How can British Conservatives get on the same page with the public?

Peter has been a Conservative Party supporter for his entire adult life and is currently a party member. As an officer with the Metropolitan Police in London, he sees the impact of government policies up close every day.

But when the Conservative government descended into chaos in recent weeks over Britain’s economic future, Peter, like many others, questioned where the Tories are headed. (Peter asked that his full name not be used.)

The party has let him down, he says, mostly because of all the infighting and the lack of coherence. “I just hate this extreme politics. People are trying to hit a target and miss a point.”

The last two months in the United Kingdom have been a real-time case study of what happens when a centrist government – hitherto broadly aligned with its electorate – swerves, suddenly and with little warning, to the extreme right. The last time the country voted, in 2019, it elected a government that, while populist, was economically and socially in the center. But sharp policy shifts by Liz Truss – who became comfortably the shortest-serving prime minister in British history – led to what was, in hindsight, an inevitable loss of confidence from both the markets and the people.

Now, under new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, the Tories have an opportunity to renew their relationship with the British public. But experts – and Britons more generally – say that the most likely outcome may not be a meeting of the minds between government and the public, but simply a period of calm governance by No. 10, without any missteps or infighting by the Conservatives.

“I’m a public servant. I just want to get paid a decent wage,” says Peter. “There is an individual politics where you have to maintain some moral integrity. And if it gets to the stage where I think these guys are not representing me, I’d have to consider leaving the party.”

“Off in quite a radical direction”

Until 2001, like most parliamentary democracies, British political parties chose their leaders – and therefore the prime ministerial candidate – through a poll of members of Parliament. In recent years, however, both the Conservative and Labour parties have experimented with giving their dues-paying memberships more power. MPs pick two candidates for leader, and the members get the final choice. The 172,000 Conservative Party members who are eligible to vote represent about 0.3% of the total U.K. electorate and tend to be older, wealthier, and whiter than the rest of the population.

While the primary voters gave their support to Ms. Truss’ libertarian ideas, the rest of the country didn’t get a say and didn’t approve – her popularity ratings plummeted faster and lower than those of any British political leader in the history of polling. In the end, it was the misguided, ideologically driven mini-budget, with $45 billion of unfunded tax cuts for the rich – the biggest since 1972 – that crashed the economy and the prime minister’s political career.

“It was a very neoliberal agenda, and I don’t think she even had time to win over the nation,” says Rainbow Murray, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “When you’re too right wing for the markets, you’ve really gone off in quite a radical direction.”

A snap Financial Times survey of British political scientists last month suggested that out of 275 parties in 61 countries, Ms. Truss’ Conservatives were the most right wing of the lot, beating out the U.S. Republican Party under former President Donald Trump and the party of Brazil’s just-ousted, far-right President Jair Bolsonaro. In fact, scored on a scale from 0 (full-blown communism) to 10 (an extreme low regulation, low tax, free-market approach), the former prime minister had managed to drag her party so far to the right that it registered a score of 9.4. On the same economic scale, the average U.K. voter fell at 3.1 and the average Conservative voter at 4.2.

In contrast to the Conservative Party membership, public sentiment has been moving steadily in the opposite direction. Tax increases to prop up crumbling public services are more popular than tax cuts to stimulate growth. Polls show that over 66% of the British public – including 62% of Conservative voters – are in favor of the nationalization of energy companies, with similar numbers supporting public ownership of water. Almost half of the country supports rail strikes. Were there to be a general election tomorrow, multiple senior Conservatives have publicly expressed fears their party could be wiped out as an electoral force. Polls suggest Labour could even beat the landslide that brought Tony Blair to power in 1997.

The cost-of-living crisis and high energy prices do not just loom over the poorest in society. They cast an increasingly threatening shadow over the middle classes – senior nurses, teachers, and office workers with annual salaries of £45,000 ($51,300) and above – who are the backbone of the electorate. Many people who by inclination are natural Conservative supporters question whether the government is able – or willing – to help them weather the coming storm.

“It is now generally felt among the public that a lot of public sector workers and others have had a bad deal from this government for a long time and that something should be done about it,” says Anand Menon, director of UK in a Changing Europe, a research organization, and professor of European politics and foreign affairs at King’s College London.

“Throughout the economic problems we’re going to have for the next year or so, Labour will be able to say, probably wrongly but almost certainly effectively, that what we’re going through is down to Tory ineptitude. That’s the gift Liz Truss has given them: a single incident, where it absolutely is the case that a decision by the government has made this economic situation worse rather than better.”

Professor Murray points to Black Wednesday, the day in September 1992 when the value of the pound fell so low that the U.K. was forced out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism in what was seen as a national humiliation. There is a direct line from that event – as contrasted with the Conservatives’ reputation for fiscal responsibility built by Margaret Thatcher a decade before – to the Tories’ subsequent electoral wipeout in 1997 that launched Mr. Blair’s New Labour into government for the first of three consecutive terms.

Now, many are asking if history is about to repeat itself. “[The Conservatives] lost their reputation for economic competence then, and it was five years nearly until the next general election, but people hadn’t forgotten,” says Professor Murray. “[The economic reputation was] hard won. And once you lose it, it’s hard to get it back.”

Steadying the ship

While Ms. Truss is gone and her mini-budget has been rolled back, thus preventing an immediate economic catastrophe, the shift from Ms. Truss to Mr. Sunak still leaves a Conservative Party in power that is further right wing than the British public wants or voted for.

For Mr. Sunak, the newest resident of No. 10 Downing St., the challenges going forward are multitude. After a decade of austerity, his ability to cut public spending is constrained. Hence he is faced with an unavoidable need to raise taxes in order to balance the books and placate the markets, even if it goes against the “Conservative values” he and his party advocate. How does the prime minister get tens of billions of dollars of tax increases past his right-wing party?

“If you look at the appointments Sunak’s made, he’s definitely playing to the anti-immigrant, anti-woke side of the party to try and give them something back for the fact that he’s going to be raising taxes,” says Professor Murray. “Sunak’s in a very strange position where in order to appease the social conservatives, he’s actually undermining the economic efforts at a time when we’re experiencing labor shortages and need immigration to address that.”

For the next two years, even as Britons look doubtfully at a ruling party whose values appear to be out of sync with their own, the best-case scenario is a period of calm. A prime minister who sees out their term in office, soothes the financial markets, and steadies the ship would be welcomed by most.

Natural Tory sympathizers have been driven away more by a perceived lack of competence and by internal division than disagreement over the actual lines the party is taking, says Professor Murray, especially now that those lines, at least on the economy, are more moderate again. “If the party can stay united, if they can avoid any more absolute clangers, and if they can get the economy stabilized between now and the next general election, I think their more natural supporters will come back to them.”

Peter, who voted for Mr. Sunak over Ms. Truss in the party elections, says the best thing to do is to write off the last six weeks.

“We need to start again,” he says. “I hope it doesn’t sound defeatist, but I have no choice but to pin my hopes on Rishi. There is no one else. And he does seem like a safe pair of hands.”