A catastrophic election defeat could lead to the parliamentary Conservative party tilting towards the populist right, Guardian analysis has indicated.
A projection of the seats the Conservatives would retain if there was a further two percentage point swing to Labour before election day, using data from Electoral Calculus, shows that about 40% of the remaining MPs would come from this wing of the party.
In less calamitous defeats – scenarios based on current polling levels, and on a situation where there is a two percentage point swing in favour of the Tories – the proportion would be nearer to 30%, roughly where it is now.
It comes amid talk of the Tories mulling over holding a general election in May. The speculation was spurred this week by the chancellor, Jeremy Hunt, announcing an earlier-than-usual date for his spring budget. The Labour party has welcomed the rumour.
The raw Electoral Calculus data also shows how, unless the polling improves, the Conservatives could lose huge numbers of seats. If an election were held with polling as it is now, the projection suggests the Tories would plummet to just 125 MPs, down from 365 in 2019. A 2% swing in their favour would bring the number to 175 – but a 2% shift away would leave the party with just 72 MPs.
It is in this last scenario that the dominance of the populist right would be strongest, both in terms of numbers but also by the metric of which leading MPs from each wing remain.
Kemi Badenoch and Suella Braverman, seen as the frontrunners to succeed Rishi Sunak from the party’s populist right, have such safe seats that they would keep them under any scenario. But in the worst case for the Tories, only Hunt and James Cleverly would survive as big-name centrist Conservatives.
Penny Mordaunt, seen as another contender from the centrist wing, would not keep her seat under any of the three Electoral Calculus scenarios used for the study.
While such judgments are necessarily subjective, the Guardian based the numbers on MPs known to be members of hard-right or culture war-sympathetic factions – such as the Common Sense Group and New Conservatives – or to have regularly expressed such views.
Other key caveats to the analysis include the impact of boundary changes, and how in some seats either a candidate has not yet been selected or is not yet an MP and thus, in almost all cases, their ideology cannot be gauged. This covers between 15% and 20% of the post-election MPs, depending on the results.
Much could depend on those new MPs, but over time the Conservative party has edged closer towards the sort of populism embraced by European hard-right leaders such as Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni, as illustrated by the turnout of Tories at May’s National Conservatism conference in London.
Arguably the safest expectation is that a post-Sunak contest would end up as a bitterly fought battle between the party’s right and centre. Given that the final choice would be made by members, who tend to be further to the right than the parliamentary party, it is possible they would, as with Liz Truss, choose someone who does not inspire complete confidence among MPs.
Martin Baxter, the chief executive of Electoral Calculus, said under the current polling consensus the Conservatives would end up with fewer than 200 seats.
He said: “This analysis shows that the party will still be split between its left and right wings, and it will still face an existential question about what it stands for. The right would still be a minority, so continued conflict would be a real possibility.”
David Jeffery, a senior British politics lecturer at the University of Liverpool, co-authored a study earlier this year that looked at similar projections showing which Tory MPs could emerge from a defeat. This pointed to other big changes, such as a potential near wipeout of the party’s northern-England MPs.
Jeffery said this project concluded that the most likely scenario was division. “The core finding was that if Rishi Sunak or a leadership contender is hoping that, post-defeat, the Conservative parliamentary party is going to skew one way or the other, then that is their mistake. Really, it’s going to be as divided as it is now,” he said.
“There will be some pressure on the party to regroup in a defeat, but this might be optimistic. Normally, you’re united in office and then you come apart in opposition, but the Conservatives have been fighting each other in office.”
