(Bloomberg) — As Keir Starmer’s Labour Party stormed to a landslide election win in the early hours of July 5, officials at Conservative headquarters prepared for lives outside of UK politics, their party’s defeat seen as devastating enough to keep it out of power for a generation.
Most Read from Bloomberg
Barely 12 weeks on, some Tory strategists are daring to believe what looked unthinkable: they might just have a path back to power at the first opportunity in five years’ time. The first signs of hope are returning, one party official said ahead of the Conservatives’ annual conference in Birmingham on Sunday.
That’s down to Labour’s difficult start. Dire warnings from Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves about the public finances, awkward news stories about donations received by senior ministers, and hostile briefing among Starmer’s top aides have made the early weeks of his premiership far rockier than expected for a party wielding such a large parliamentary majority.
Polling published by the More In Common think tank on Friday showed Starmer’s personal approval rating down 38 points since July to minus 27. That’s as bad as ex-premier Rishi Sunak’s numbers when he called the election. A recent Ipsos survey showed six in 10 Britons were unhappy with the government.
The slump is prompting a Conservative rethink about the July vote, if it really locked them out of power or was just another swing in Britain’s volatile post-Brexit politics that can be reversed — just as Starmer’s Labour turned the tables on the Tories in five years after Boris Johnson’s big win in 2019.
“Given the roller-coaster ride the country has been on for the last decade or so, we’d be foolish to completely rule out a quick comeback,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London. The next election will hinge on Labour’s ability to fix the economy and public services, he said.
To be sure, there are strong arguments against Tory success at the next election, likely in 2029. Labour and Starmer have time to reverse their slumping popularity. Voters are still angry with the Conservatives after 14 years in government defined by turmoil, scandal and a moribund economy.
Sunak’s fall has left the Tories rudderless, with the outgoing opposition leader making only a brief appearance in Birmingham. Front-loading unpopular decisions is a deliberate choice by Starmer, to do the tough things now to show dividends by the time Britons go to the polls.
“Starmer’s by no means dead in the water if, in four years’ time, real wages are rising, inflation is under control, the National Health Service appears to be getting back on its feet, and potholes are getting filled,” Bale said.
Still, Starmer’s struggles have given the Tories something to cling to. One lawmaker heading to conference this weekend said they’d assumed it would resemble a wake, but now predicted the mood could be better than at Labour’s rally that ended in Liverpool on Wednesday with a rebuke of the government.
One Tory strategist said the Tories have a chance because voters are more fickle than ever, with a faster news cycle driven by social media that means people are quick to lose patience with those in power.
Another aide said accusations of hypocrisy leveled at Starmer over gifts and donations, after the prime minister promised to clean up politics, will have an impact. Labour politicians see arguments about conflicts of interest and paid access as sleaze when Tories are accused, but morally justifiable when they’re caught up in it — a distinction voters don’t make, the person said.
The path to power for the Tories still looks steep. The Birmingham conference will be dominated by the question of who takes over from Sunak. Several Tory MPs said a major problem is that all four contenders were a senior figure in the last government. That means they’re at best tainted by association, or at worst directly responsible for key decisions it made that contributed to the party being booted from office.
The candidates also illustrate the battle for the direction of the party. Robert Jenrick, a right-winger who is the bookmakers’ favorite to win, is campaigning for hard-line crime and immigration policies. Yet he was an immigration minister in a government seen as failing in that area.
James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, also former home office ministers, face a similar challenge especially on immigration. They both draw their support from more moderate Conservatives and are therefore not necessarily in sync with party activists. Kemi Badenoch, the second-favorite, is more right-wing but also served in Cabinet under both Sunak and Johnson — as Jenrick and Cleverly did.
Labour MPs and party aides said they weren’t fazed by any of the Tory candidates. Speaking on condition of anonymity, they said Cleverly was the best communicator and most likely to connect with voters, though they don’t expect him to win. One Labour MP said strategists should borrow the US Democrats’ playbook on Republican vice-presidential nominee JD Vance, by painting Jenrick — who they expect to win — as “weird.”
Several Tory lawmakers and aides told Bloomberg that whoever wins the contest won’t lead the party into the next election, and that a new leader from the next generation of MPs would be chosen in a couple of years.
Whoever it is faces a volatile electoral map. James Kanagasooriam, chief research officer at Focaldata, has compared Labour’s election victory to a sand castle in danger of being washed away due to the fragile voter coalition that made it possible. Yet he said that metaphor is “about Labour weakness more than Tory opportunity” due to the rise of smaller parties including Nigel Farage’s anti-immigration Reform UK, as well as the Greens.
“Both main parties may be giving way to coequal status, with new movements on right and left,” he said.
Bloomberg research after the election found the UK’s party system is now more fragmented, suggesting it’ll be difficult for the Tories to win voters back because they are fighting on multiple fronts. In 2019, more than two-thirds of parliamentary seats were straight fights between the Tories and Labour. In 2024, that was less than half, as support for Reform and the Green Party grew.
That is a problem exacerbated by the leadership contest, in which Cleverly and Tugendhat more obviously represent a strategy to win back voters in the center, and Jenrick and Badenoch likely taking aim at Reform on the right.
But it also makes it harder to capitalize on Starmer’s struggles, especially on donations. That row triggers wider anti-politics sentiment and a plague-on-all-their-houses mindset among voters. That favors Farage “more than anyone else,” Bale said. “He fits that bill precisely.”
–With assistance from Jacob Reid.
(Updates with Sunak’s plans in eighth paragraph.)
Most Read from Bloomberg Businessweek
©2024 Bloomberg L.P.
