Given the scale of the damage it has done to the United Kingdom’s reputation, the hurdles it has placed on businesses, tourists and consumers, it can seem a little eccentric to note that Brexit has also been an utterly rotten deal for the Conservative party.
It brought the premiership of David Cameron to an abrupt end and took the frontline career of George Osborne, the Tories’ most brilliant strategist, down with it. The reconfiguration of British politics and voting it helped to accelerate means that the party has lost, probably for ever, the electoral coalition that helped it to win in 2015 — smaller, yes, in terms of votes gained than those of 2017 or 2019, but one largely comprised of voters with a direct self-interest in economic dynamism and an appetite for tax cuts.
And far from sending Nigel Farage into retirement once and for all, as its advocates once claimed would be the case, Brexit has put him in a position from where he could become Britain’s next prime minister — potentially relegating the Conservatives to minor party status in the process.
More damagingly still, Brexit destroyed the party’s relationship with the chunk of the electorate that the Conservatives will always need if they are not only to win elections but to govern effectively: successful people in the middle of their careers.
Not everyone whose journey on the Eurostar used to end with a near-frictionless arrival at St Pancras feels an emotional connection to the European project. Nor does every small business owner who no longer trades with the continent experience a pang of regret when they are reminded that the UK is no longer in the single market. But they do all experience a sense of irritation at barriers to their pleasures or their profits having been erected against their will.
One reason the successive Tory administrations from 2016 to 2024 achieved so little beyond damage control is that they traded middle-aged voters who needed little from the state for older voters who require rather more. The struggling Conservative party is now essentially one that only appeals to wealthy retirees. The animating energy, purpose and drive for a viable centre-right has to come from people who wish to become wealthy retirees, not people who already are — in other words, people who, for the most part, think that Brexit was a bad idea.
An essential condition today for entry into the upper echelons of Conservative party politics is being willing to at least pretend that you think taking Britain out of the EU was a good idea. This is a never-ending lobotomy for the Tories. It’s not that there aren’t any brilliant, economically successful and working-age people who still support Brexit — there are. There just aren’t as many of them as there are people who hold what, until relatively recently, we’d have called “Conservative” views on economics and public policy but who think Brexit was a bad idea and aren’t willing to pretend otherwise.
If you remove the already large group of people who would make excellent Tory MPs but are doing perfectly well for themselves in jobs they enjoy, and then require the remainder to believe Brexit has turned out to be a good decision, or pretend they do, your talent pool becomes very shallow indeed. The Conservatives’ current approach is a bit like saying you can only fully participate in the political life of the party as long as you don’t own a television — sure, you will get some good people, but not very many.
We underrate how corrosive it is to the Tories’ future that they’ve become a party where it is an open secret that a large number of MPs first elected in 2019 or later who now claim to be long-standing opponents of EU membership, were in fact horrified by Brexit. No party can have honest and serious conversations about policy trade-offs if acknowledging the truth as you see it becomes not just an optional extra, but an active barrier to advancement for the kind of successful people who used to be the bedrock of the Conservatives in both parliament and in the country.
The party’s fortunes would not be immediately transformed were their leader, Kemi Badenoch, to say that she has realised that it is incoherent to kick off one speech by praising the importance of free trade and then, a few days later, celebrate wrenching the UK out of its nearest free trading zone. But what is undeniable is that if the Tory party wants to be once more in the 21st century the party it was in the 20th — a natural home for successful people — it must again become a place in which pro-Europeans are not only welcome but can hold high office. Without that, it will be for ever defined by past glories, and not future triumphs.
stephen.bush@ft.com"The opportunity to serve our country: that is all we ask.” John Smith, May 11, 1994.
- By Bones McCoy
- By Abernathy
