This gave me a big belly laugh:
Another Conservative said: “The answer is we need to find a way to appeal to voters we lost to all parties. I don’t know how you do that on policy, but Keir Starmer showed you can do it by looking competent and serious. But I don’t know if any of the candidates we have at the moment can do that.”
Chasing after Reform is a losing game. You can’t win over anti-establishment votes as the establishment. The only way forward for the Tories is to the left.
Except their funding source(s) would prefer to set the money on fire, rather than allow the Overton window to slip even slightly left
The overton window slides this way and that, but eventually it snaps back to more central. We’ve just observed this here and in France.
I fully agree, but I believe this is the perspective of the billionaire class funding Reform and Tories.
Way more of their “one nation” faction lost their seats in the last election unfortunately. Including Penny Mordaunt who was being mooted as a potential leader. Tom Tugendhat is on maneuvers though, and he is trying to appeal to both sides so I suppose he might take the party in that direction.
Previously it was looking like Kemi Badenoch (Scruton style tory) vs Suella Braverman (populist tory) but support has melted away for the latter since the election, mainly due to her incendiary statements about LGBT people at a conference in the USA.
They lost those guys because those seats couldn’t be won by a more right wing Conservative. But the party went full further right and those voters rejected it. They will not rewin those seats from the right.
Agree that going further right is not a winning move. Brexit is the most right wing policy they delivered in 14 years and it tore them apart. If they want to win again in 5 or 10 years then they need to look competent and demonstrate a united front - basically everything Starmer did to become a serious candidate.