Has Rishi Sunak destroyed the Conservatives forever? Our writers give their verdicts

If the polls are correct, the Conservatives are on the verge of wipe-out across the nation. The Red Wall would be shattered by a resurgent Labour party, while the Blue Wall faces a threat from the Lib Dems. Meanwhile, the up-start Reform party is appealing to traditional Tory voters. But will there be a way back from such a defeat? Can the Conservative party as we know it survive such a pummelling?

Here, two of our political writers express their view. Tom Harris believes they will bounce back, though the timing is largely up to who Conservative members select as their next leader. He says the first-past-the-post voting system, combined with the need for a centre-Right alternative to a Labour government, will ultimately work in the Tories’ favour.

Sherelle Jacobs disagrees. She argues that while Theresa May, Boris Johnson and Liz Truss weakened the party, Rishi Sunak’s decision to call an early election was potentially fatal. It has created a whirlwind with the return of Farage, and lost people who in the past would have voted Conservative come what may.

Read their opinions in full below.

We’ve been here before, more than once.

The past is no guarantee of the future, but it would be foolish to ignore the evidence that defeated political parties – even those that are heading for an historic wipe-out, according to all the polls – tend to recover.

As with so much else, 1997 provides an excellent example, if not a precedent, for how a political party can recover its appeal, even after it has been widely written off. The scale of John Major’s defeat was unprecedented, losing half the constituencies he had won five years earlier with the help of the largest number of votes ever cast for a political party. Yet thirteen years later his successor as Tory leader, David Cameron, was in Downing Street, albeit with the aid of the Liberal Democrats. Another five years and he had won his own majority.

Or consider the plight of the Labour Party in 1983. Reduced to just 210 seats, facing an impregnable Conservative majority and having won just two per cent more of the popular vote than the SDP/Liberal Alliance, no one would have been surprised if Michael Foot had just presided over the fatal eclipse of the people’s party by a fitter, more confident rival.

But three factors make the Conservatives’ future less doom-laden than many believe, although the third factor is far from guaranteed. First, all governments need an opposition and that isn’t going to come from Reform or the Liberal Democrats. The former is too far to the Right, the second too far to the Left. The public’s inclination towards symmetry demands that a centre-Left party needs a moderate, centre-Right alternative. Only one party can fit that bill.

Second, our electoral system, despised as it is by reformers and supporters of less popular parties, isn’t going anywhere, and its vagaries virtually guarantee the continuation of the Conservatives as an electoral force.

The third factor is leadership. If, as is likely, Keir Starmer’s government runs into difficulties sooner rather than later, and if those difficulties are serious, the nation will start to consider the alternative. If that alternative has been chosen by party activists who are themselves out of touch with the nation, the Tory recovery will take far longer than it needs to.

Which is why a swift recovery is not guaranteed. But that recovery of itself is still more likely – at some point in the future – than the complete eradication of the Conservatives as an alternative government.

When it comes to the question of who is responsible for wrecking the Conservative party, there are a few contenders. It is often overlooked that Cameron put not just the Tories – but Britain itself – on the path to destruction when he flippantly threw away this country’s last decent chance to rescue itself from economic decline.

Instead of seizing on the sunset of the cheap money era to pursue an aggressive stimulus program and raise the country’s dire productivity, the then prime minister opted instead for an austerity approach. He then called a Brexit referendum to “lance the boil” of Euroscepticism. What he created instead was an unhealable wound.

When Theresa May blew her negotiating hand by losing the Tories’ majority in parliament, the party turned rabid. Its Left wing conspired to force the entire corpus into a state of paralysis; its Right wing could only froth spasmodically with outrage. This left the country disgusted.

With Labour nonetheless still a mess, and amid the professional middle class swinging to the Left and the offspring of the traditional working-class gravitating towards conservatism, Boris Johnson seemed to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat. He was supposed to usher in a new era of “realigned” Right-wing politics. Instead, he preeningly convinced himself that he was the heir to Blair, his divine task to govern in the centre ground.

His politics was cakeist fuge – from the con-socialist economic policies to the points-based open border system. When the rains came, with Britain pummelled by Covid and inflation, the mud cake turned to mere mud. The Tories were stuck. Liz Truss tried to establish some direction but shot the party’s already waning economic credibility to pieces when she tripped the country’s ticking time bomb of toxic LDI pensions in her earnest dash for growth.

Yet even up until the departure of Truss, the annihilation of the Tory Party was far from assured. Frankly, even taking into consideration Sunak’s mediocre premiership, we wouldn’t necessarily be here today speculating the Tory party’s very survival.

But it is Sunak’s single catastrophic miscalculation that he could bounce the country into an election which has finally sent the Tories into a death spiral. Had Sunak pushed the election to the autumn, he could have taken the fight to Labour. As France-bound foreign investment – spooked by Le Pen – flowed into the UK and the dark clouds of inflation cleared, he could have gone into an election with the country on an economic high. It also would have afforded him more time to get flights off to Rwanda and convince his supporting wets to let him offer Nigel Farage a peerage.

Yet if competence is the waning superpower of the technocrats, arrogance is their Achilles’ heel. Sunak resolved that his opponent was an inferior mind and a poor debater, and therefore immensely beatable. He might have believed the insider babble that Farage had retired from British politics and was more interested in nurturing influential connections in the Trump campaign than returning to the gruelling British election trail.

As the letters apparently streamed into the 1922 Committee, he stubbornly thought he could avoid a galling confidence vote by bouncing his own side into an election.

Sunak conceitedly calculated he could plunge Labour into an election while they were off guard, causing them to lurch from gaffe to gaffe (in fact it turned out to be the other way round). He also precociously resolved that, by taking the country by surprise, he could nudge the country into a gentle panic about whether they were really willing to put Labour in power after all. It was an unbelievable gamble. It utterly backfired.

Now momentum is towards the Tory party’s destruction. There is a significant possibility that they will not win enough seats to form the main opposition. If that does happen then the illusion that the Tory party’s destiny to dominate, to rule, to eternally exist will be shattered. The respect they command from those conservatives who vote for the party while intensely disliking it (on the premise that a vote for anyone but the Tories is a wasted one) will be shot.

This centuries-old party will either swallow Reform or be swallowed by it, and in any case never be the same again.