The Last Months of the Tory Party
The Tories election performance in the EU Elections where they got just over 9% of the poll and 4 MEPs has been reported as their worse Election performance since 1832. I’m not entirely sure what the historical basis of this claim is (and Ive looked) but there is no doubt that the Tories are in a very serious crisis.
Geoffrey Wheatcroft writing in the Financial Times (25.5) on the Tory Party drew attention, in the context of the Tory leadership election, that the Party which had 2.7m members in the early 1950s now has, at best, 160,000- it was 124,000 as recently as March 2018 (Sunday Telegraph 26.5) The average age is according to some estimates 70 (others suggest 57- my thanks to the Guardian’s Stephen Moss for this info)
Wheatcroft wrote a book in 2005 on the strange death of the Tory Party (the title echoed Dangerfield’s book on the strange death of Liberal England) which turned out to be somewhat premature. He had the direction of travel right though. While Labour under Corbyn has revived to 500,000+ members, the Tories are definitely struggling to survive. They have few activists on the ground, and in many areas no Councillors, the base from which Parliamentary seats are often won.
The reason is probably easy enough to determine. Theresa May dubbed the Tories the Nasty Party in a speech to the Tory Conference in 2002, and some half-hearted attempts to ‘modernise’ since notwithstanding they have only got nastier since. It would take quite some front to join the current Tory Party I suspect, unless perhaps you were a former member of UKIP
Further if the Tories key raison d’etre is to be the party of business they have a very serious issue. Namely that while much of business wants to stay in the EU the Tories policy is to leave. Indeed the reportedly leading contender for the Tory leadership, Johnson, is on record as saying ‘f*ck business’.
As Wheatcroft notes this is a little surprising because as a Party the Tories have been around a long time and have proved themselves to be the great survivors.
There was,Wheatcroft notes, a Tory Party in the late eighteenth century. They started to become something like the party we know today (broadly)after the 1832 Reform Act.
Wheatcroft goes on to note that while the Tories were deeply divided over things like the Corn Laws in the 1840s and Tariff Reform in the early twentieth century, not to mention Ireland on various occasions, in every one they avoided destroying themselves.
In the period 1951 to 1992 there were 12 Elections and the Tories won a Parliamentary majority in 8 eight of them. Since 1992 there have been 6 Elections and the Tories have won a Parliamentary majority once.
The Tory Party may yet survive a while longer but the direction of travel seems clear.
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