Let The Tories Defect
The Conservative Party’s loss may help the party rediscover its national purpose, recover its vision and restore its appeal as a force in British politics.
"A dozen Tories will defect to Reform - let them so the Party can rebuild."
Originally published in The Times - 19th September 2025
During turbulent times voters traditionally look to one of the big parties for direction. Today, both are found wanting.
The Conservatives have yet to gain credibility following a dire election defeat. Labour is failing to live up to its own billing. Into that vacuum has stepped Reform UK with Nigel Farage, ever the communicator, offering simple answers on hot-button issues.
His mix of economic nationalism, anti-establishment anger and cultural defence resonates. Polls show it’s working. Trust in the two-party system is evaporating. Politics should be about offering solutions not just belittling opponents.
Yet the obsession with attack has left Labour and the Conservatives locked in combat, playing straight into Reform’s hands. Voters see little substance and lose faith.
If more effort were made to build consensus, on welfare and pension reform, immigration and even defence spending, there would be far less incentive for the electorate to look elsewhere for answers.
The Conservatives are facing a moment of reckoning. Disunity not only cost them the last election but meant they could not even lose well. Spurred on by emails from the public - “Join the winning team, the Tories are dead” - former and current MPs whisper about defecting.
Ignore the ideology, go with the momentum. This is not just drift but decay: a party that has lost sight of the bigger picture. The Conservatives once thrived as a broad centre-right church, governing for the nation, not the base. Disraeli, Baldwin, Churchill, Macmillan, even Thatcher, anchored them-selves in the national interest.
But today, with the final say over who leads the Conservatives resting with the party membership, policy has become captive to an ageing base. The result is a party looking inward, increasingly out of touch with the electorate.
Fewer than 10 per cent of under-25s now vote Conservative, a bleak foundation for appealing to the next generation. For a party that has spent more of its existence in government than out, the advent of multi-party politics is a shock.
Unless the party decides where it truly sits in this crowded spectrum, reconciling the “light blue” centre-right tradition that brought consistent success with the “dark blue” hardliners, it risks consigning itself to the margins.
Ironically, Reform’s surge may force that reckoning. Its rise is brutal for my party, and more than a dozen MPs will defect, but the Tories must let the blood flow.
It may ultimately help the party rediscover its national purpose, recover its vision and restore its appeal as a force in British politics - necessary if it is ever to govern again.