised trying to cling on to working-class, socially conservative voters who backed Johnson in 2019.
“It’s frustrating,” he says, admitting that he has to fight perceptions that the Conservatives do not like London. “It has been a lonely battle.” By focusing on this one core group of voters, he says, it has ended up excluding many others. The party “is getting smaller and smaller”.
Asked about the party’s troubles with more prosperous voters, Sir Bob Neill, until recently the Tory chair of the House of Commons justice committee, has a succinct response: “There’s one answer to that: Brexit.”
For most politicians and commentators, Brexit is Year Zero in modern British politics. The Midlands and north of England tended to vote Leave, as did many working-class, older voters. The south, along with its metropolitan demographic of professionals and graduates, tilted to Remain.
At the 2019 election Johnson spotted a rare political opportunity. He assembled a formidable Tory coalition with his promise to “Get Brexit Done”, prising Leave voting northerners away from Labour, while easily holding on to the party’s southern strongholds. He won a majority of 80.
It was a major achievement but left his party with a serious problem: how to preserve the fragile coalition. “It was always the danger of Brexit,” says Prof Tim Bale, a historian of the Conservative party. “The 2019 electoral coalition was always going to be difficult to hold together.”
Johnson’s own charismatic leadership was a key factor in winning over the north, as had been the strong national desire to settle the Brexit issue. But the coalition was also glued together by another key factor: Labour was then led by the far-left leader Jeremy Corbyn, whose radical agenda scared northern and southern voters alike.
Johnson’s plan was to reward his party’s new northern seats by throwing billions of pounds at them in a “levelling up” agenda, but then Covid ate up £400bn of public cash and the spending taps were turned off. Meanwhile Corbyn was replaced by the reassuringly centrist Sir Keir Starmer as Labour leader; Johnson was toppled in disgrace in 2022; Brexit was “done”. The foundations of the Tory red wall strategy had crumbled.
But rather than abandoning red wall Leave voters to a resurgent Labour — or Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK — successive Tory leaders began deploying language and policies on cultural issues intended to shore up support among small “c” conservative, working-class voters.
The messaging was in some ways reminiscent of that used by Donald Trump and the US right. It was cheaper for Sunak’s party than spending billions of pounds in northern constituencies, but according to experts it had a corrosive side-effect: the alienation of Tory voters in the south.
“If you couldn’t keep people sweet with cash, you had to deploy culture war rhetoric,” says Bale. “It put off people who are affluent, fairly well educated, who don’t share those views.” Anthony Wells, director of political polling at YouGov, adds: “There was a tilt towards populism and Brexit started that. The style, the language, the vibe.”
14 years of Tory rule
Earlier this month, the FT examined the legacy of Conservative-led government
Part one: In charts, the record — and the paradoxes — of the Conservatives
Part two: Have the Tories squandered their years in power?
Theresa May, prime minister from 2016-19, set the trend with a party conference speech in which she declared: “If you are a citizen of the world, you are a citizen of nowhere.” It was a direct repudiation of the globalist, liberal Toryism of David Cameron’s premiership of 2010-16.
Johnson doubled down, reportedly declaring “fuck business” when bosses started complaining about his hard Brexit policy, while the “liberal establishment” found itself the scapegoat for the country’s deepening political problems.
In 2019 Johnson withdrew the Tory whip from moderate party grandees — including former chancellor Ken Clarke, Gauke and former attorney-general Dominic Grieve — for refusing to toe the line on Brexit.
Judges were labelled “enemies of the people” by the Tory press, the BBC was denounced, universities were criticised for being too “woke”. Liz Truss, during her brief premiership, used “living in North London town houses” as a political attack line.
Sunak, who became prime minister in 2022, calls Starmer a “lefty” human rights lawyer as a term of abuse, while he asserted in February after pro-Palestinian protests that there was a “growing consensus that mob rule is replacing democratic rule” in Britain.
His former home secretary Suella Braverman, talked about an “invasion on our south coast” by migrants, who were to be sent to Rwanda. Sunak threatened to leave the European Court of Human Rights — a “foreign court” — if it tried to stop him. The brakes were applied to green policies.
Sunak and his predecessors seemed confident they could set this new tone of Conservative discourse without damaging support in the party’s heartlands. Polls suggest this was a big misjudgement.
Among younger voters and graduates, upon whom the future of “successful Britain” was likely to be built, the strategy has been an absolute disaster. A YouGov poll last month put Tory support among 18-24-year-olds at just 8 per cent; hardly a promising business model for the future.
The party has not been helped by the fact that so many younger people, especially in London and its suburbs, are struggling to afford a home. Sunak’s first policy announcement of the 2024 election campaign seemed unlikely to rebuild bridges with this lost demographic: he proposed a return of compulsory national service for 18-year-olds.
It had not always been like that for the Conservatives. In 1983 Margaret Thatcher won 42 per cent of the vote in that age cohort; even John Major in 1997 won 27 per cent, despite facing the ascendant Tony Blair, the Labour leader who won three consecutive elections.
“The most important strategic issue we face is we have to have an offer for young people,” Jeremy Hunt, chancellor, tells the FT. He was speaking from his prosperous Surrey constituency, from where many residents commute to jobs in London: Hunt admits this once-safe seat is now “on a knife edge” and could fall to the Lib Dems.
