The Conservative Party is suffering from the biggest identity crisis in its history

 Alwyn Turner

Daily Telegraph 

06/10/25

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In the aftermath of previous great defeats, the Tories had time to regroup. The presence of Reform UK has removed that luxury

In the aftermath of the 1997 election, John Major said the Conservative Party will always bounce back from big defeats. What if he was wrong?

In the aftermath of the 1997 election, John Major said the Conservative Party will always bounce back from big defeats. What if he was wrong?Credit: David Levenson/Getty Images

“We’ve suffered great defeats before,” said the outgoing prime minister. “We have always come back because there is something in the conservative philosophy and the conservative instinct that runs absolutely with the grain of the British instinct.”

That was John Major, speaking to party workers on the morning after the general election of May 1 1997, and trying to keep a sense of perspective. He had just led the Tories to a catastrophic collapse – just 165 MPs were elected, fewer than half the tally last time – and Labour had secured a massive majority, but he was right: the party had been here before.

In 1906 it had been a Liberal landslide, and the Conservatives had been reduced to 156 seats. And then in 1945, the first Labour majority had seen Winston Churchill’s party cut to 197 seats. On both occasions, the Tories had indeed come back. In the first instance, they went on to dominate the governments of the interwar years; in the second, after the interregnum of Clement Attlee, Churchill returned to start a 13-year Tory term. It took a little longer after Major’s defeat, but in due course David Cameron took the party back into office.

So there are precedents for the electoral abyss in which the Tories find themselves. Even so, Major’s words sound absurdly optimistic now. Partly that’s because 2024 was the worst election rout by all measures: the fewest MPs, greatest loss of seats, biggest fall in vote share. But mostly it’s because the old remedy won’t work this time.

In the past, the Conservatives have – sometimes after a false start or two – eventually come to recognise a landslide defeat as a sign that the country has changed. They have then adjusted their position and moved on. In the 1920s this was an acceptance that the state had an interventionist social role. “If the Tory Party is to exist,” said Stanley Baldwin, three-time prime minister, “we must have a vital, democratic creed, and must be prepared to tackle the evils, social and economic, of our over-populated, over-industrialised country.”

After the Second World War, it was economic intervention by the state that had to be accommodated, with Labour having brought a fifth of British industry into public ownership. The Tories disapproved, but saw no reason to go backwards, to undo what had been done. “Nationalisation has proved itself a failure,” declared the 1951 manifesto. “We shall stop all further nationalisation.”

And after 2005 Cameron made clear how relaxed he was with modern mores. “In some ways political correctness is a good thing,” he announced, and he apologised for “the mistakes my party made in the past” in relation to key liberal causes, particularly apartheid South Africa and homosexuality.

Always it was presented as a reclaiming of the centre-ground, an assertion of the One Nation Conservatism that Baldwin had proclaimed in 1924. What it actually meant was that the country had moved to the Left, and so too had the Tories – there was little need for further change.

More recently, however, the party took a different approach, not following the public mood, but seeking to be in the vanguard. It was so determined to shed the image of “the nasty party”, as identified by Theresa May at the conference in 2002, that it leapt ahead, buying into the fashionable soundbites and hashtags of the day, from “the right side of history” to “be kind”.

Under May’s leadership, The Guardian could run a headline “The Tories are on the right side of the transgender debate”, even as it became a high-tax, high-spend, and above all high-immigration government.

None of that was noticeably conservative but, much worse, it was a political misjudgment, because the country was drifting to the Right. The signs were obvious enough. Nigel Farage’s Ukip won the 2014 elections to the European Parliament, breaking the Conservative-Labour duopoly that had dominated every national poll since 1918. In the general election the following year, only one Ukip candidate was returned to Parliament, but if seats were allocated proportionately there would have been 81 MPs. Rather than adjusting to this new reality, the Tories chose to plough onwards, as though nothing had changed.

Which is why the 2024 election has left the party looking stranded and, frankly, irrelevant. This Labour landslide came without a popular mandate – barely one in five of the electorate voted for Sir Keir Starmer’s party – and reflected not an endorsement of the new, but solely a rejection of the old.

The resultant confusion is cultural and social as much as it is political. What does a Tory even look like today? Labour has an identity – albeit not one that Keir Hardie or Ernest Bevin would have recognised – but the Conservative Party does not. There is no discernible Tory presence anymore. The stalwarts of the suburbs and shires, let alone the aspirant working-class, are being lured away by Reform UK, unashamed of traditionalism, untainted by office and compromise.

And that, ultimately, is why John Major’s optimism feels so alien now. There is a rival pole of attraction that didn’t exist in 1906, 1945 or 1997. In the aftermath of those great defeats, the Tories had time to regroup and readjust – the presence of Reform UK has removed that luxury. Major was correct to suggest that the grain of the British instinct is inherently conservative. But it’s going to take a monumental effort to persuade the public that that’s also true of the grain of the Conservative Party.