Brexit might have killed the Conservative Party

The Brexit referendum was supposed to save the Conservative Party from internal conflict and stop Farage. Instead, it emboldened Farage and could have killed the Conservative Party, claims Tim Bale.

The competition for the most overused word in media analyzes of British politics is always tough, but “existential” has to come out on top – particularly when paired with the word “threat” and particularly when applied to the relationship between the Conservatives and one of the parties led by Nigel Farage.

Hyperbola? Maybe. But maybe not. Regardless, Farage’s pet project, Brexit, has put the Conservative Party on the brink.

The Brexit referendum was supposed to stop Farage, but instead emboldened him

For more than a decade now, Farage’s parties have been eating away at Conservative support, starting with nearly four million people backing Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) in the 2015 general election, giving him almost 13 percent of the vote.

It is true that this result only gave UKIP one seat (in Clacton, of course!) in the House of Commons. But it was enough to terrify many conservatives. After all, it hasn’t happened before but After David Cameron’s pledge that, if re-elected, his government would hold a referendum on Britain’s membership of the European Union. And this pledge was only made in the first place in the hope that it would not only end Tory infighting over Europe, but would kill Farage’s fox once and for all.

Farage’s pet project, Brexit, has put the Conservative Party on the brink.

Unfortunately for the Conservatives, neither the 2016 referendum nor its result lived up to these hopes. In early summer 2019, in what was widely considered to be the last European Parliament elections held in the United Kingdom, Farage’s Brexit Party won 30.5% of the vote. Meanwhile, the Conservatives fell to their lowest share on record, with just 8.8 percent of the polls, finishing in a humiliating fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats, Labor and the Greens.

It wasn’t hard to understand why. The Party had spent the previous three years tearing itself apart over the precise question of how, when and why to leave the European Union. Discipline had already begun to seriously break down during the coalition years, and was further undermined when Cameron decided to allow his frontbenchers as well as his backbenchers to campaign against his recommendation that, following his unimpressive speech “renegotiation of Britain’s relations with Brussels“, the country should remain in the EU.

No preparation for a Leave victory means chaos for the Party

Cameron’s decision not to allow any serious contingency planning in the event of defeat, as well as the crucial failure of the Remain campaign to force Leave supporters to spell out exactly what kind of Brexit they were seeking, left his successor, the hapless former Home Secretary, Theresa May, struggling in vain in search of a withdrawal deal – a multi-dimensional deal that could simultaneously satisfy his party’s disillusioned Remainers, who are far from magnanimous but often Leavers. practically helpless, and a European Union, naturally determined to play tough.

This prolonged parliamentary panic, which came on top of the snap 2017 general election which saw Jeremy Corbyn (by far the most left-wing Labor leader elected since the Second World War) manage to deny their party a majority, saw many Conservative MPs who should have known better than to throw their caution and weight behind Boris Johnson’s perennial leadership bid.

Johnson’s elevation proved a resounding short-term success, giving their party an eighty-seat majority with 43 percent of the vote and supposedly putting the Brexit Party, which received a paltry 644,000 votes and just 2 percent of the share, firmly back in its box.

In the long run, however, Johnson’s promotion to prime minister proved utterly disastrous. Even before Johnson fatally mismanaged the UK’s response to Covid-19 and allowed “Partygate” to retoxify the Tory brand, his (or was it Dominic Cummings’) determination “by any means necessary” to “get Brexit done” saw some of the most forward-thinking and media-friendly Tory MPs expelled from the party.

This helped tilt the party’s ideological balance towards the populist radical right, resulting in, firstly, the disastrous selection of the brash bigot Liz Truss to replace Johnson and, secondly, his replacement, the potentially more measured and moderate Rishi Sunak, unable to resist pressure to make promises he could not keep to “stop the boats” and deliver costly tax cuts when most voters were demanding improvements for the country money hungry and grumpy. services.

In the long run, Johnson’s promotion to prime minister proved utterly disastrous.

In the 2024 general election, Farage’s party, now renamed Reform UK, won 14.3 percent of the vote, less than 10 points behind the Conservatives, who, with 23.7 percent, recorded their worst result ever in a general election. This was largely because around a quarter of the voters (more than three million people) whom Boris Johnson had persuaded to support the Conservatives five years earlier felt seriously betrayed by promises that, once the UK left the EU, immigration would plummet, growth would go “through the roof” and “levelling up” would be unleashed across the country, allowing potholes to be filled, demolish wind farms and reverse the trend of “awakening”. back, and the long waits for medical and hospital treatment are just a bad memory.

Long Brexit hangover continues for Tories

Their disillusionment has not dissipated. Indeed, despite the fact that many right-wing commentators seem to have convinced themselves that Kemi Badenoch represents the way, the truth and the life, it would be difficult, given that the party has since been stuck below 20 percent in opinion polls, to claim that the Conservatives are on the road to recovery.

But in reality, the elections of 2025 and 2026 seem to confirm vast survey research it suggests that Leave and Remain identities continue to exert an outsized influence on voting behavior and that Leavers have, to an extent that effectively failed and even broke the Conservative Party, decamped in overwhelming numbers to reformed Britain. Indeed, they provide further evidence, if any were needed, that, in Western Europe at least, right-wing voters (with the exception of a relatively affluent liberal minority) are increasingly likely to turn to populist and radical alternatives to the more mainstream/centrist groups who, for more than half a century after 1945, were able to take their support for granted.

It may, of course, still be argued that, whatever Brexit has done, it has at least healed the open wound that internal arguments over Europe had created within the Conservative Party. Even if they are right, however, they should ask themselves whether the price paid by the party – and even by the country – for the stifling consensus thus obtained is worth it.

Unfortunately, they are almost certainly wrong. Currently, the Conservatives are committed to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), downplaying the huge risks this poses to the Northern Ireland settlement and to the already fragile trade and cooperation agreement with the EU. If these risks can be passed on to the electorate by their opponents, then the Conservatives’ chances of emerging in good shape after the next election are slimmer than ever.

If, however, they somehow manage to survive beyond that limit and help Farage form a government with a small majority, then the attempt to keep that commitment – ​​a commitment that not all Tory MPs believe in their hearts to be achievable, let alone sensible – may well cause that government to implode sooner rather than later. The chaos that would ensue, I imagine, would really be the final nail in the coffin for the Conservatives.

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