Sunak has struggled to come up with a message for graduates, who often studied in a multicultural and liberal environment far removed from the largely white, working-class, older communities that the Conservatives are trying to keep sweet in this election.
In 2019 the number of young people in England attending university passed the 50 per cent mark for the first time, up from 15 per cent in 1980. Finding a way of winning back graduates is a key Tory challenge.
Tim Barnes sits in the café where he runs a small charity for entrepreneurs on London’s Strand. The Conservative candidate in the Cities of London and Westminster notes that Labour has never won this seat.
Does he find it extraordinary that this bastion of capitalism is — at least according to the polls — about to vote Labour for the first time? Barnes insists he is still in with a good chance and that his charity — which is about “aspiration and opportunity — core Conservative values” — embodies what his party is all about.
Barnes says Labour would put up taxes and undermine enterprise; he believes many Tory voters will recognise the danger. But his Labour opponent Rachel Blake says people are now willing to come across to her party: “I think the Conservatives have been talking success down,” she says.
Tory candidates hope that undecided former supporters will on July 4 come back into the fold, rather than risk giving Starmer what defence secretary Grant Shapps has called “a supermajority”; party strategists insist the polls are wrong.
Down the road in the Square Mile, there is little love for the Conservatives, although some are unconvinced that Starmer will be much better. Tom, an economist in the City who declines to give his surname, says he is a former Tory voter, but that he expects Labour to win.
“We can recall when Boris told business to eff off and Liz Truss believes she was overthrown by the satanist left-wing socialist cabal of the City of London and the Bank of England,” he says.
Sarah O’Sullivan, who works in insurance, says she is planning to vote Labour. “I’m pretty unhappy with the state of the NHS and public services,” she says.
Greg Davis, who works for a fintech company, says he had previously voted Conservative but would vote Labour this time. “There have been extreme decisions going away from the centre,” he says. “It’s about time we went back to something a bit more centrist and sensible.”
Losing in the Cities of London and Westminster would be bad, but the Tories are also braced for defeat in some of the most archetypal Tory seats in the country in prosperous areas around the capital. One of those is Royal Tunbridge Wells, a well-heeled town known for its spring baths and apocryphal retired colonels writing “Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells” letters to the Daily Telegraph.
Neil Mahapatra, the Conservative candidate in the seat, admitted in his local newspaper KentOnline that things had gone wrong. “The Conservative party has disappointed: some poor policies, worse implementation, infighting,” he wrote, in a personal statement that remains on the site. “We have let you down — I am so very sorry.”
Speaking to the FT, he says residents are “likely to have disapproved of aspects of the party’s conduct since 2019, but I do feel that they remain the type of base that is looking for a reason to vote Conservative”.
Greg Clark, a former Tory cabinet minister who is standing down from the seat, says: “The last few years of turbulence have been quite troubling to people here.
“Prosperity is associated with moderation. People don’t like major upheaval and disruption, they want sensible people to be in charge,” he adds. “This is not natural Boris Johnson Brexit territory. It’s middle of the road Conservative territory. They like David Cameron here.”
The “London effect” — where young, liberal graduates move out of the capital in search of cheaper housing — is another ominous development for the Conservatives defending seats in the Home Counties around London.
Mike Martin, the former army officer and Lib Dem candidate in Tunbridge Wells, says that around 3,000 people move into the area every year. “Every house you go into has a map of a suburb of London, usually in the toilet,” he adds.
“Everyone who was moving down 30 years ago — that age group and professional class — was voting Conservative.” Martin says that has now changed.
Sipping a coffee at a café with his family and dog, 44-year-old Andrew McCall says he is planning to vote Lib Dem “to make sure the Tories have a chance of losing”. The lawyer, who works in London, adds: “For me, it’s about Brexit, wrecking the economy. I don’t believe in their vision of society.”
If the Conservatives lose on July 4, they will face a moment of truth. Should they double-down on a right-wing agenda of culture wars and immigration — trying to neutralise the rise of the Faragist right — or build back from the foundations of their liberal traditional southern base?
Steve Akehurst, director of new research group Persuasion UK who coined the term “blue wall” in 2021, has analysed trends in the roughly 50 seats that make up the historically staunchly conservative voting block where a disproportionately large number of residents are graduates.
Akehurst found that voters in these seats are more likely to prioritise issues like housing and the environment than immigration and are also more pro-EU and socially liberal than those in the red wall, leading many to feel as though the Conservative party has drifted from their values.
“These are parts of the country where the rot set in for the Conservative party long before Boris Johnson broke Covid rules or Liz Truss tried her hand at economics,” says Akehurst. “As those voters desert them, it will leave the Conservatives with a dilemma after the election and as they seek to find their next leader: do they try to rebuild the David Cameron coalition in the blue wall, or abandon it entirely in search of a more socially conservative electorate in the red wall and beyond?”
Gauke predicts the party will take the latter option, which he believes to be the wrong choice. “I fear that the response after the election will be to double down on a strategy that will be electorally harmful,” he says. “It’s looking grim for the Conservatives. The difficulty is that the Conservatives are failing to properly represent or appeal to any part of society.”
Data visualisation by Jonathan Vincent
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