Defeated Tory MPs debate where it all went wrong - and how to save their Party

After suffering a historic loss, Rishi Sunak has been forced out of No 10, resigning as leader of the Conservatives. A leadership election will now commence.

Here, former Conservative MPs exclusively debate the future of the Party.

Should it move to the centre, or appeal to disaffected Reform voters? What should its priorities be in the short term? Can it survive?

The debate starts now.

Miriam Cates

Former Conservative MP

‘We need a party that is both socially and economically conservative’

Today is a dark day for conservatives. Despite a combined vote share for the centre-right of 37.2% – compared with Labour’s 36% – our system has delivered an enormous majority for Labour. We have been decimated.

So how did we end up with this most unrepresentative of Parliaments, with the Conservatives losing so many MPs despite the Labour vote declining? Our vote was split – fairly evenly in constituencies like mine – between Reform and the Conservatives.

In 2016, 2017 and again in 2019, British people voted for a new kind of politics. They were tired of the liberal consensus which, for the past three decades, has sold out our culture and our economy to the interests of an international elite. Many voters in our villages and post-industrial towns despair of how successive governments have prioritised international courts over our national parliament, foreign workers over our own, global conglomerates over small business and imported neo-Marxist ideology over our own history and culture.

For a brief moment in 2019, it seemed as if the Conservatives had woken up to this ‘realignment’. The commitments of Boris Johnson to ‘Get Brexit Done’, and to Level Up our economy promised finally to fulfil voters’ demands. But it was not to be; despite many brave attempts by individual MPs and Ministers, the outgoing government oversaw a period of record immigration, massive public debt and the long march of woke through our institutions. Understandably, many of our core voters are angry and frustrated that we have not delivered and have shifted their vote to Reform, or stayed at home.

The way back for the Party will be a difficult one. The first step must of course be to better represent voters’ views on immigration, sovereignty and culture. But we must also recognise that the liberal economic model of the last 40 years is broken. Free-market liberalism will not win back the votes we lost yesterday. We need a party that is both socially and economically conservative; the liberal consensus has failed.

Tobias Ellwood

Former Conservative MP

‘The Conservatives must return to the middle-ground’

The nation has spoken and the message is as clear as it is brutal. Our Party did not deserve to continue in office.

How long this lasts for is up to us. At the last election it was Labour that the nation shunned. Yet within only four years the party re-invented itself, targeting the sweet spot of the electorate – the middle ground.

Choosing a new leader is premature. Until the final selection of the Party leader is returned to the Parliamentary Party, wannabe future leaders will gloss over trying to impress colleagues with their loyalty and instead appeal directly to our Party base. The proven risk is that we make promises which cannot survive contact with reality. This is our Achilles heel.

The Conservative Party wins elections when it remains a broad church and looks beyond its base to the very middle-ground that Labour have just occupied.

The leaders who put the nation’s interests first and governed from the centre did so with distinction: Benjamin Disraeli, Stanley Baldwin, Winston Churchill, Harold Macmillan and, yes, Margaret Thatcher too.

I urge Rishi Sunak to stay on as leader and oversee a period of reflection in order to shape a robust consensus about what modern conservativism means to the nation. This is the fundamental building block missing of late.

Simply put, it is about putting country and community first. The alternative is to seek solace by embracing the extremes: a recipe for failure. One road leads to recovery. The other risks gifting Labour a decade or more in power.

Matt Warman

Former Conservative MP

‘Reform is not honest. It is the worst of the old kind of politics’

A tide of contempt for politicians has swept us out of power. Broken promises turned healthy British scepticism of leaders into a toxic desire to punish all those in office, and so Starmer enters No 10 with most voters believing that things can only get worse.

As Margaret Thatcher observed in 1997, we will now start to rebuild the party for the future.

Conservatism always used to be based on competence – painfully hard to demonstrate in opposition – and needed relatable, inspirational leadership to capture the hearts of voters. We’ve recently been devoid of both.

Those who want a more right-wing Party anyway are already saying that the rise of Reform proves that tacking towards them is the best way to achieve success. In reality it proves the opposite – Nigel Farage’s party gained just four seats. They have made knowingly undeliverable promises in the knowledge they will never have to try to implement them.

This is not a newly honest kind of politics – it’s the worst of the old kind. Now they demand PR knowing it is the only system in which coalitions mean compromises that make manifesto promises redundant.

MPs who lost their seats, such as myself to Reform’s Richard Tice, should tread carefully on prescribing what comes next. But it seems obvious that a Party that wins in Boston and Bournemouth and Wales as well as Winchester can only do so with a programme that appeals to the broad range of demographics that live in those diverse places. If we’re not committed to winning widely, we will never form a government again, under first past the post or PR. Denying that fact demonstrates not courage or purity, but simply a shaky grasp of maths. We cannot divide to rule.

The electorate is more volatile than ever. Conservatives must bear in mind that one lesson of 2024 is that 2029 must be fought with a leader who could actually take over. A new leader must inspire loyalty, and their new chief whip must make sure he or she has it. Discipline in parliament and diplomacy to convince the media that the Tories are relevant will be key.

There was a mood for change, supercharged by partygate, Liz Truss’s premiership and a lamentable campaign. The better question is how we put forward a plan that tackles immigration, cuts taxes and builds houses in a way that both convinces and inspires. With Starmer as Prime Minister, Britain needs those Conservative values more than ever.

Bob Seely

Former Conservative MP

‘We must stop demonising Farage, but park our tanks on his lawn with Kemi Badenoch’

It’s often said that success has many parents, but failure is an orphan.

Rarely in political life has a party thrown away so much so quickly. To have gone from a position where 10 years in office seemed a minimum, to one where the calamity of 1997 appeared a good result, beggars belief.

So what do we need to do? First, Look at the data. We lost because the conservative vote was badly split. Therefore, to have a chance of winning we need to reunite the Right.

What does that mean? We need to stop demonising Nigel Farage and realise that he did well because there was, electorally a gap in the market. We either do a deal with Reform at the next election or introduce policies that are both credible but also which finish Reform off. The Conservatives will not survive if Reform continues to poll over 10 per cent.

Elections are won from the centre but we were seen to be not conservative enough by many of our voters. A majority for every party believes mass migration is too high. Because our leadership failed to deal with that single issue, people did not listen to us on anything else.

We should not rush but we do need to get in place a new team. For me, the only person now capable of positioning us in value terms and policy terms is Kemi Badenoch, should she run. If Kemi wins, and we have someone who clearly and competently espouses a conservative rather than a managerialist view of the world, we have a chance of getting heard again, especially given the volatility of voters and the low polling of Labour.

Labour will quickly get the shock of their lives in Government, and it is likely their popularity will plummet as they fail to grip the same problems that we faced: immigration levels, slow growth due to being over-taxed and overregulated, the burden of net zero, an NHS unable to deliver.

People wanted change. They have wanted to be able to trust, and we failed.

If we can win back trust through a new leadership and a new vision, and deliver credible ideas over the coming months, on migration but also on other key issues such as housing and public services, then we could recover potentially quickly. If not, we’re finished for good and we will gift the future of our great nation to a Labour Party instinctively at odds with the values and outlooks of the British people.