The Recovery, Part II

What is to be done.

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It has now been nearly three weeks since the election. The initial shock of the scale of the Tory defeat should be wearing off. The party's new MPs are settling into Westminster as the old ones slope away. In the coming days, electing a new leader will begin, edging the way towards whatever the recovery might look like. In my last few essays, I've looked at the depth of the peril the party is in and the background that has predicated this crisis. I've also made the case for the resurrection of the party.

The real difficulty, of course, is translating it into action. Neither the death of the Tory Party nor its resurgence is guaranteed. From this vantage point, both are possible, but rest on the decisions made by the leadership and the organisation. It is not by accident that the party has survived the significant political and social changes of the last two centuries but by active work and responsiveness to changing times. It needs to do so again.

In the coming years, the Conservative Party should understand it is again fighting for its life. To survive, it will have to be a much better organisation. It will need to better connect with the nation and anticipate the changing trends that threaten it. In the next election and the ones after that, the party needs to arrive with a positive, effective and persuasive vision and the campaigning means to deliver it. The most obvious lesson of the last two years should be that waiting for something to turn up doesn't work. It is essential to make it happen.

The starting point should be increasing membership. The collapse of the grassroots numbers of the party has been the unspoken disaster of the last 20 years. It is absurd that the party was nearly a hundred thousand members smaller in 2022, after a dozen years in power than in the doldrums of 2005. It is a failure that it is half the size of the Labour Party in absolute terms and as a percentage of votes received. Yes, there are societal changes and trends at play here. The party will never be as big as in the 1950s era of mass membership, but the decline has been much greater than that of other parties, suggesting it is an organisational failure.

The size of the membership matters. It is a source of money and manpower, two things the Tories struggled with in the last election. When the collapse in support turned historically safe seats into battlegrounds, it showed how neglected the organisation had become – in many places the Tories were outmanned and out-resourced, losing them close seats. More than that, however, it gives you a better connection to the constituencies you serve and operate in, providing a flow of ideas, feedback and good sense to the party.

A strong membership is a force multiplier. As membership dwindles, it becomes more challenging for those that stay. Delivering and canvassing, or running the local association, becomes more attractive if others share the burden. Politically, it also means the membership is more likely to be in step with the national mood, not just the preserve of the die-hards. Whether on national policy or local stuff, members are often the ones MPs talk to and listen to most. It is far better for that to be a group of 500 rather than fifty.

The party should target having a membership of 5% of its 2024 total vote by the end of this parliament. That would be about 340,000 members – a reasonable and attainable goal. Let's face it: the people who voted for the party this time are about as nailed on as Tories can be, so it should be perfectly possible to get more than one in twenty signed up. Achieving this is about more than just naming a number, however. It needs to be backed by a strategy which delivers it.

The membership experience must be made into something appealing, pulling voters in. This begins with making some of the basic privileges of membership happen. I've been a member off and on for 17 years. In that time, largely due to the snap elections rules, I've only been able to help pick my local candidate twice – in the the 2010 and 2015 elections. It's hardly surprising that potential members feel there is little point in joining the party. Upgrading membership doesn't end there, however. Producing exclusive content for members is now relatively easy, giving increased perks and access to those who sign up, such as video calls with MPs and newsletters. For a reasonably low time spend, you could massively increase the perceived value of actually joining the party. With the correct thinking, you can offer dozens of things to make membership more attractive.

At the same time, the organisation has to reorient around this as a goal, especially for the next couple of years when there will be little political movement. In the 121 areas we currently hold, MPs should be responsible for this membership drive. Keeping the association healthy should be seen as a critical part of their role and a sign they are credible for higher office. If the party is to have ministers who can actually get stuff done, why not prioritise those who can achieve it in their own patch rather than politicking in the Commons' tearoom? 2024 exposed how many MPs had been lazy for decades with this. It cannot happen again.

Where we are no longer the incumbents, this should become central to rebuilding the relationship between CCHQ and associations. As someone who has chaired a constituency, neither the incentivisation nor the support existed to make your association top-notch unless it was your personal mission. Associations that hit the 5% target could be rewarded with extra funding, visits from senior figures, and the like. This incentivisation should be backed with training and knowledge sharing about the best ways to increase membership, helping associations to do it right. There are some obvious starting points – the membership has massive churn, and little is done to encourage lapsed ones to rejoin. A quick chase to members who have left in the last decade would shake the tree a little. All of it would build towards expanding the party and reap the benefits.

When this is in place, the party must also work on getting the most out of its members. They certainly need to be more appreciated but also better marshalled. Other parties have become better at turning supporters into activists, activists into organisers and so forth. Like the membership drive, the party must work on new ways to enthuse and develop its networks.

Moving through the following stages of this parliament, the party must also think carefully about who and how it selects to fight winnable seats. Critiques of the selection process often have an implicit "I should be selected" (and, for full disclosure, I was briefly on the candidates’ list). What is clear, however, is that the current process is deeply unsatisfactory for grassroots members and aspiring MPs. It is opaque, often dominated by patronage, happy to rush through many without sufficient experience and to string others along with promises no one intends to keep.

