The 'Everything Bagel' theory of the Conservative defeat 2024

...And what to do about it

Did we lose because we were too right wing or too left wing?

Both.

Did we lose because of the behaviour of the people at the top, or because people were unhappy with our performance?

Both.

Were we unlucky with Covid and the Ukraine/Energy crisis, or did we make our own misfortune?

Both.

Over recent weeks I have spoken to literally thousands of my constituents. If you knock on every door in a heck of a lot of streets you have a lot of interesting conversations, which reveal the tricky task facing the party.

Different MPs in different places will have had different experiences. But mine is pretty representative: our area includes the edge of a city, a town, and some villages. We’re in the middle of the country, and the middle of the pack in most ways.

I met plenty of people put off by Partygate, Barnard Castle, disunity and too many changes of PM. There are a chunk of people who are traditionally Conservative because they see us as the serious, grown-up, eat-your-greens, balance-the-books party. And the events of recent years have put many of them off.

I met plenty of people who were just a bit depressed about the state of the country.

A big chunk of people would volunteer that this was because of Covid and Ukraine, but many others have forgotten this, and only see the problems they have caused.

Here, far and away the three biggest policy issues were the NHS, immigration and the cost of living. As it happens, those are the top three issues people name in the polls too.

After those big ones there were a string of other things that came up. For many conservative voters potholes were top of mind. Gaza was a big issue at the Leicester end, and I got yelled at in the street about it three times. Schools came up a bit - particularly special needs, and also Labour’s plans for VAT on independent schools. Crime and disorder were another - particularly things like knife crime.

In the Westminster village people still too often think there are one set of voters who care about the NHS, and then a different set of people who want to cut immigration.

In reality, they mainly overlap - indeed many people I spoke to directly connected the two issues: more people, more pressure on services.

I met endless people who were on the one hand culturally and socially conservative (on migration, culture and crime) but also worried about schools, hospitals, councils and the state of the roads and town centres. Appealing to these voters was the winning combo for both Blair and then Boris in 2019.

But in 2024 we appeared to many voters to be drifting on both.

This is what I mean when I say we were both too left wing and too right wing.

We were elected on multiple occasions promising to reduce immigration, but increased it to a record high. Boris Johnson introduced the new liberal system which made numbers explode. Liz Truss wanted to liberalise it even further. Rishi moved excruciatingly slowly to deal with it even as the numbers reached record highs. Even in the dying days of the last parliament we were having an argument about the post-study work visa. Too many people in government thought it more important to fight for their departmental position than to keep one of our most important pledges to voters.

So many of those I spoke to who were considering Reform raised the small boats crisis, with a mix of anger, frustration and bewilderment. I heard again and again: “You said you would stop the boats and you haven’t.” They literally couldn’t understand why not.

Labour’s share of the vote in England only went up by 0.6%. You can say we mainly got obliterated simply because we lost a stack of voters to Reform over this issue.

To those of us who have been pushing for a stronger line, this was hardly a surprise.

An essential step in reviving the Conservative party is to win back these lost votes. To do this it is essential that we show we are “under new management” on the immigration issue, on which many people feel betrayed.

I’ve written before about how the build up of ECHR case law is making it more or less impossible to solve the small boats issue. Moving to support exit from ECHR would be one way to restore trust with these voters, and is in practice the way to actually solve the issue.

Starmer’s plan - which amounts to: “be nice to the French, let more in legally and, er, better enforcement” - will fail. At that point voters will look elsewhere for answers, and we need to be the ones providing them.

And yet, there is a tricky balance to pull off. Whoever is our next leader must win back voters from reform on the right but also those who have flowed to Labour / Lib Dems / the Greens, or not voting.

For these voters we need to demonstrate:

1. That we care about and have a plan for public services - above all the NHS.

2. That we are a generally level-headed bunch, and have a plan for the economy.

There is some tension here between winning back the voters lost to Reform and those lost to the left parties or non-voting. But the tensions can also be exaggerated.

Now, I could write you a technocratic plan for the NHS full of things I think would help improve it. We could follow the Hewitt review and NHS plan and try and shift the balance of resources to primary care and prevention…. We could reform GP remuneration, liberalise the ARRS and QOF… drive the growth of the NHS health check… We could continue to drive the uptake of productivity-enhancing technology…

…But in truth voters are unlikely to be interested in much of this.

We did actually deliver on 2019 manifesto promises like the 50,000 extra nurses and 50 million extra GP appointments. But partly because of Covid and partly because of strikes, and partly because of the ageing society, people did not feel the health service was in a good place.

So - to make voters look again at us - we need a very simple headline answer to “why the NHS will be better under us”.

My suggestion would be that we should promise to take a large chunk of money out of the aid budget (£15 billion a year in 2023) and put it into health and social care. We could focus the money on improving access to GPs - far and away the bit of the NHS which people interact with most.

Such a pledge would speak to both Reform-minded and centrist voters¹. Cutting aid to cut tax I don’t think would work. Cutting aid to fund the NHS would.

At the same time, we do need to rebuild our reputation with boring, centrist, square, sensible, small-c conservative voters on the economy.

There will be opportunities on this front: Labour face some massive decisions in the weeks ahead in the run up to Reeves’ first budget. She is no fool, but her Mais lecture gives almost no clue as to what her economic plan is. It is beyond thin.

Will Labour “get their disappointments in early” and break their tax pledges? Or try to squeeze huge sums out of just 1/4 of the tax base? Or do they go for something more incremental (with the risk that they will have to come back for more later)?

Fighting on two fronts is difficult, but the Conservatives now have to. Whoever our next leader is will need great skill to simultaneously win votes back from Reform on the one hand, while attracting them back from the centre and the sofa on the other.

1. Having a clear plan to cut out underperforming NHS managers and tiers of bureacracy would be good, but this works better as a supplement to a simple main message of “more funding.”