The Conservative Party is the Taylor Swift of politics: always willing to reinvent itself to bounce back from electoral defeat.
Disraeli’s one-nation party, Thatcher’s neoliberal party and Johnson’s Brexit party were all born from electoral defeat, and each carried the Tories back into government.
Many Tory MPs in once-safe seats are holding their breath that this is one of those moments.
With just three years until the next election, Kemi Badenoch and her new Shadow Cabinet are busy engineering a recovery from the party’s weakest position in generations.
Replacement
Coming second in 293 constituencies in the last election, the Conservatives were in pole position for a comeback if Labour lost popularity.
But inexplicably, the official opposition lost ground between 2024 and 2026, despite a hugely unpopular government. Keir Starmer left office with an approval rating of -45%, yet Labour still outpolled the Conservatives. The last MRP (multilevel regression and poststratification) poll of his premiership put the Tories on just 96 seats – in third place.
Between 2024 and 2026, Reform UK had replaced the Tories as the anti-Labour vote. Reform won the 2025 and 2026 local elections, even flipping the wards within Kemi Badenoch’s own seat, while the Tories finished third and fourth respectively.
The Conservative vote collapsed in by-elections too: they polled 7.2% in Runcorn and Helsby, 1.9% in Gorton and Denton, and 10.9% in Makerfield. Reform came first or second in all three.
Meanwhile, three frontbench Tories defected directly to Reform, joined by dozens of sitting and former Conservative MPs. In some seats, entire Conservative associations defected, wiping out the Party’s capacity to campaign locally.
Throughout 2025, the Tories struggled with their self-confidence as an independent party. The then Shadow Justice Secretary, Robert Jenrick, openly backed a pact with Reform – a statement for which he was not fired.
Revival
Nevertheless, the Conservatives retain the structural advantages of a legacy party.
Though not free of scandal themselves, their vetting process protects them from the constant, rolling melodrama that besets Reform – from councillors publicly breaking with party leader Nigel Farage, to scandal and a steady drip of defections. Insurgent parties also struggle to equip themselves with talented frontbenchers: of the five Reform MPs elected in 2024, one has had the whip suspended, and another has started his own party.
Reform’s overcentralisation also makes it poorly built for the long term. With its appeal stemming largely from the personal popularity of its leader, any decline in his credibility would be an existential threat to the party’s future. And as majority shareholder and outright owner of the party, only Farage decides his successor – there is no means, other than by his own initiative, to change or modernise Reform, and no possibility of removing him if a better leader emerges.
This suggests Reform’s success is far more conditional on circumstance than recent polling implies. Should these circumstances turn, the Tories are well placed to reclaim their place as the party of the right.
Indeed, the Conservative leadership have had moments of success mobilising the party’s policy platform in by-elections. By campaigning hard for oil and gas in Scotland, the Party came second in the Arbroath and Broughty Ferry by-election and won Aberdeen South.
Reinvention
This offers a hint at what the next successful era of the Conservative Party could look like. This summer, Kemi Badenoch made all parliamentary candidates commit to scrapping Net Zero and the Human Rights Act – a red line that saw former Defence Secretary Grant Shapps blocked from standing.
With these red lines, Badenoch is striving to put clear water between the Tories and Labour on core issues. Equally, she is carving out a platform distinct from Reform – rebuffing Farage’s extreme rhetoric over national stories like the Henry Novak murder and by ruling out, under any circumstances, a pact with Reform.
The recent Shadow Cabinet reshuffle, which promoted Badenoch’s key allies, suggests this positioning is set to be consolidated.
In the last week, the circumstance-dependent nature of Reform’s popularity has been laid bare, with the latest polls putting them within the margin of error of the Conservatives. A full Tory resurgence will depend on Reform’s ability to break free of perma-scandal, and on Badenoch’s tenacity in producing attention-grabbing policy for disillusioned voters.
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