The party must be much better at agreeing on what it wants and expects from its candidates. More thought should be given to what makes for effective government and how to balance the range of talents and experiences that can make good MPs. There should be more support and training for those on the list to make them better candidates and parliamentarians. This time, several were dumped into what were now marginals with barely any support to run a campaign or even an induction pack. Above all, the entire process should be better understood and more driven by ability than what seems to be hidden networks of patronage and preference.

These two threads come together as we move closer towards the next election. Members are understandably frustrated about the influence CCHQ maintains over selection. However, this would be much easier to argue against if the membership were bigger and more representative of our voters, never mind broader politics. In the run-up to the election, it was hard to tell if individual photos were from a selection meeting or a candidate's visit to a local care home. The candidate was surrounded by a dozen or so mostly elderly placard holders—hardly the sign of a party on the up.

A small selectorate is going to shift the way candidates are picked. Some fear an ideological impact if we end up with only the most committed of the most committed picking candidates. But it might also be more social. One of the phenomena of this cycle was more candidates who were local councillors and activists. This tendency might be part of a trend of how we see MPs, but there is another issue at play – if only 30 people turn up to pick a prospective parliamentarian, the person who knows 20 of them already is at a massive advantage. Returning to the days of hundreds of people turning out for selections might fix this and encourage the competition that gets the best people in place.

The party must also select candidates early and get them in place in a far better order than has happened in recent elections. The Conservatives already know the seats they should target in the next contest. The sooner people are in place, the more time the party will have to build up name recognition, reconfigure the local party, and amass canvassing data. Given that the timing of the next election is within the gift of Labour, the Conservatives should aim to have all candidates in place by January 2028. In many ways, this year was the worst campaign the party had fought for a long time. The next one needs to be the best.

Successfully building the membership and local organisation is a big part of it. The centre needs to be better too. This year, the party was poor at raising funds, bad at using data, and appalling at advertising. All this must be reviewed and improved, with better staff and systems pulling from best practices worldwide. 2024 blew apart the cracks that had been apparent to those close to the centre for many years. For next time, the party has to be excellent at executing campaigns otherwise it will fall short again.

The Conservative Party must also think deeply about its offering in 2029. The election was lost this time for several reasons that came together. Its policies were bad, its record was poor, and it lost its reputation for competency and decency. Each of these needs to be restored if the party is to stand a chance of expanding in the next general election.

Ultimately, policy will be a long, hard thing to work on. It needs to be informed by what Labour do, and how conditions change over the next four or five years. As Labour themselves showed, there is not much you need to do before the manifesto, and even then, you can be pretty circumspect. Instead, the Conservative Party needs to think more broadly about what it wants to offer Britain and its vision for the future.

It is often the mistake of parties that lose to keep repeating the messages that once brought success. This is shortsighted. Between now and the next election, many things will change. The demography of the electorate is one – but so is the political landscape. The party must consider what will likely arise and avoid those changes. It should think about how Labour might fail, what might narrow the polls, and how it should be able to fight on those terms. There needs to be a Tory vision for Britain in the 2030s and beyond, with profound answers on conservatism as the world changes.

The party also needs to get people feeling good about it again. Its brand is severely tarnished. That cannot be shied away from. There should be no comfort taken from the idea that "There's no love for Keir Starmer", instead, they should worry that 2024 was the "hurt the Tories" election. There needs to be humility and repentance. There also needs to be a period where the party is less belligerent and more as though it likes modern Britain. It needs to reconnect with aspiring Britain and start to offer them something, it also needs to underpin this with a relentless focus on standards and governing effectively.

The Conservative Party has perhaps never been in a worse predicament. 2024 was a terrible result, and despite some promising aspects, the fundamentals are against it. The age profile of voters is particularly gloomy, as is the difficulty of building a coalition between voters who are now pulling in different directions. It has to decide if it wants to survive and implement the changes that can take it from here to something resembling success.

Organisationally, there is much low-hanging fruit. These are not necessarily easy things to achieve, but obvious ones which will yield significant benefits. It starts with building up membership and turning it back into a highly effective campaigning force in both voluntary and professional parties. The party cannot be outspent, outmanned, and outplayed by Labour again, nor can it lose more in places vulnerable to third parties. To start flipping results at scale, a better organisation is needed.

Politically, the battle will be harder. It needs good policies, but it also needs to detoxify the brand and rebuild a core vote that spans generations and demographics. A winning appeal starts with clearly standing for something, but something that is tailored to fit the needs and concerns of the electorate. To achieve this means understanding the landscape as it will be at the next election and beyond. The party has done best when it has been associated with competence and aspiration – a reputation it desperately needs to reconstruct.

It is almost a sideshow to argue whether the party has been too left or right, wet or dry, conservative or liberal. These are mostly nebulous to the median voter. The party failed because it has been too crap at campaigning, communicating and governing. For the sake of its future and rights in general, the real work lies in rebuilding its capacity to do all of those and aligning with a group of voters who want to support it. That, at its heart, is the only way back.