Joey Gwinn, Kevin Ghateh and Grace Hunter: It’s wrong to write off the Young Conservatives

Joey Gwinn is a senior parliamentary assistant and a former county and city council candidate. Kevin Ghateh is the Interim National Chair of the Young Conservatives and Grace Hunter works in a constituency office and is a former borough council candidate.

For much of our lives, the Young Conservatives have been a soft underbelly for punchlines, derision, and proof that the Conservative flame was fuel-starved and dying.

It was an easy source for column inches, an easy target for political opponents and even an easy outlet of frustration for some party members – and for a time, though through the actions of just a few irresponsible individuals, this was somewhat justifiable.

Today, however, this reality couldn’t be further from the truth.

We three have come together to write this not just to correct a false narrative of Young Conservative decline, but to defend the dedication, passion and backbreaking work that we know thousands of Young Conservatives across the country over the last few years have poured into successfully reviving not just our party’s youth wing, but our party as a whole.

Eleven months ago, the Party allowed the election of a volunteer interim chair and the formation of a team of volunteers around them to reignite and rebuild a meaningful Young Conservative outfit. This was the culmination of many voices, including the assiduous Liv Lever and Blue Beyond, and was ultimately spearheaded by Kemi Badenoch who made it one of her first missions as party leader. In her tenure, Kemi has been one of the most passionate advocates of the Young Conservatives, bringing under-30s members front and centre in all aspects of party life, and has been a steadfast rock of support.

In just the eleven short months that our party has had an official youth wing again – led by Kevin, Young Conservative revival has been nothing short of phenomenal and is arguably the biggest shakeup seen in under-30s politics in that time.

Young Conservative attendance at Party Conference has smashed modern records not just once last October but has already done so twice for this year’s conference too; the Young Conservatives’ reach on social media has grown more than twenty-fold; membership figures for under-30s are up, and the new constitution the team has written means that, next month, we will not just be a turbocharged organisation but a fully democratic one too. The current generation of Young Conservatives have also comparatively been one of the most active generations of a youth wing in our Party’s history.

If you have just one takeaway from this piece, we want you to know that the scale of contributions that this generation have and continue to make are not only immeasurable, but also rapidly growing.

Young Conservatives are near-universally integral to campaign efforts on every level, are taking on extraordinary levels of responsibility in helping run all aspects of the voluntary party, and make up the majority of Parliamentary staffers assisting every one of our MPs in beating back this disastrous Government and delivering Kemi Badenoch’s Party Renewal.

This May’s elections saw not just an unprecedented amount of Young Conservative volunteering, but an unprecedented number of Young Conservatives stepping up to be candidates too.

In London, hundreds of Conservative candidates were under-30, and a huge proportion of our activists were too. Not only was this the only region in the country where we both won control of councils and gained seats overall, but many of our retained and newly elected councillors were Young Conservatives. These efforts and the enduring efforts of elected Young Conservative councillors cannot be scrubbed away at the tap of a keyboard.

Young Conservatives also often stand in the hardest seats too. All three of us not only have ample experience of standing and losing, but know first-hand the efforts of hundreds of Young Conservatives every year who stand up and answer the calls for candidates in seats that no Conservative has any real prospect of winning, and still delivering exhaustive campaigns so that every British citizen can still be provided with a Conservative option on their ballot. This is why every win by a Young Conservative candidate should be held as even more precious.

In the trenches, thousands of Young Conservatives have been the critical difference in getting Conservative candidates over the line in countless elections and by-elections. In Newark West last July, it was the relentless efforts of Young Conservatives from Nottinghamshire and Lincoln that saw us reclaim our first Council seat off of Reform since our May 2025 drubbing by a margin of just eight votes. In Barnet, it was a coalition of Young Conservative activists that helped secure a fantastic result in May, almost winning back the whole majority we lost in 2022. Here, 24 of our candidates, many of whom were successful, were Young Conservatives themselves. This burgeoning youth participation is the fruit of the Barnet Young Conservatives, a branch established and built by Kevin over several years. Lincoln too was kickstarted by Joey.

We are sure that Young Conservatives will continue to make the decisive difference in upcoming campaigns, whether that be in Knaresborough East where the candidate, Tyler, interim deputy chair, is a selflessly hard-working Young Conservative himself, or at any other dozens of by-elections on the autumn slate.

But membership of a ferocious electoral juggernaut is not all the old Young Conservatives had a long tradition of offering, and it’s not all that is on offer in the rapidly renewing new Young Conservatives either.

