The Decline of British Conservatives. Will the party of Churchill and Thatcher disappear?

Margaret Thatcher. Photo: Hulton Archive / Getty Images

Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher are among the most famous British politicians of the last century, whose legacy is debated worldwide. Both were leaders of the Conservative Party, also known as the "Tory party". Their successors in the 21st century, from Boris Johnson to Liz Truss, tried to emulate them. But both quickly lost the trust of the country and the party, which is now fighting for survival.

Already five current and eighteen former parliamentarians have defected to Reform UK, Nigel Farage's party, the main opponent of immigration in the kingdom. This signifies a split in the right wing of British politics, where conservatives have dominated for almost 200 years. Among the defectors are several former ministers, a speechwriter for two prime ministers, and a member of the House of Lords. As for rank-and-file members, Farage claims that his party already has twice as many as the Conservatives, although these figures are not published.

Behind the wave of defectors lies the Conservatives' rapid decline in opinion polls. A year ago, Reform UK surpassed them in ratings, and in the local elections in May 2025, gained a majority in several cities and municipal councils where the Tories had never lost. Farage declared his victory "the beginning of the end" for the Conservatives. Since then, his party has not lost its first place in the polls.

Just six years ago, the Conservatives dominated British politics. What went wrong?

Political and economic fiasco

All British governments since the end of World War II have been formed by either Labour or the Conservatives (once in a coalition with a third party). Other parties were represented in parliament but did not have a majority.

The main reason for this is the British version of the first-past-the-post voting system. The winner is determined in each individual constituency, always by a relative majority of votes. The percentage of votes nationwide does not affect the number of seats in parliament. All this usually hinders the success of new parties, and the swing is between the Conservatives, the default right-wing party, and Labour, the main left-wing party.

Another period of Conservative rule began in 2010, after a long Labour dominance. David Cameron, who called himself a liberal conservative, became the new Prime Minister. He cut budget spending but maintained a liberal approach to social issues and, despite promising to reduce migration, facilitated its growth. If not for Brexit, he would be remembered for legalizing same-sex marriage and military intervention in Libya.

But in 2016, the referendum on leaving the EU, initiated by Cameron, did not yield the result he expected, and the prime minister resigned. The next three years were spent in a merciless struggle within the still-ruling Conservative Party. Boris Johnson emerged victorious, promising to complete Brexit and increase spending on healthcare and education without raising taxes.

As a result, the Tories won a majority in the elections and the kingdom left the EU. But Covid scrambled Johnson's plans. Revelations about a series of parties held at the Prime Minister's office in the midst of lockdown became an unforgivable political mistake.

Johnson was replaced by Liz Truss, whose economic plans caused panic in the financial market, a sharp rise in mortgage interest rates, and a collapse in the pound sterling's value. After 50 days as prime minister, she resigned. Like Johnson, she made an unforgivable mistake – only an economic one this time.

After this, a change of power in the country became a matter of time, and in 2024, the Conservative Party suffered its largest electoral defeat in its history. Kemi Badenoch, who held positions as deputy minister and minister in the Johnson and Truss cabinets respectively, became the new party leader. This complicates her attempts to distance herself from their mistakes.

Although Badenoch is formally the leader of the opposition, practically no one outside the Houses of Parliament in Westminster considers her as such. In the media and public consciousness, this role is played by Nigel Farage, a former MEP and the country's loudest voice for Brexit.

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Nigel Farage. Photo: Thomas Krych/Anadolu via Getty Images

At the beginning of 2026, one of the most prominent Tory MPs, Robert Jenrick, who had recently contended for leadership of the Conservative Party, defected to Farage's party. He now states that his former party "broke Britain."

Suella Braverman, another prominent defector to Farage, who held a ministerial post in two Conservative governments, also publicly disavows her past.

"I believe that in my lifetime, the Conservative Party should not be allowed near power," warns Braverman, who served as an MP for that party for over a decade.

One Conservative political adviser described their state as "a zombie party with a zombie leader."

Decline of the two-party system?

In the currently ruling Labour party, things are even worse – Keir Starmer has already become the most unpopular prime minister in modern British history. In opinion polls, Labour is starting to lose not only to Farage but also to the Conservatives.

But this is hardly good news for the Tories, because the most likely explanation is that their crisis is more serious and deeper than the scandals surrounding Boris Johnson or Liz Truss. More and more voters are disillusioned with the political establishment as a whole – and do not believe that a change from Conservatives to Labour or vice versa can change anything.

"Both parties are running out of time to avoid not just defeat in the next election, but the loss of their status as major parties capable of forming a government," writes Financial Times columnist Stephen Bush.

By early 2026, all the same problems remain on the agenda as under the last Conservative government.

Labour continues to raise taxes, even though they promised not to. Life is getting more expensive, and real estate prices remain exorbitant. Twice fewer Britons were able to buy their own homes by the age of 30 than in their parents' generation. Every day headlines paint a picture of decline and economic stagnation. More and more young couples say they cannot afford to have children because it is too expensive. The healthcare system is in a permanent crisis due to a lack of money, doctors, and nurses.

"I have almost no economic reason to vote for the Conservative Party in the next election, because it offers only tax increases and worsening public services," notes Henry Hill, editor of the conservative blog ConservativeHome. But many Labour supporters could say the same about their party.

