The Conservative Party stands on the edge of a precipice. After its worst ever general election result in 2024 its support has — remarkably — plummeted still further. Whether the most successful political party in UK democratic history can survive in any meaningful form is now deeply questionable. Our electoral system means that UK-wide parties which drop much below 30 per cent of the vote tend to be brutally punished in terms of their representation in Westminster. This would be especially true of the Tories whose base of support is relatively evenly spread across much of Britain. If an election were held today, with the party consistently in the sub 20 per cent zone, the Conservatives would be eviscerated.
Some would say the reason for this is the loss of a reputation for competence. I don’t totally agree. I think something much deeper is happening and that the consequences for the Conservative Party — and British (small c) conservatism more generally — are enormously more profound. For those who buy into the “chaos and incompetence” (vide Pfeffel) theory of Tory decline, there is a further mystery. For all of the criticism of Bad Enoch for not cutting through sufficiently in the media narrative or failing to score enough points at PMQs, she has undoubtedly overseen a year of (almost unprecedented) Conservative calmness and unity. (Bar the exits of Jenrick & Braverman) This is a rather noteworthy achievement, and one that has gone largely unremarked upon because it involves something you don’t see rather than something you do. She’s also managing to shift the Tories away from the ludicrous 2050 carbon net zero commitment and towards a pledge to leave the European Court of Human Rights. She has achieved these policy pivots with barely a murmur of resistance or discontent from any of her parliamentary colleagues or from any faction within the party. But – riddle me this, dear Puffins – if the underlying problem for the Tories was that they were unleadable, divided, and prone to backbiting, a year of tranquillity under Kemi surely should have gone some way towards making them more attractive to the electorate……….. so why then have poll ratings not improved? Even more bewildering is that, despite their lowly standing, the Conservatives remain the most trusted of any of the political parties in terms of running the economy. This, surely, is as good a metric as anyone could find for “competence”, yet it has not translated into any uplift in support, quite the opposite.
Competence, trust, unity and discipline all matter in politics. As do charisma, clarity of message and media impact. But these are not the driving factors that determine which political tribe people feel they belong to. Now it has been argued that when entering the voting booth the public tend to choose “the least incompetent option”. That might be true of who we bank with, or where we shop. But our political loyalties are more deeply ingrained. There may be a measurable advantage in a political party proving to the electorate that they can adequately manage a spreadsheet — but it is not the core, brand proposition. Beyond regaining a reputation for competence, the party faces a much more metaphysical question. We are going through — and approaching the end of — an enormous realignment in our politics. Not just in the UK, but across the Western world. These realignments happen infrequently, perhaps once every century. The key feature of a political realignment is not that new parties emerge and older parties die/become irrelevant (though this may be a feature); it is that the very construction of political tribes changes fundamentally. The theory assumes that people assemble into their tribes based on one principal and one secondary aligning factor.
From the end of the Second World War until recently, the principal aligning factor had been where you stood on economics. If you tended to support free markets, low taxes, fiscal discipline, capitalism and a small rather than extensive state, you’d very likely have found yourself in the centre-right tribe: in Britain, a Tory; in the US, a Republican; in France, a Gaullist; in Germany, a Christian Democrat. Likewise, believers in the state having a large role to play in providing welfare, running a wide range of industries and correcting apparent market failure, tended to align with voting Labour, Democrat, French Socialist, or German SPD. The secondary aligning factor was where you stood on “social freedoms” — civil liberties, gay rights, lifestyle choices and the like. The big two tribes across most Western countries were a broadly social conservative, pro-capitalist tribe on the centre-right and a liberal-leaning, social democratic tribe on the centre-left.
This has now changed. Over the last decade, the key aligning force that determines your political tribe has shifted from the “economy” to “identity”. Basically, how do you approach nationhood, culture and history ? If you are unambiguously proud of your nation’s history, concerned that immigration levels are too high, and sceptical about international institutions such as the EU, the ECHR, the World Health Organisation and global efforts to tackle climate change, you now find yourself in the new tribe of the right. If you think your country needs to apologise for past misdeeds, that we should welcome large numbers of people from other cultures and be an enthusiastic member of alphabet soup global institutions to tackle environmental and economic problems, you find yourself in the new tribe of the left.
Economics still matters in this new alignment, but it is only the secondary aligning factor. Whether you are a state interventionist or a free marketeer is not the key thing that defines which tribe you now find yourself in. If the main parties of the old alignment wish to flourish under the new alignment, they will need to adapt and change almost beyond recognition. They must choose which tribe they wish to represent. If they fail to do so, they will wither and perhaps even die altogether. The Donald may be a Republican president — but today’s GOP under the new alignment bears almost no resemblance to the party of Eisenhower, Ford ,or even Reagan. It has reinvented itself as a new tribe reflecting the new alignment. Similarly, the Democrats may still technically be a continuation of the party of JFK and Clinton but, increasingly, in name only. Elsewhere, the French Socialists and French Gaullists — the two powerhouses of the old alignment — still technically exist, but barely. The new battle is between Emmanuel Macron’s liberal globalists and Marine Le Pen’s nationalists. In Germany, the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats are both struggling to hold on to support in the face of the growing popularity of the right-wing AfD and of the radical left.
Britain is, later than most other Western countries, now going through the final stages of its own realignment. We can’t yet be sure of the party labels the two big tribes will wear, but Reform is currently making a strong case to be one of them. The problem for the Conservatives is that they have not yet understood that this major realignment is reaching its last stages, and they have therefore failed to decisively pick a side in this new era of politics. In too many areas, the Conservatives are ambiguous when it comes to the major issues which split us into our new political tribes. They channel a certain degree of patriotism and national pride but mix this in with several dashes of globalism. They apparently think that man made climate change is a major problem but believe we can buy more time to deal with it. They remain unclear on the extent to which they wish to unravel the post-Blairite consensus but think it a spiffingly good idea to trim back numbers in the civil service — but only to its 2016 levels. The Tories’ principal strategy simply seems to be to try and score highly on economic competence. There’s nothing dishonourable in that — indeed it’s been their route to electoral victory over many past decades. But it won’t be nearly enough, in the new alignment, to make them one of the two big tribes. The plight of the Conservative Party is not due to the No. 10 Trolley, the Truss mini-budget, nor to Bad Enoch not being on television enough. It is not even because the electorate think the Tories are incompetent or untrustworthy. All of these things may have had some sort of electoral impact but none of them are key.
The central issue is that the political terrain has shifted, and the Conservatives have refused to shift with it. This leaves them stranded in no-man’s land. You might not be entirely clear about Nigel Farage’s and Reform’s precise policies in every area, but you know exactly which battlefield he and his troops are standing in. Until the Conservatives grasp that politics has fundamentally realigned and clearly decide which lane to pick within the new system, the party’s electoral decline will continue — and probably at an ever increasing pace. The upcoming local elections in May will be an indicator of their likely future.
© DJM 2026
