Small Tents
Party purges and purity spirals
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The Conservative Party, it appears, is tipping into a purity spiral. The purges of the candidates’ list have begun – although anecdotally, many potential candidates have been self-purging for a while. The foremost offensives appear to be support for the ECHR and Net Zero. The latter, curiously of course, having been Conservative policy for a decade or so, and one of the key flagship pledges of the 2016 manifesto. It is a push, I suppose, to stamp the leader’s authority onto the party, remaking it in a new image. The move is also calculated to bolster the party’s right flank against Reform and answer a bugbear that has bounced around the party for years: that candidates tended to be too Wet.
The approach is rooted in the internally dominant diagnosis of 2024’s problems: that the party was too left-wing in government. This almost tips into a “stabbed in the back” narrative that circulates within right-wing Tories, namely that the Wets undermined previous governments and led the party to failure. It is, at best, a partial diagnosis. For sure, the Conservatives failed to meet their own promises on migration and struggled to reduce spending as much as they sometimes liked. But really, 2024 was a broader failure, driven largely by poor governance, including failures in public services, struggles to deliver growth, and being mired in scandal.
The drive for purity misunderstands both the dynamics of political success and how the public responds to parties. Winning is rarely the result of narrow appeal. It is simple arithmetic. The more people who might vote for you, the more votes you are likely to get. Forty per cent of the population tolerating you is far better than fifteen per cent adoring you. The other side of the equation matters too – divisive political parties motivate their opposition.
