The Conservative Party should ignore public opinion right now

A poll showing widespread indifference to the Conservative leadership contest is inevitable, and should not be cause for alarm: the time will come to speak to voters

A poll by Ipsos taken at the beginning of the month was featured in the media recently: it asked the public which of the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party they favoured, but many found more newsworthiness in the statistic that 62 per cent of respondents said “they do not personally care very much or at all who becomes the leader”. Some perceived in this a kind of “gotcha”, evidence that the condition of the party is even worse than people thought and that Conservatism was utterly irrelevant. I think, even if it is in good faith, that is a misleading framing of the Ipsos results.

The Conservative Party has a very limited public role at least for the rest of this year. It must function correctly and efficiently as His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition, both in formal terms of responding to the government in set-piece parliamentary events like the debate on the King’s Speech—Rishi Sunak as Leader of the Opposition is expected to respond to Rachel Reeves’s Budget speech in October—and in terms of holding the government’s feet to the fire in terms of policy. We’ve seen this in the way that Andrew Griffith, Shadow Science, Innovation and Technology Secretary, and Alex Burghart, Shadow Northern Ireland Secretary, have taken up questions about the appointment of Labour advisers and donors as permanent civil servants since 5 July.

This kind of scrutiny matters, because no government, however large its majority, should be left unchecked and untroubled to do as it pleases. At the same time, we should be realistic: it is unlikely that Sir Keir Starmer is going to come badly unstuck in political terms in the immediate future, so, while Griffith and Burghart are not quite going through the motions, they understand, as we do, that their impact will be limited.

John Major understood this predicament when he made his farewell speech as leader of the Conservative Party at the annual conference in Blackpool in October 1997. He was handing the reins to the 36-year-old William Hague, who had beaten Kenneth Clarke, John Redwood, Peter Lilley and Michael Howard in the last leadership contest to involve only the parliamentary party, and he warned the audience that they would initially struggle to be heard against Tony Blair’s New Labour juggernaut.

It’s difficult being the leader of a newly defeated Party. For a while, people won’t wish to listen to what we have to say.

The departing leader went on to promise that such a situation was not permanent, nor should the party lose hope.

That will pass. The tide will turn and—as the local election results are already suggesting—perhaps more speedily than anyone imagines… we now have the luxury of time to think anew—and we should use it to build up policies that the broad mass of the British people will know are right—and feel comfortable with.

Major’s words should not be taken as a blithe assumption that the Conservative Party will naturally return to power as a result of some inevitable swing of the pendulum. But they suggest a different way to look at the prima facie gloomy news from the Ipsos poll.

There are six MPs contesting the party leadership: James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Mel Stride, Robert Jenrick, Dame Priti Patel and Kemi Badenoch. They should not suffer too much anxiety about the electorate’s current indifference to the party’s leadership race, because, at the moment, the electorate is not their primary audience or constituency. The process for the election of the new leader of the Conservative Party dictates that Conservative MPs will vote in two ballots starting on Wednesday 4 September to narrow the field from six to four candidates. Those four will then all give speeches at the party conference, which is being held in Birmingham between Sunday 29 September and Wednesday 2 October, after which there will be two more ballots of Conservative MPs to reduce the remaining four candidates to a final two. The whole party membership will then vote on the remaining two, from Thursday 10 October to Thursday 31 October, and the final winner will be announced on Saturday 2 November.

The logical interpretation of this process is that leadership hopefuls need not try to establish any great rapport for the voting public in the short term. In the immediate future, let us say till the end of 2024, the electorate has virtually no interest in the Conservative Party and that, instead, candidates should focus on two key constituencies: firstly, their fellow MPs and then, if they are lucky enough to reach the final two, the party membership.

Self-evidently, appealing to all of those groups at once is a challenge, so the key is prioritisation. Initially, candidates will to play to the gallery of their colleagues in the House of Commons, calculating what kind of qualities other MPs value in a potential leader. It may be, for example, that the parliamentary party, which includes some very seasoned and experienced political operators, may look for a pragmatic, centrist, reassuring figure, and many have suggested that James Cleverly may shine in this context. At the same time, the rank-and-file membership is thought to lean more towards the right than MPs, and may prefer uncompromising and emphatic statements to a nuanced dialogue: it may be here that Robert Jenrick or Dame Priti Patel could shine.

In any event, the central point is this: leadership candidates must prioritise. The first task for any of them is to be elected, and that is achieved by convincing first Conservative MPs and then Conservative Party members that he or she is ideal for the job. This does not mean they should base their policy platforms solely on what will please existing Conservatives: self-evidently that would be narrowing and disastrous. But they should think about the successive different contexts, and pitch their ideas with those in mind. Emphasise what will gather plaudits, and, if necessary, downplay, but do not abandon, those elements of your pitch which are aimed at broadening the party’s future electoral appeal rather than enthusing the core vote.

Winning the party leadership is only a mechanism, a tool to give you an opportunity to compete for office and power. Ultimately the new leader of the Conservative Party will stand or fall on his or her ability to present a convincing, coherent centre-right narrative to a broad electoral coalition, and it is only by carrying out that task that he or she can then have the opportunity to implement Conservative policies.

The first meaningful contact with the voters since the catastrophic defeat of 4 July will be upon the Conservative Party soon enough: there are local and mayoral elections scheduled for Thursday 1 May 2025, by which time the new leader will have been in post one day shy of six months. At a bare minimum, he or she must tread water for these elections rather than see the party’s support slip further, and it is defending control of 19 county councils and seven unitary authorities. It is unrealistic to expect the Conservatives to look like a government in waiting by that stage, but the party must at least have a vague credibility about it and must seem like it is a functioning, relatively unified political organisation with some broad sense of purpose.

That must be the sequencing for leadership candidates, then, in terms of their primary constituencies: from now till early October, fellow Conservative MPs are the priority, then the party membership until the end of October, and then, only then, for the victorious candidate, it will be time to look outwards and begin to prioritise the electorate. This will all happen very quickly, but there is reassurance too: the fact that voters are indifferent at the moment is both inevitable and understandable. Once the new leader has been chosen, then he or she can start to make their presence, their policies and their character better known and begin to articulate to voters why they should, in fact, pay attention and give the Opposition a hearing.