Paul Goodman: ‘The Tory divide is between serious and frivolous’

What will happen to the Conservative Party? As voters head to the polls in an election widely predicted to be a record defeat for the party, attention will inevitably shift to Keir Starmer’s new Labour administration. Those left in the remnants of the Conservative Party will have to figure out what happened – and how the Conservative movement can regroup and rebuild. And one of them will be Paul Goodman.

Goodman is no stranger to the ups and downs of the election. He has spent the last two decades as an editor ConservativeHomean influential Tory news and commentary website. He was previously the Conservative MP for Wycombe from 2001 to 2010. He returned to parliament earlier this year, having been promoted to the House of Lords on Rishi Sunak’s final honours list. In the run-up to the election, I spoke to him about what had gone wrong for the Tories in recent years and whether there was any chance of improvement.

“When you lose your reputation for economic competence, like the Conservatives did in the 1990s, you get punished for it,” Goodman told me bluntly. The chaos of the short-lived Liz Truss era damaged the Tory brand to the point that it will take years for voters to trust them again. Multiple leadership changes – five prime ministers in the past decade – have undermined the party’s reputation for stability, while campaign mishaps (the election being held in the rain, Rishi Sunak leaving the D-Day celebrations early, a gambling scandal) have further damaged its credibility.

All of this has been thoroughly dissected over the past six weeks, and will no doubt be discussed further when the post-election post-mortem is carried out. But Goodman also cited two other factors in the Tory decline story that have received less attention: Covid and wider demographic trends across the western world.

Post-Covid elections—in Italy, the US, New Zealand, Australia, Germany, the Netherlands—have tended to oust incumbent governments. Only Canada, Spain, and France have bucked the trend (and the latter looks uncertain). This Covid effect, Goodman suggested, has been compounded by underlying concerns about immigration and economic security that governments of all stripes have struggled to address.

“The first driver (of the Conservative defeat), I suspect, is the effects of the contagion. If something like Spanish flu or Covid happens, the effects are catastrophic for governments.” He continued: “There is clearly a crisis in Europe, which is fundamentally a crisis of demographics, living standards, migration and integration. So those two huge factors are having an impact, quite apart from the internal fluctuations of the last few years.”

The fact that they are not alone in their plight will be small comfort to the Conservatives when they wake up on Friday to a vastly reduced number of MPs and a fierce argument over how to rebuild the country.

Much of this debate will take place in the pages of ConservativeHomewhere those hoping to replace Sunak will present their offer to party stalwarts. The website regularly publishes polls on which senior Conservatives are the most popular, and also surveyed members on who they would like to see as future leaders. In the latest, in January, Kemi Badenoch topped the list. Interestingly, a small handful of people (18) wrote in to suggest an alternative: Nigel Farage. And despite being the leader of a rival party openly hostile to the Conservatives, halfway through this election campaign ConservativeHome posted an article by Farage himself in which he urged the website’s readers to vote for the Reform Party.

What to do about Farage and the threat he poses to the Conservative Party will be a central question in the upcoming leadership contest. Most of the likely candidates in the running have sought to distance themselves from him; only Suella Braverman has suggested working with him. But the question of whether a deal or even a merger is needed to unite the right remains – and there is no doubt that Farage has influence among some members: a November 2023 poll found that seven in ten Conservative Party members would support his readmission to the party.

It is interesting, then, that Goodman advises those running for the leadership to be cautious. For a start, he notes that this poll took place before Farage’s bombastic return to frontline politics and his aim in this election to actively destroy the Conservative Party. It also took place before the numerous scandals surrounding the Reform candidates, a significant number of whom have been shown to have extremist and fringe views, even links to fascism. And Farage’s comments about Putin, Goodman suggests, will also raise alarm bells.

“If your first reaction to Putin, when someone asks you about him, is that he’s a strong leader, rather than that he’s a tyrant, that says something about you. And I think that message has gotten through to a lot of Conservative MPs – and some party members, and a lot of Tory voters.”

Rather than panic about Farage and let him shape the debate, Goodman argued, the Conservatives needed to think long-term. “The first thing you have to do is prove your competence, and that’s very hard to do in opposition,” he said. “So the revival will start in local government.”

Indeed, Goodman advised that the party would do well to look in a very different direction to Farage: Ben Houchen, who won a third term as mayor of the Tees Valley in May, even as the Conservatives suffered devastating losses nationwide. “From the moment Keir Starmer becomes prime minister,” he noted, “Ben Houchen is suddenly the oldest elected Conservative in the country to hold office.” Why? Because, unlike the national Conservative party, Houchen and other local leaders “are perceived as competent.” Local government leaders are also, he said, “people, even though these areas are very blue, who are in a position to give advice on how to win because they have to engage with real voters and win their support.”

Connecting with real voters means reaching beyond the passionate but narrow audiences of right-wing media outlets like Telegraph and GB News. Goodman has stressed to me in the past the dangers of succumbing to the “right-wing entertainment complex” – i.e., veering right and going for what will be popular with GB News opinion, not the national opinion.

“The Conservative Party needs the left and the right,” he said. “That means taking away Reform voters, taking away Labour voters and taking away Lib Dem voters. That is a very long-term project. What they can’t do is put their eggs in one media basket.”

How long the recovery will take depends, of course, on the scale of the defeat: 150 MPs is a very different prospect from 50. Some polls suggest the Conservatives may have so few MPs that they struggle to be an effective opposition – they may even fail to be the second largest party. Normally, a recovery of this scale would take a decade. But with changing political trends and a lack of enthusiasm for Labour, despite the seismic majority it is expected to win, all good things can happen. (After all, Boris Johnson’s “huge” majority of 80 seats in 2019 collapsed like a sandcastle.)

For his part, Goodman doesn’t foresee a miraculous revival. “I suspect that the Conservatives’ problems will only start to heal once the current generation of leaders, plus Farage, have left and a new generation has come in,” he admitted. There are no quick fixes – some of the factors that have made the party so unattractive, particularly to young voters, such as the failures on housing and property ownership, will be incredibly difficult to reverse. (In a parenthesis that is unlikely to please Conservative NIMBYs in the leafy south-east and the home counties, Goodman suggested that they should not oppose Keir Starmer’s planning reform plans: “The temptation for them will be simply to oppose Labour’s attempts to build on green areas, and that in itself is not the answer.”)

If the party is to return as a force in British politics, it will require hard work and a leader who understands that there are no shortcuts, whatever those who appear on GB News suggest. The main division in the party, Goodman said, was no longer between left and right – or even between Leave and Remain.

“It’s somewhere between serious and not serious,” he told me. “What’s serious is trying to understand what the key issues are and address them, and you can’t do that without thinking seriously about demography, ageing, migration and social policy.

“What’s not serious is simply telling people what they want to hear, which is that they can now have painless tax cuts on a very large scale that won’t destabilize markets.” He sighed. “We’ve been there — and we’ve got the T-shirt.”