Image source, Getty Images
- author, Paul Seddon
- role, Political reporter
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Conservative leadership candidate Suella Braverman said the party must win back Reform UK supporters to recover from its heavy election defeat.
The former Home Secretary, who is expected to run to succeed Rishi Sunak, said Nigel Farage’s party was an “existential threat” to the Conservative party.
He warned the party no longer had the “luxury of monopolizing” right-wing voters, adding that there needed to be more focus on “core Conservative policies”.
But other senior Conservatives have warned against a shift to the right as the party seeks to recover from its lowest ever parliamentary base.
Conservative Tees Valley mayor Ben Houchen said supporting Reform UK could extend his party’s time in opposition for “many years”.
“No one in the Conservative party that I’ve spoken to personally thinks that’s a good idea,” he added.
The Conservative Party’s heavy election defeat has reduced its number of MPs by 251 to 121, casting serious doubt on the party’s future direction.
The Conservative Party’s vote total fell to just 6.8 million, down from 13.9 million in the last election in 2019.
Reform UK, whose platform included freezing “non-essential immigration” and scrapping the net zero rule, won 4.1 million votes and five MPs.
Harrow East MP Bob Blackman has been elected as the new chairman of the 1922 backbench committee, which sets the rules for party leadership elections. He replaces long-standing chairman Sir Graham Brady, who did not stand for re-election as an MP.
No Conservative MPs have yet announced their candidacy, and debate is ongoing over when and how an election should be held.
Besides Ms Braverman, other candidates for the leadership position include Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverley, Tom Tugendhat and former Minister Priti Patel.
Two other former ministers, Robert Jenrick and Victoria Atkins, also appeared on Politics on Sunday to give their views on the party’s future and suggested they too were considering running.
Meanwhile, shadow home secretary Mr Cleverley called for the party to “come together” and “stand together”.
Writing in The Times, he said the Conservative party was “too often distracted by internal party infighting” and had “lost its well-deserved reputation for effective and good government”.
He said the party has “always performed best by embracing broad support”.
“We’ve lost voters on both the left and the right, and we won’t get them all back if we narrow our proposals,” he added.
“Madness Awakens Virus”
The Conservative party postmortem began at Westminster conference for the populist Conservatives, a right-wing faction set up earlier this year by former chancellor Liz Truss, who lost her seat in last week’s election.
Speaking via video link from a separate right-wing conference in the US, Braverman called on the party to take a tougher stance on immigration, cut regulations and protect government agencies from the “crazy woke virus”.
She said the rise of Reform UK was “entirely our own fault” because the Conservative government had failed to tackle “uncontrollable population growth” in recent years.
She also said the party should withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), arguing it prevents ministers from tackling illegal immigration.
She said Mr Farage’s party, which launched less than five years ago as the Brexit Party, had managed to capture the support of “many traditional lifelong voters” and posed “an electoral threat to our existence”.
“It’s not OK to disparage reform voters. It’s not OK to smear the Reform Party,” she added.
“They are their voters now and we need to do everything in our power to win them back.”
Former cabinet minister Jacob Rees-Mogg, who also lost his seat last week, offered a similar solution, claiming that “Conservatives”, including Reform UK, won a total of 11 million votes in last week’s vote.
He added that the results are “a wake-up call against the arrogance of believing that we have a divine right to govern and a divine right over certain voters.”
“We didn’t. We thought our core votes had nowhere else to go. That’s what they thought.”
“And we can’t just assume that the pendulum is going to swing back to our side or that all of the reform voters are going to suddenly repent. We need to get them on our side somehow.”
But Lord Houchen warned against embracing Reform UK, adding that it would prolong the Conservative party’s “path to salvation” with voters.
He pointed to his party’s loss of seat after seat in Conservative heartlands to the Liberal Democrats, adding that the election “was not about ideology, it was about effective governance”.
Leadership dominates the discussion
The debate over future direction is also reflected in procedural arguments about how leaders should be selected.
Re-elected Conservative MP and former minister George Freeman has argued the party’s leadership rules, introduced in 1998, should be changed to strip members of the final vote on deciding the winner.
He suggested that activists should narrow the list of candidates down to “three or four” and then party lawmakers should choose a winner.
But figures on the party’s right, including Ms Braverman and Mr Rees-Mogg, are fiercely opposed to the idea of taking decision-making power away from Conservative members.
Discussions are also ongoing about when the contest will take place.
The Conservative party has increasingly argued for a longer campaign rather than a rushed selection of a new leader over the summer.
Sir Graham, the outgoing chairman of the 1922 Committee, said on Sunday there was a need to balance the need for debate over the next leader with the need to provide “an effective counter-measure quickly”.
He added that there was “no need” to change the current voting process, in which MPs select two final candidates and then put them to a parliamentary vote.
He added that this would require changes to the party’s rules and that there “probably won’t be” a majority in favour of it.
