Writing in The Sunday Telegraph, she attributed the party’s worst-ever defeat - in which it was reduced to just 121 seats - to the party pursuing an “idiotic strategy of intermittently and inconsistently making ‘Tory Right’ noises which disintegrated when set against our liberal Conservative record”.
“I say again, whatever some of my colleagues think, the voters aren’t mugs: they saw what we did in office and ignored what we insincerely said while campaigning,” she added.
The former home secretary - who retained her seat of Fareham and Waterlooville but with a much-reduced majority - blamed “high taxes” and “high immigration” as well as “insane political correctness” she believed the party had embraced for the scale of the defeat.
Is this comment not somewhat of an oxymoron? People moved to reform because they’re more right wing than the Tories.
Moving further to the right will enable them to mop up the reform vote and this election show that the Tories still have a HUGE core vote.
Their core are dying off and not being replaced. Also they are losing centre right voters who either vote Lab or Lib, or not at all. Further right they go, the worse that gets.
I understand your point but seeing that labours vote share only increased by 1.7% shows that very few Tories are moving left or centre. Most Tories either protest voted by moving to reform or they simply endorse policies further to the right.
Pretty sure Reform has plenty of x-labour racists too.
Centre Tories seam to have gone LibDems. Or not voted all.
Tory 2019 : 13,966,454 votes
Tory 2024 : 6,827,311 , Reform : 4,117,221
It will be interesting to see how many voters stick with the Lib Dems in the next election.
If the Tories do what we think they are about to do, I think the last of the right-centre voters clinging on will give up on them, and further swell the LibDems.
Sure but it’s at the sacrifice of all the moderate votes. The conservative party was always a weird amalgamation of right of center and varying degrees of extremism. That big problem with reform is that they took all the extremists away leaving them only with the moderates, so obviously they chased after the extremists. This didn’t help them one jot and then they lost the moderates because of their extremist attitudes.
As a result they hemorrhaged voters from both camps.
They are still continuing to chase the hard right extremist option, so they will continue to lose voters.
I’m still of the opinion that this wasn’t an election based on policy, it was an election based on party gate, Lizz Trusses disaster budget and the cost of living crisis.
This was a tactical vote to punish the Tories, I think very few people were thinking they’d vote Tory if only they were a little less right wing. There’s still a considerable proportion of people that blame crime and being poorer on migrants.
Libdem lady elected in my constituency literally had it on her leaflets - vote tactically for me to punish tories. And she won on that basis. Hope she will prove herself, lets see, but I agree with your assessment.