Only serious corrective action can stop the Tory plane crashing to the ground

Conservative Party candidate Helen Harrison reacts during the by-election for the Wellingborough constituency

The lights have been flashing red on the Conservative Party’s flight deck for some time now.  On Friday morning, a few more lit up. The plane is spinning to the ground fast. Some of the crew are pulling on parachutes and getting out while they can. But the passengers are still being told: don’t worry, we have a plan, we know what we are doing. Maybe there is a plan – but is it just to carry on doing the same thing until we hit the ground?

If you had any hope that things were picking up for the Conservative Party – and I must admit I have had a few glimmers of it this year – Thursday night’s by-elections will, or should, have killed that off.

The Kingswood result is roughly what you would expect from the current state of the polls – a 16 per cent swing, consistent with a heavy defeat nationally. But Wellingborough is a truly terrible result. A 28 per cent swing is much, much worse than the national polls. At a national level, it means utter disaster.

Now, of course, by-elections are different, and both of these had special factors. It’s not obvious that choosing the partner of Peter Bone, the previous Tory MP who had been expelled from Parliament, was the best strategy for holding on to Wellingborough. And in Kingswood, Chris Skidmore’s precipitate departure to join the green bandwagon, and the imminent abolition of the seat itself, won’t have boosted enthusiasm. In neither place did the Tories really bother campaigning. So a bit of interpretative caution is justified.

But you can’t hide the general picture – and it is the same as with all previous by-elections: Conservative voters didn’t come out and vote. In Wellingborough, Labour got the same number of votes as last time and in Kingswood, their vote actually fell by 5,000. But in the latter, nearly 20,000 Tories sat on their hands as did 25,000 in Wellingborough. When that many of our voters won’t vote for us, we aren’t going to win elections. It’s as simple as that.

The other story of the night is of course the Reform Party. For the first time they delivered on their national poll ratings of 10-13 per cent of the vote. But they still got only 3-4,000 votes in elections where vast numbers of Tories stayed at home.

Two decent Reform candidates

These numbers still suggest that the positive appeal of Reform to Conservative voters is quite low – and this in elections where they had two decent candidates (which, to put it charitably, won’t be the case everywhere), which weren’t about choosing the government and accordingly where the “vote Reform, get Labour” slogan had little real purchase.

Reform can hamstring us, they can certainly damage us badly, but I don’t think they can get ahead of us.

I don’t want to give up on the general election. I am frightened by what the Labour coalition of anti-Brexit self-righteous woke control freaks, on the one hand, and Marxists with a dash of anti-Semitism on the other, might do to our country. But we have to acknowledge that many voters seem less troubled. So we must do more than try to make the flesh creep and give people a positive reason to vote for us.

That brings me back to what I have been saying for the last few years, both within and outside government: if we want the many Conservatives in this country to vote for us, we have to give them Conservative policies and show why these fit into a Conservative vision and philosophy for the country as a whole.

But time is running out now. I still hope the March budget may confound expectations, but the apparent outsourcing of the decision-making to the OBR doesn’t leave me optimistic.

So the plane is spinning faster; the ground is getting closer; and only serious corrective action can now make a difference.

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