The Lead Untangles: Is the Conservative Party finished?

Can the Stamp Duty announcement save the Tories from political extinction?

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Oct 10, 2025

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“The Tories – remember them?” quipped Keir Starmer in his leadership speech at this year’s Labour Party Conference. Starmer wasn’t the first to suggest the 200-year-old Tory party was officially over — Nigel Farage has been banging the “the Conservative Party are finished” drum all year — and he certainly wasn’t the last.

Following a ghostly conference and numerous unfavourable opinion polls, the Tories’ fall from grace is undeniable. And now the question on everyone’s lips is: Is the Tory Party actually dead? Or will the stamp duty announcement spark a turnaround in popularity?

The Facts

Let’s take a look at the figures. From finances to membership to opinion polls, the Tories are facing a stark dip.

Last year, the Tories took the worst defeat in its near-200-year history, losing 251 seats and 20 per cent of the vote since 2019 — and the party has seemingly been in freefall ever since.

An MRP poll by the think tank More in Common from September predicts that the Conservatives would win just 41 seats if an election were to be held tomorrow. That’s a loss of a further 80 seats. Meanwhile a voting intentions poll by Ipsos, also from September, found that just 14 per cent of voters would vote for the Tories. In both polls, Reform would win.

Indeed, Nigel Farage’s far right populist party poses a huge existential threat to the Tories. This week, in a single day, 20 Tory councillors defected to Reform UK, bringing the total number of right wing defectors to 35 in less than two years. The party has also lost 19 MPs to Reform UK.

The Tories are fairing poorly locally, too. In May’s by-elections, of the 16 councils it was defending, the Tory party lost control of every single one, and more still in the local elections that have followed since.

Membership numbers are down, too, with analysis by the Spectator showing that the party lost 8,000 members since last November, when leader Kemi Badenoch was voted in, and July this year, with the total membership figure down to 123,000 from 131,000.

This year’s conference in Manchester was haunted by empty seats. A pre-conference leak, reported by Sky News, showed that there were more than 1,000 fewer members due to go to the conference than had been listed in the same period in 2024. A spokesperson for the party said the figures were out of date, but numerous reports told the story of empty halls and even a lack of protesters.

The Tories have also lost significant financial backers. Earlier this year, one of the party’s biggest donors, Richard Harpin, the founder of the home repairs business HomeServe, stopped funding them. Harpin gave the Conservatives nearly £850,000 in 2024 and has donated £3.8m to the party since 2008.

This isn’t new: in the run up to last year’s election, the party raised just three-quarters of the levels it did going into the 2019 election.

And, when it comes to who’s voting for the party, the Conservatives have the oldest voter base on average (62-years-old) and had one of the lowest shares of voters aged 16 to 29 in last year’s election. Their voters are, quite literally, dying out.

Context

It is clear that the Conservatives, over 14 years of power, failed to deliver. Recent polling by YouGov, for Best of Britain, found that people who say they intend to vote Conservative at the next general election, and those who voted for the party in 2024, are more likely to consider Brexit to have been a failure than a success. The Tories, via Liz Truss, tanked the economy, and the party failed to “stop the boats,” a huge point of dissatisfaction for voters.

Meanwhile, the party’s drift to the right has caused it to lose voters on either side of the spectrum. Of the 72 seats won by the Liberal Democrats in 2024, the vast majority were taken from the Conservatives, while all four of Reform’s seats were previously Conservative.

“After Brexit, the Tory party deliberately — and sometimes gleefully — purged its moderates in favour of ideological purity,” says our Westminster Editor Zoë Grünewald. “That shift pushed the party sharply to the right, but even that ground has now been occupied by Reform, who are willing to go further without the reputational constraints of an establishment party.

“The Truss mini-budget blew up their claim to fiscal prudence, and Boris Johnson’s antics stripped them of the “sensible adults in the room” mantle and left them exposed to attack.

“Meanwhile, their old centre-right base has drifted to Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens — the Remainer Tories who valued net zero and Britain’s place in the global order.

“What’s left is a party that’s lurched to the fringe, only to watch even that fringe splinter away.”

It is, of course, worth noting that Labour is far from immune to a dip in popularity. But that’s an issue to explore separately.

What are people saying?

Anthony Ridge-Newman, Associate Dean And Associate Professor School of Humanities, Liverpool Hope University, said: “Currently, the Conservative party seems lost in the wilderness. It is far too laboured in its thinking about how to reshape its identity in an era of superfast social, political and technological change.

“It is failing to resist the urge to emulate aspects of the Reform UK agenda, and seems to be lurching further to the right towards its rival. In so doing, the Tories are losing their unique selling point.”

MP Danny Kruger, who defected from the Conservatives to Reform last month, said: “The Conservative party is over. Over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left.”

Neil, a caller to BBC 5 Live Breakfast said: “The two party system was always going to splinter after New Labour at some point. Blair and Corbyn, for example, don’t belong in the same party.

“Arguably, neither to Cameron and Badenoch. So four parties that are right wing, centre right, centre left and left wing, probably represents what we’ve actually been for a while.”

Journalist John Rentoul said: “Kemi Badenoch continues to raise significant sums of money from donors, but they are propping up a Potemkin party that will cease to exist within four years.

“The 119 Tory MPs keep themselves busy with shadow ministerial posts, but they all know that it is over.”

What’s next?

The Tories have been down and out before and, as we know, have staged a comeback.

But as we slouch towards the 2029 election, the Tories have a long road ahead. As of right now, it’s clear that many (around half) party members don’t see Kemi Badenoch as the right person to lead them into the election, with Robert Jenrick proving popular.

With Farage as a serious threat, the question is whether or not the Tories will attempt to join forces. Members seem to back this possibility — a YouGov poll found that 64 per cent would support the Conservatives and Reform UK forming an electoral pact at the next general election to not stand candidates against each other in their target seats, while 46 per cent would support a full merger. However, Farage and Badenoch have both ruled out a pact between the two parties but Jenrick has not.

On top of that, dissatisfaction in the current Labour government is very real. As a report by More In Common notes: “If the mood crystallises against the Labour Party and the Conservatives are able to take advantage of that, it could make for a path back to power.”