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One of its most influential critics Rishi Sunak has admitted that if the party had listened to the then prime minister, it could have avoided the defeat it suffered in the general election.
Ben Houchen, the Mayor of Teesside and the only Tory leader still in power, insisted that the party “really can win in five years” but warned that the Conservatives should not try to become a version of the UK Reform in their efforts to achieve this.
Lord Houchen, who has not publicly come out in support of a leadership contender, spoke specifically The Independent ahead of this week’s party conference in Birmingham, and after the election in which the Tories returned a historically low 121 MPs.
After backing Boris Johnson back as prime minister when Liz Truss resigned, then rejecting Mr Sunak ahead of local and regional elections in May – not even wearing a blue rosette when the results were announced – Lord Houchen now believes the former prime minister’s analysis is correct, but “people have stopped listen”.
He warned that while Labor is struggling with the question of free, the influence of rich donors like Waheed Alli, and anger at the new government’s policies – especially to cancel winter fuel payments for 10 million pensioners – the Tories “still have a long and difficult road to recovery” .
He said his party had only himself to blame for a situation where, he said, voters’ main aim was not to elect a Labor government, but to oust the Tories.
“I’ve been saying this for the last year. There’s no love for the Labor Party. They’re not increasing their vote share. It’s too broad, too shallow a vote that they actually have.
“The biggest problem we have as a country – and it will be the problem for the next five years of misery, and we, the Conservative Party, are to blame – is that we lose the election. Labor doesn’t win.
“It is diametrically opposite, actually, to Tony Blair, for example. In 1997, people actively came out and voted for Tony Blair.
Part of the reason for this, Lord Houchen said, was that the party and the country refused to heed the warnings of Mr Sunak, who he now believes “would be considered a very good prime minister in normal times”.
“He’s very competent, he’s got all the right skill sets, but (given) the situation he’s in, he’s bound to fail, and that’s not his fault.
“In hindsight, it’s pretty clear that, regardless of who is the leader of the Conservative Party going into the general election, they’re not going to win that election, because of our behavior.”
Lord Houchen now believes her downplaying of Ms Truss’s mini-budget and its impact on interest rates, mortgages and the cost of living “damaged trust with the British people”.
He said the party should listen to Mr Sunak’s warnings during the leadership election, and then listen to the warnings about Labour.
“I think we’ll see in the next few weeks and months: everything he said in the leadership election, when he was running against Liz Truss, is coming true. He’s warning members of the party about what’s going to happen, and the problems we’re going to face, and the members are not pay attention to him.
“Then, finally, he became prime minister, and then we saw, everything that was said during the general election, all the points that were made about the Labor Party – everything that people were reminded of – is now starting to come true.
“The problem is, no matter what Rishi says and how true or accurate it is, people have stopped listening. People are just killing it, and they want to vote for someone other than a Conservative government.
But he warned that a simple debate over whether the party should emulate the Reformers or move closer to the Liberal Democrats. He pointed to the fact that some voters were trying to decide between Reform and the Lib Dems as an anti-Tory vote.
“There are a lot of Conservative voters who end up voting elsewhere – Lib Dem or Reform, or some go to Labor – but the truth is, most of the votes end up staying at home.”
In Reform, he suggested that Nigel Farage was actually imitating Boris Johnson.
“Farage can rally red-walled voters who are fed up with the political establishment. “Boris Johnson is anti-establishment, or should think of himself as an anti-establishment candidate.”
He said that he agreed with Kemi Badenoch that “Reform voters are our voters. That doesn’t mean we don’t know what Reform is. We have to go back to what we did, as Conservatives.
He also agreed with candidates Tom Tugendhat and Robert Jenrick, who suggested that the UK could leave or reduce the impact of the European Convention on Human Rights.
“I think the conversation about (the Convention) is much more general than people think: it’s not about the technical nature of the Convention, but what the competitors are doing is completing a broader discussion about it.”
Lord Houchen has not announced his support for any of the four candidates who will replace Mr Sunak as leader, but he is clear about what the party needs to do.
“Just because Labor is terrible doesn’t mean the Conservatives don’t still have a lot of work to do. We need to elect the right leaders, we need to implement the right policies. We need to rebuild that trust with the public. It will take a long time, not just days or weeks or months. It will take years, until the next election, to get close to rebuilding.
