All going south

The Conservatives aren't making progress in their heartlands. That's a big problem for them.

No longer as Tory as it looks. Photo: Samuel Sweet

New polling this week put the Lib Dems top in the South of England. This should be taken with the usual caveats. These sub-polls tend to be small sample sizes and noisy. Looking at the wider picture, however, it tends to stack up. The party has climbed steadily since the start of the year, and we would, based on 2024, expect this to be proportionally skewed towards the south. This presents a real problem for the Conservatives.

The South of England has always been the Tory’s patch. The two are almost synonymous. Whether it is the Surrey suburbs, the smart towns or the rural hinterland, these are places that not just consistently voted Tory but embodied the party. Even in 1997, you could have travelled from Plymouth to Margate without leaving Conservative seats. Last summer, this all changed.

The big difference between the electoral map of 1997 and 2024 is the vast swathe of seats across the south of England that the Conservatives lost. These are the reasons why the party ended up with 121 seats, not the 165 of Major’s defeat, and this trend appears to be strengthening, which presents some real issues for them.