A scenario for a Conservative comeback in Britain

Politicians are routinely accused of being shameless. Nigel Farage has a novel solution. At a press conference on January 15th he told reporters he was “getting in people who are apologetic, indeed ashamed, of what they’d done in the past.” Beside him Robert Jenrick, his newest recruit (and better known for being shameless), shifted in his seat.

The former immigration minister is the most prominent in a string of repentant Tories who have left to join Mr Farage’s populist-right outfit, Reform UK. The most recent defections include a former chancellor, Nadhim Zahawi, and the MP for Romford, Andrew Rosindell. Mr Farage has given Tory MPs a deadline of May 7th (the day of local and devolved elections) to join his party. Kemi Badenoch, the Conservative leader, hopes to persuade voters that her party is the true standard-bearer of Britain’s right. To do so, it might not hurt to lose some apologetic colleagues.

The Tories’ position is dire. Their poll numbers have been in decline almost continuously for six years (see chart 1). From breaking covid-19 lockdown rules to Liz Truss’s disastrous premiership in 2022, the party has eroded Britons’ trust and lost its status as the natural party of government. Some reckon the origins of decline were even earlier, with the 2016 Brexit referendum fracturing the party’s alliance of social conservatives and economic liberals. In both vote share and seats the result in 2024 was its worst since 1832.

Since becoming leader, Ms Badenoch has done little to stop the bleeding. Despite an unpopular Labour government, the party’s support is just under 20%—lower than the 24% it won at the last election and little more than half its typical post-war poll numbers. Reform’s surge makes the Tories’ plunge existential. If right-of-centre voters judge the Tory party to be a lost cause, they may switch en masse to the populist alternative. Even if prominent defectors are not particularly popular (only 11% of Britons have a favourable view of Mr Jenrick), they reinforce Reform’s status as the premier right-of-centre contender.

Yet Westminster has a tendency to make premature pronouncements of death. Based on the fundamentals of the next election, there is a scenario which may not be so bleak for the Tories.

The rise of Reform since 2019 has been closely associated with the salience in voters’ minds of immigration—the party’s raison d’être. In April 2020 YouGov, a pollster, found that only 13% of Britons said immigration was one of their three top issues (see chart 2). Reform languished with less than 2% support in The Economist’s polling average. By the 2024 election the figures were 41% on immigration and 15% for Reform. And by October 2025 immigration’s score as a top-three issue had risen to 57% and Reform’s support to a heady 30%.

There is no guarantee that immigration will continue to have such a hold on Britain’s politics. The Office for National Statistics estimates that, after reaching a peak of almost 1m in 2023, annual net migration is falling fast and may now be lower than it was in June 2016, when Britain voted to leave the European Union. Visa restrictions introduced by the previous government seem to be having an effect and Labour promises to tighten the system. Although there is no sign yet that the government has been able to slow the arrival of small boats, that may change too.

Meanwhile, people’s concerns about their pay packets are likely to increase. Real household disposable income grew by 2.6% in 2024-25, the fastest pace since 2015-16. It’s probably downhill from here. The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), Britain’s fiscal watchdog, forecasts that income growth will slow for the next three years, to just 0.1% in 2027-28—as the next general election approaches. Such stagnation will make the tax rises planned by the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, even less popular; many of them come into effect only in 2028 or 2029. And all that is before accounting for tax rises to pay for higher levels of defence spending as the transatlantic alliance frays.

It is possible that the economy, rather than immigration, will be the dominant issue at the next election. The Conservatives may try to make it so. Despite everything, they hold a clear lead on the question of which party voters think would be best to handle Britain’s economy (see chart 3). Just as Reform rises when immigration is salient, the Tories rise when the economy is voters’ top issue. And voters seem fed up with Labour’s left-wing approach. According to polling by YouGov, the share of people who say the government taxes too much and spends too much has increased from around 28% before Labour was elected to almost 43% today (see chart 4). In late 2024, the British Social Attitudes survey recorded the highest support for reducing taxes and spending since researchers first asked the question in 1983.

Reform is not well-placed to benefit from this. Its voters are poorer than those of other parties, meaning they are more reliant on public spending. And a parliamentary majority for Reform would probably require winning many working-class constituencies in the north of England from Labour. All that makes it tricky for Reform to advocate deep spending cuts. The Liberal Democrats are the only other party, apart from the Tories, that could feasibly gain from criticising Labour from the right, but they have shown neither the ability nor the inclination to do so.

Ms Badenoch, though becoming a more confident performer in Parliament, has so far prioritised anti-wokery over economic wonkery. But it might not be such a bad thing for her to lose colleagues who are ashamed to be Tories. As foreign secretary in 2018, Boris Johnson said “fuck business” over corporate concerns about Brexit. Ms Truss lambasted “unelected bureaucrats” at the OBR. Tory MPs even railed against people who eat avocados or drink lattes as out-of-touch elites. By contrast Kemi Conservatives (according to her shadow chancellor, Sir Mel Stride) defend the OBR. If the party wants to be relevant by the time of the next election, it wouldn’t hurt to be unashamedly in favour of business, fiscal responsibility and prosperity.■