Reader, we blew it. The route back for my party is steep and narrow

The results of last week’s local elections were depressingly predictable. With the thankful exception of Ben Houchen’s victory in Tees Valley, my party took a drubbing. Whether or not these results prove to be an accurate prediction for the general election, we must face the fact that the Conservative Party has gone from one of its best to one of its worst local election results in just four years.

It’s easy to blame such a collapse on the party leader, or in this case, successive leaders. But this is to overlook the underlying trends both here and abroad.

Over the last twenty years, a great “realignment” has been taking place in Western politics. Globalisation, de-industrialisation and declining political support for neighbourhood and family life have seen voters become disenchanted with the established political parties. Many millions shifted their allegiance to politicians who emphasise economic, cultural and national security over global market liberalism and out-of-touch “woke” elitism. The vote for Brexit in 2016 and the seismic shift of the working class vote from Labour to the Conservatives in 2017 and 2019 were signs of this realignment.

While the UK Conservative Party – just five years later – is now staring into the abyss, centre-Right parties across the West are still tapping into this shift and anticipating big gains in forthcoming elections. Having led the realignment, Britain is now bucking the international trend. So what happened?

Reader, we blew it. For a brief moment, Conservative voters across the UK – from our rural heartlands to post-industrial towns – believed that the party understood their concerns and would deliver. These voters demanded economic regeneration or “levelling up”, to restore wealth, productivity and purpose to the regions rather than continued over-reliance on the financial services of the South East.

They wanted, and still want, patriotism and national security, rather than a vision of “global Britain” which frequently seems to serve an international elite rather than ordinary UK citizens. Our voters want a state that is neither big nor small but one that works. They don’t want the meaningless mantra of “Diversity, Equality and Inclusion”.

They do want to be proud of family, neighbourhood and nation, and they want cultural security, not mass immigration. And they want affordable houses for their children and grandchildren.

It is significant that the Conservatives who spoke to these concerns did better last week than the party as a whole. Ben Houchen in Tees Valley, Andy Street in the West Midlands and Susan Hall in London all outperformed the national party’s polling because they stand for economic and cultural security and for the pragmatic promotion of their regions.

Sadly, at a national level, our party has not delivered for many of our voters. But just as it is wrong to attribute our success in capturing the realignment to any particular leader – the lion’s share of the “Red Wall” swing happened under Theresa May, not Boris Johnson – it is also wrong to blame the failure to deliver on any particular prime minister.

Rather this failure is better explained by differences of opinion within the Conservative parliamentary party. It is often said that we are a “broad church”, but since 2016 this has at times proven to be a weakness rather than a strength. These divisions certainly create unhelpful headlines, but they also ensure that some of the key reforms demanded by our voters simply cannot happen – under Rishi Sunak or any other leader.

We cannot meaningfully reform our asylum system by leaving the ECHR, we cannot drastically reduce immigration, we cannot have an effective industrial policy, we cannot repeal the Equality Act, we cannot reform planning laws to build millions of new homes, because these measures would not pass through Parliament. In short, the Conservative Party has not yet fully grasped what the realignment is all about.

None of these reforms should be beyond the pale for Conservatives; indeed it’s the direction in which the Prime Minister is pushing. There is a route back to success for our party, though it is a steep and narrow path. Hall, Houchen and Street, along with the rising popularity of Reform, demonstrate that the demand for a realignment is still there. Our only hope is to deliver it.