Write to your MP, volunteer at your local food bank, even run for office. There are many ways to be civically engaged in the 21st century. But for the last 14 years, if you really wanted to make a difference, all you needed to do was join the Tories.
Until recently, Conservative Party members had selected four of the last five prime ministers. It might have been a full set, had Liz Truss not self-imploded with such vim and at such a velocity that the parliamentary party was forced to close ranks and choose the next one itself. What is inescapably different about this Tory leadership contest is that the winner does not automatically become prime minister.
The typical reaction of a first term opposition is to elect a leader from its ideological comfort zone. This happens for many reasons. Because party members did not enjoy losing and want to feel better about themselves. Or they think they lost because their party failed to offer real socialism/conservatism [delete as appropriate]. Or because lots of less partisan members let their memberships expire, leaving behind only the true believers.
So far, the Tories appears to be ambling down this path of least resistance. A YouGov poll out this week finds that a little over half of Conservative members think the next leader should move the party to the right. This compares with a third who want a move to the centre, and 12 per cent who would like to keep the party where it is.
The majority support for a rightward shift is based both in ideology and apparent practicality. At the last election, more than four million people voted for Reform UK - a party to the right of the Conservatives. Unite said right, it is argued, and the Tories would saunter back to their customary spot on the government benches. Except, it doesn't really work like that.
Labour attempted a similar ploy in the early 2010s. Under Ed Miliband, the party hoped to return to government in one term by peeling off unhappy Liberal Democrats. Instead, it went backwards in 2015 and David Cameron secured an unexpected majority.
And there's another problem. The Tories did not lose last time purely because of their place, real or imagined, on the ideological spectrum. Jack Peacock, a researcher at Survation, sums it up thus: "The public ultimately rejected the Conservatives because they lost trust in their ability to govern." Rishi Sunak had potentially popular policies on immigration and tax cuts — the problem was that few believed he could deliver on them.
Unfortunately for the Tories, reclaiming that public confidence will take some time. Indeed, it may require the Labour government either making a large unforced error (e.g. 'mini-Budget' ) or simply to be in office when some exogenous shock occurs (global financial crisis, Covid-19). British elections are won from the centre, but they are also determined by which party voters remember screwing up most recently. Right now, that is the Tories.
The point is not to sound deterministic. Conservative Party members face a real choice in this leadership election and absolutely have the power to make things worse. But whether the ultimate victor is the immigration hardliner Robert Jenrick, culture warrior Kemi Badenoch, grassroots champion Priti Patel or one of those moderate-sounding men (Tom Tugendhat, James Cleverly, Mel Stride) — matters less than what Labour is able to deliver in the next five years. Welcome to opposition.
