Boris Johnson’s election victory in 2019 was so sweeping you could walk from Land’s End to Hadrian’s Wall without ever leaving a Tory constituency. You could also have walked between two constituencies where More in Common ran focus groups with 2019 Conservative voters this week – Warrington South and Godalming and Ash. These are two seats that tell the story of the breadth and collapse of the Conservatives’ 2019 coalition.
Warrington South, a north-west marginal that has flipped between Labour and the Conservatives, sits just outside the “red wall”. It voted leave in 2016, backed Johnson in 2019 and swung to Labour in 2024. Today, More in Common’s MRP (multi-level regression and post-stratification) modelling suggests it would be won comfortably by Reform UK.
Godalming and Ash, by contrast, is deep in the “blue wall”. An affluent commuter seat in Surrey, it voted remain, and in a rare bright spot for the Conservatives in 2024, Jeremy Hunt managed to fend off the Liberal Democrats to hold the seat.
These very different seats are now central to the “battle for the right” that exploded back on to the political scene this week with Robert Jenrick’s defection/dismissal. How did voters in these seats react to the latest skirmish?
It is fair to say that even 14 months into her leadership, views of Kemi Badenoch remain fuzzy. But when played a clip of the video Badenoch filmed announcing her dismissal of Jenrick, the groups were unusually approving. Sarah, an admin officer from Godalming, said she was “blown away”, while James, an IT engineer from Warrington, described Badenoch as “decisive”. In both groups, the participants said they wanted to see more like that from Badenoch and wondered why they had not seen it before.
But while Badenoch personally impressed, for some it brought back memories of why they had booted the Conservatives out of office in the first place – their tendency to infighting. “I think she’s one to watch,” Allie said, “but it’s all a bit risky, isn’t it?” James said it could feel like a return to the “chaos inside the party” of the last government.
Neither of these groups took to Jenrick. Shown clips of his defection speech. George, a Warrington service engineer, thought Jenrick seemed “primed” or “scripted”, Jenna said he was “not very convincing”, and Helen said: “He said words but there was no substance to them.” This feedback mirrored what we heard during the Conservative leadership election, when voters struggled to warm to Jenrick and questioned his authenticity.
What about Jenrick’s “broken Britain” claim, now at the centre of a three-way debate between Labour, the Conservatives and Reform? In Godalming, some felt it a tad hyperbolic. “He was a bit of a drama queen,” Allie said, “a bit sensationalist.” Did she think Britain was broken? “Breaking, yeah. Not broken yet.” Even so, the group worried about the direction of travel: crime, the cost of living, small boats, government waste.
In Warrington, the mood was darker. Derek reeled off examples: “NHS, definitely broken. Police force, officers leaving in droves. Pensions being affected.” Valerie, a receptionist in her 70s, told us: “I thought now I’d be enjoying life, going out during the day, socialising, but I’m having to work … The price of everything, whether it’s heating, your utilities, plus food – prices have just gone up so high.”
For George, the cost of living was eroding solidarity. “It’s becoming a bit selfish now because it’s got to the point where everybody is struggling. You’re kind of thinking: how is it going to benefit me and my immediate family?” he said.
Is Nigel Farage the answer? Valerie earned nods of approval when she said: “I don’t like him but he stands by his convictions.” Rachel agreed: “He’s a bit like Thatcher. He might not be right but he stands by what he does.”
Even in Godalming, hardly Reform’s home turf, some were tempted. Jenna said he “seems more positive and proactive about stuff. And, I don’t know, you sort of seem to have a bit more faith in an individual like that.”
Leaving aside their antipathy for Jenrick, the groups tended not to think it mattered that Reform were taking in Tory defectors. Asked whether they felt it undermined Reform’s claim to be something new, Tom from Godalming replied that they could be “becoming like the Globetrotters”, taking the best players from the other teams. Likewise, Valerie from Warrington was not concerned about Reform’s talent being diluted. “Is he [Farage] trying to cherrypick the best just like a company would? Pick from the opposition so that your company ends up better?” she said.
Nor did accusations against Farage of racism at school move the groups. Presented with the accusations and the Reform leader’s response, almost everyone felt it was unfair to judge Farage by what he had said as a schoolboy, and added that most people would have said things they regretted in school. Helen said: “As you grow up, you go: actually, no, that was ridiculous. That was awful. Why did we do that stuff?”
Hanging over both groups was another name. Westminster’s obsession with the US does not normally extend to our focus groups but this past week has been an exception. Whatever they thought of Farage, their attitudes to Donald Trump were sulphurous. “I feel he’s pushing us towards world war three,” Valerie said. Kerry said: “He’s just going to make things 10 times worse.”
For many voters on the right, it is Farage’s Trump problem above all else that puts them off. Matthew, a travel agent in Godalming, said Farage was “very much a mini Trump … he’s going to take the country down the wrong path”. Bill, a retiree from Ash, saw it a bit differently: while not a fan of Trump, he wondered whether Britain needed a shock to “get us kicked in the right places, because we’re just going nowhere at the moment”.
Britain may feel broken but the right is far from united on how to fix it, split between traditional conservatism and Reform’s insurgence. Most recoil from Trump’s style of disruption and upheaval, and ties to him remain a top liability for Farage. But one thing that did unite the two groups was their sense that Keir Starmer was struggling as prime minister. Allie summed it up by saying Starmer was “floating over it all without going very deep into anything”.
That sense of a prime minister adrift, after the failures of the last Tory government, was driving these voters to contemplate something more radical. Or as Derek put it: “We’ve tried Conservative, we’ve tried Labour, they didn’t work. Why not try Reform? We’ve got nothing to lose. If that doesn’t work …” he chuckled, “then it’s definitely broken.”
(Participants’ names have been changed)
Luke Tryl is the UK director of the research group More in Common
