How the Conservatives came to the brink of wipeout

This is part of a Data Points series on the UK election

With less than a week until polling day, the Conservatives are heading for the worst general election result in their 190-year history.

One large poll and forecast this week from research companies FocalData and Prolific estimated that the Tories would hold on to only 110 seats if an election were held today. More striking still was its finding that even if they hold on in tight Labour and Liberal Democrat marginals, that figure only rises to 158 seats. John Major’s humbling 1997 defeat by Labour is no longer a worst-case scenario but an optimistic hope.

This makes it all the more baffling that as recently as five months ago, Tory strategists were reportedly preparing for the possibility of back-to-back general elections, based on their belief that Labour would win the first so narrowly that the party would quickly be forced to call a second snap election to try to secure a working majority.

That many in the Conservative party believed things were salvageable until very recently does not bode well for the Tories’ ability to learn from the errors of the past four and a half years and rebuild both themselves and their relationship with the electorate.

Much of the narrative in recent weeks suggests this election was lost only in the past few months as Nigel Farage entered the fray and his Reform UK party began eating into the Conservatives’ right flank, but this is false.

Using detailed voting data to model how a general election would have played out at various points over the past four years, we can see that as early as January 2022, with the “Partygate” scandal over pandemic lockdown breaches gaining traction, the Conservatives were on course to lose an election. By the time Boris Johnson resigned as prime minister, they would have been down to 211 seats, their fifth-worse result in two centuries.

As fresh calls are made for Johnson’s return, few in the party seem to recall that he departed less popular than Rishi Sunak is today. It was under his leadership that many voters came to see the Tories as synonymous with dishonesty and unfitness for government. On the eve of his resignation, Johnson and his government were less popular than Major and his on the eve of the 1997 election.

Months before Liz Truss’s infamous “mini” Budget, only 60 per cent of those who voted Conservative in 2019 were planning to do so again, and the Tories had already lost their lead over Labour on the economy, immigration and crime. The situation has deteriorated since then, but huge damage was already done.

To be clear, the split on the right has done considerable additional harm, amplified by the capricious nature of the first-past-the-post voting system. But that has turned what was already on course to be a top-five worst-ever defeat into what seems set to be the all-time worst.

Uniting the right is a necessary step on the way to the Conservatives’ return to power, but it is far from sufficient to deliver it. At best it gets them back to where they were under Johnson: a dysfunctional party disliked and distrusted by most of the electorate, trailing some distance behind Labour in the polls.

And even this won’t be easy. Most voters who have stuck with the Tories since 2019 take a dim view of Farage. And the increasingly desperate attempts to win back those who have switched to Reform UK in recent weeks have fallen flat. This is because they make the same mistake that lost those voters in the first place: thinking this is about making popular pledges when it is actually about demonstrating trustworthiness.

The reason the Tories stand on the brink of a historic defeat is a slow, rolling competence shock that has alienated voters across the spectrum, not just a few months of insurgency on their right flank.

That they had thought the situation salvageable five months ago shows a failure to appreciate both how far and why they had fallen. It is just the latest indication that this is a party that reaches for short-term sticking plasters over long-term solutions.

The Conservatives seem likely to have plenty of time for soul-searching over the coming years. Asking simple questions that produce reassuring yet misleading answers is what helped bring them to the brink of wipeout. They would be wise to take their own future more seriously than they took the country’s.

john.burn-murdoch@ft.com, @jburnmurdoch