Besides problems common to the whole country, there are also issues important to specific communities that have a disproportionate impact on national politics. Currently, there are five MPs in parliament informally known as "Independents for Gaza." They were primarily elected on a pro-Palestinian platform and won in constituencies with a significant Muslim population. According to some forecasts, candidates with such a platform could take more than a dozen additional seats from Labour in the next elections.

And this is not the only threat to Starmer's government. More and more young and successful Britons are opting for the Liberal Democratic Party, which positions itself as a centrist party, while left-leaning voters prefer the Green Party.

A by-election in Gorton and Denton, one of the electoral constituencies of Greater Manchester, held at the end of February, became an indicator of the new reality.

For the past 90 years, Labour had dominated this constituency, but this time a Green Party candidate secured a convincing victory, with a representative from Reform UK coming in second. Labour finished third, while the Conservatives garnered only 1.9% – the party's worst by-election result in its entire history.

"The realignment of British politics is a reality. The Greens and Reform together secured 69.4% of the votes in Gorton and Denton. Labour and the Conservatives combined received only 27.3%. The traditional dominance of the two parties has come to an end," concluded Stephen Swinford, political editor of The Times newspaper.

"Zombies" on the right and left

Both major British parties are turning into zombies, but global upheavals are more to blame, according to Philip Collins, former speechwriter for Tony Blair.

"This is a changing of the era, the end of the age of optimistic globalization, not just local problems," writes Collins in the left-wing magazine Prospect.

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Keir Starmer. Photo: AP Photo/Alberto Pezzali

The decline of traditional political forces is an echo of what is happening in the USA, believes Aris Roussinos, a columnist for the conservative publication UnHerd. Despite specific internal problems, British and indeed European politics remain merely provincial variations of American politics, he argues.

"A significant part of Europe's current woes stems from our leaders redesigning society on a model inspired and simultaneously imposed by American hegemony of the 1990s, and now finding themselves abandoned as the metropole changed course," writes Roussinos. He is confident that the crisis of the two main parties is in fact the collapse of their common ideology, liberalism.

The new US national security strategy aims to combat values that were cultivated in Europe for decades with American support. In 2016, President Barack Obama campaigned for Britons to remain in the European Union; now President Donald Trump is in ideological conflict with the EU.

But the main reason for the crisis of liberalism in the US and Europe is voters' attitude towards mass migration, with which it is inextricably linked. In Britain, during 14 years of Conservative Party rule, it reached record levels. The number of legal migrants who arrived in the country in 2022 reached one million people. A record for illegal migration, over 45 thousand people per year, was recorded in the same 2022, under the Conservatives, despite all their efforts to combat it.

Labour promised to limit legal migration and stop illegal migration, but there are no simple solutions for this, and voters are losing faith in the ability of the two main parties to change anything.

This is precisely what underlies Farage's popularity, whose program is built around one promise — to completely stop migration, even legal migration, at least for the time being.

Conservatives have a chance

There is one scenario in which the Conservatives could emerge from the crisis and compete for a parliamentary majority already in the next elections, due to be held in 2029, suggests the influential Economist magazine. This would happen if the economy once again concerns Britons more than migration.

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New leader of the Conservative Party Kemi Badenoch. Photo: Alberto Pezzali / AP

The fact is that even now, despite the Conservatives' collapse in overall opinion polls, they lead in response to the question "who would you trust to manage the economy." And this is despite the economic mistakes of Conservative Prime Minister Liz Truss.

Currently, trust in economic matters does not translate into popularity, because immigration remains the most pressing issue. But "there is no guarantee that immigration will continue to define British politics. It is entirely possible that the economy will become the main issue in the next elections," writes the Economist. By the next elections, the volume of legal migration could drop significantly, as measures introduced between 2023 and 2025 to restrict it will begin to take effect.

Besides the economy, the Conservatives also have another advantage – the electoral system.

Farage's Reform is not the first British party to threaten to break the duopoly of Labour and the Tories. In the 1980s, former Labour members founded the Social Democratic Party (SDP), and it quickly soared in opinion polls. In its first election in 1983, the SDP alliance and its allies garnered over 7.8 million votes (over 25%), only slightly trailing Labour (8.5 million, or 27%). However, the party won only 23 seats in parliament out of 650, while Labour secured 209.

However, Farage's goal is not to displace the Tories, but to replace them. And there is a precedent for this too. While the Tories dominated the right wing of British politics for the last 200 years, Labour became the main left-wing party in the 1920s. Before them, this role was played by the Liberal Party – but it experienced a sharp ideological crisis during World War I and could not recover from it.

Nigel Farage's bet is that mass migration has inflicted similar damage on the Conservatives, and the position of the main right-wing party is vacant. But even if, by the next elections, the main trends in British politics favor his agenda, international events could interfere with everything.

Serious crises in British life in recent years originated outside its borders. Waves of illegal migration began with conflicts in Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, and Eritrea. The Russian invasion of Ukraine led to a sharp jump in heating and electricity prices. The war in Gaza divided British society and led to the first attack on a synagogue in modern British history. Trump's tariffs could significantly reduce the kingdom's economic growth.

In a situation of new and unforeseen challenges, Farage, who is exclusively associated by voters with the promise to stop immigration, might concede to traditional parties with their experience in government during moments of other global crises.

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