Are the Conservatives doomed to irrelevance?

As a Conservative donor, I speak regularly with senior Tory figures, and I keep hearing the same optimistic lines about the party’s awful standing in the polls. ‘Kemi’s net favourability is improving’, they say. ‘She’s more popular than Nigel Farage’, they insist. Both are arguably true. Yet both miss the point.

Politics isn’t measured in favourability ratings. It is measured in votes. And by this metric, the Conservative Party may soon find itself in intensive care. The latest polling aggregator puts the Tories on 18.1 per cent, behind both Reform (28.5 per cent) and Labour (19.8 per cent), and only slightly ahead of the Greens (14.1 per cent). The Conservatives have become irrelevant, and the biggest barrier to recovery is the degree of in-house denial.

Some party figures are sanguine. They say the Tories’ standing is simply the legacy of 14 difficult years in government. They predict that time will heal the wounds of this torrid legacy. The truth is less convenient.

Outside a General Election, the real scoreboard in politics is voting intention. Opinion polls are the equivalent of the Saturday results for a Premier League manager. One or two bad weeks can happen to anyone. But a long run of defeats ought to lead to difficult conversations. At the moment, the Conservative Party is a team that is losing three-nil every week, but wants to talk positively about its possession statistics.

I say that with no pleasure. I became a donor because of Kemi. I like her directness. When she won the leadership contest and said, ‘The time has come to tell the truth’, I was genuinely inspired to write a cheque. But telling the truth must start inside the Conservative Party. It is time to ditch the self-delusion about favourability ratings. If they mattered at all, then Ed Davey would be prime minister.

To be clear, I am not arguing that Badenoch should go. Leadership musical chairs would only make things worse. Being known for moral honesty and purpose is a strategy, but denial is not. For Badenoch and the party to survive, there must be candour about the years of Conservative rule from 2010 to 2024. Voters will not forgive the party for its failures until they are acknowledged.

Candour alone does not win elections. Inspiring hope, however, will. And hope comes from sharing a heartfelt moral mission that the public can believe in: a fairer country where work is rewarded, where virtue matters and where bad behaviour carries consequences.

The Britain we need leading out of is a place where millions toil just to survive, while others idle at home on benefits. It is a Britain where MPs step over rough sleepers near the gates of parliament without breaking stride. There is a great moral argument waiting to be made, and whoever makes that argument the strongest will win the next election. Policy-wise, a four-year commitment to make the first £18,000 of earnings tax-free would be a start. Not as a gimmick, but as a statement of what the party believes: that work should pay, and that there is a Conservative answer to widely accepted decline.

Badenoch has the instincts for this fight. But instinct alone will not be enough. She must be honest about what went wrong, what must change, and what the nation she wishes to lead stands for. Many voters like Kemi Badenoch. But almost none are convinced to vote for her – yet.

Andy Preston was mayor of Middlesbrough from 2019 until 2023.