Losing It: The Conservative Party and the 2024 general election

By Michael Ashcroft

The 2024 general election produced the worst defeat in the Conservative Party's history. Five years after winning a commanding majority, the Tories lost half their vote and two thirds of their seats in parliament.
In Losing It Michael Ashcroft examines the seismic result and its causes. Drawing on extensive polling and analysis – as well as conversations with voters across the country, who describe in their own words how the Tories squandered not just the election but their reputation for competent government – this is a pitiless account of how the Conservative Party came to be seen by those who elected it to office.
Before the Tories can begin any kind of recovery, they need to understand and accept what happened and why. This book sets out the reasons in uncompromising terms.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Biteback Publishing
• Release date: Oct 3, 2024
• ISBN: 9781785909672

Michael Ashcroft

Lord Ashcroft KCMG PC is an international businessman, philanthropist, author and pollster. He is a former deputy chairman of the Conservative Party and currently honorary chairman of the International Democracy Union. He is founder and chairman of the board of trustees of Crimestoppers, vice-patron of the Intelligence Corps Museum, chairman of the trustees of Ashcroft Technology Academy, a senior fellow of the International Strategic Studies Association, a life governor of the Royal Humane Society, a former chancellor of Anglia Ruskin University and a former trustee of Imperial War Museums. Lord Ashcroft is an award-winning author who has written twenty-seven other books, largely on politics and bravery. His political books include biographies of David Cameron, Jacob Rees-Mogg, Rishi Sunak, Sir Keir Starmer and Carrie Johnson. His seven books on gallantry in the Heroes series include two on the Victoria Cross.

Book preview

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losing it

The Conservative Party and the 2024 general election

Michael A. Ashcroft

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Contents

Title Page

Introduction: Lessons from history

Methodological note

1. The 2024 general election

2. How we got there (according to the voters)

3. Meet the defectors

4. The good old days – and the future

About Lord Ashcroft

Copyright

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Introduction: Lessons from history

IT IS NEARLY TWENTY years since I published Smell the Coffee: A Wake-Up Call for the Conservative Party. That work, my first foray into political polling, aimed to show why the Tories kept losing elections. One of the most important findings was that, after eight years and two further defeats, they had still not really learned, let alone acted upon, the lessons that should have followed Labour’s landslide victory in 1997.

The Conservative Party cannot wait another eight years before getting to grips with what has just happened. On 4 July it lost half of its vote and two thirds of its seats in parliament. It is faced not just with an enormous Labour majority but, in Reform UK, an insurgent competitor on what it has always considered its own territory. Whether the Conservatives recover, and how quickly, will define the shape of politics for many years beyond the current parliament. The 2024 general election felt like a nadir, but there is no rule to say that things can only get better, as someone once said: there is no reason why there must be only two major parties or, if there are, why the Conservatives must always be one of them.

For the Tories to approach any kind of recovery, they will need to understand and accept why they lost not just the election but the reputation for competent government that was once an indispensable part of their appeal. To many readers, the reasons for viiithe defeat might seem so obvious as to be hardly worth writing down. But it is human nature, not least among politicians, to learn the lessons that suit you and draw the conclusions that fit with what you already thought. My large-scale polling and analysis, together with focus groups around the country with voters who switched to other parties, provide some pretty inescapable evidence of how the Conservative government came to be seen by those who elected it.

There are three broad reasons for what befell the Tories in 2024. First, it is always difficult for a government to be re-elected after so many years in office. The party gets tired and runs out of steam; disappointments accumulate; the voters grow weary and have a healthy instinct that it’s time for change.

Second, the Conservative voting coalition of 2019 was extremely unusual, and it was never going to be easy to hold it together. The combination of Jeremy Corbyn, Boris Johnson and the aftermath of the EU referendum threw together lifelong Labour voters, liberal remainers, Farage-supporting arch-Brexiteers and traditional Tories to produce a winning but unstable alliance with conflicting worldviews and contradictory demands.

But these are both reasons why winning yet another term would be tough for any government. They do not explain why the Tories got the trouncing of a lifetime: why people were so sick of them that the Liberal Democrats have taken the seats once held by David Cameron and Theresa May, or why we have Labour MPs in such socialist utopias as Poole, Bury St Edmunds and the Isle of Wight. For this we have to look to the third reason, which is that the Conservative administration became, to use a technical term from political science, a total shambles.

The Tories didn’t so much play a difficult hand badly as drop all their cards on the floor. People will understand and, to an extent, forgive the unenviable decisions that ixgo with running a country. Even now, many who abandoned the party still give former ministers generous leeway over their handling of covid, even on decisions they think look wrong in retrospect. What really did for the Conservatives was a series of unforced errors, both political and personal. In the last parliament, these began with partygate and continued right up to the election. They included a succession of unelected prime ministers, an experimental budget that produced the opposite of the economic stability that voters looked to the Tories to uphold, endless infighting, failure to keep promises, and a growing impression that the Conservatives were completely detached from their lives and concerns. To despairing