Since Kevin and the Interim Team have taken post, they’ve organised and coordinated nationally advertised events open to all Young Conservatives at a rate of almost one every month, including socials in Bristol and Leeds, a packed-out rave in Birmingham, a candidates party in Kentish Town, panels at both the London annual conference and national spring conference in Harrogate, huge pub receptions at both spring conference and party conference in Manchester – with another planned for Birmingham in October, and an official Christmas party. They have also made inroads linking up with centre-right parties across Europe. It’s been Kevin’s vision from the start, that we three all share, that the Young Conservatives need to be a serious political force that’s fundamentally fun to be a part of.

Equally exciting is the exponentially growing calendar of localised and energetic events put on by newly enthused Young Conservative branches and growing Conservative groups injecting real community into the movement all across the country. Tens of these events have been put on by hundreds of activists in just the last few weeks, ranging from the Next Gen Tories’ now monthly socials to pizza meets in Gravesham.

From our own personal lives as much as the feedback we get from others, we can all say that the Young Conservatives have become more like a family in the last year than at any point during our enduring membership of the Party. There has never been a better time to be a Young Conservative for our current generation, and we say this before even considering the number of hugely positive policies that Kemi is now bringing forward, including her New Deal for young people – the single most revolutionary policy package for under-30s any party has offered in our lifetimes.

All of this, however, has not come without at least some of the same tired and timeless criticisms that we and many Young Conservatives have always had to brush off regardless of our zeal and contributions to help the whole Party move forward – something that thousands of us do from a heart posture of selflessness in Party and National interest, expecting nothing in return except to see dials shifted.

It is true that the actions of a few individuals historically has given credence to some of the stereotypes now levelled at us by outsiders – we have never shied away from that. We also don’t lack self-awareness in that some individuals, with oftentimes no actual established roots in the grassroots party, continue to act online in a way that perpetuates the wrongful pervasiveness of some such stereotypes to an extent that makes most of us cringe until our teeth hurt. This is an enduring problem for our image, but a problem that every party has and a problem countless Young Conservatives have worked tirelessly to begin to successfully now eclipse.

Think about the other parties: for the Greens and the Lib Dems, this cringy, immature, ideologically ungrounded shock and outburst politics is not just pervasively rife but also completely on brand and part of their appeal; Labour hasn’t just suffered its worst electoral defeat in its history, and Reform don’t have an organised youth wing that we, or we think frankly Reform HQ, know of. The reason the very things that make most cringe at hearing the phrase ‘Young Conservatives’ have managed to cut through the media to become a quasi-pop-cultural oddity is because it is so jarringly different from the reality. It’s galling for us actual Young Conservatives to hear, not because truth hurts, but because we know that for the vast majority of us it simply isn’t true. We must not accept this decline narrative when we are roaring so positively forward.

It is also true that conservative ideology, packaged in a way that draws younger generations to that ideology’s true home, hasn’t yet cut through. It is certainly regrettable that in online spaces, it is often the left-most and right-most shouts from our generation of Young Conservatives that cut through, usually on departure when they themselves have discovered that their own ideological groundings were fundamentally not really founded on conservative roots. The unfortunate reality is that for both social and traditional media, dissent sells. Even Conservative Home, as important as it is for platforming both big and small C Conservative values, can oftentimes prove this point. But beneath the most salaciously consumable constructs lies the enormity of the ideological and policy writing heft that Young Conservatives contribute. Just scroll through this website to see for yourself.

We may struggle to make it fully known, but the Young Conservatives are a powder keg of ideas that are already reshaping the party back towards its true conservative principles. It is on this very basis that any attempt to simply write off our generation of Conservatives is simply unfathomably wrong.

We hope this article hasn’t given the impression that we are perfectly content that the Young Conservatives has reached its final destination – we’re not. The renewed organisation, essentially a vast franchise model, has been undergoing an incredible transformation over the last year almost entirely through the work of volunteers. But our discontent is not because we believe this hasn’t been enough, it is because we are simply far more ambitious about the trajectory it should be on, and we know that we are among an ever-growing membership that still remains an under-tapped pool of phenomenal talent.

So if you’re a ‘normal’ aged Conservative and you want to see our impact grow: please consider what you can do to logistically or financially help us. If you want to see Young Conservatives campaign and make a difference on your electoral battlegrounds: please continue to facilitate our campaigning and champion us on an equal footing in selection processes. If you own a pub, restaurant or any other entertainment venue and want to see a renaissance the likes of which harking back to your own Young Conservative glory days: please reach out and work with us. And if you’re a journalist, podcaster, editor or producer and you want to see Young Conservatives spread their ideas: please platform us – ConservativeHome to their credit already does this well.

Young Conservatives have been and will continue to be integral to reviving the Conservative Party, the question now is what can you do to help us continue to revive the Young Conservatives?