Alexander Bowen is an MPP-MIA student at SciencesPo Paris and St Gallen specialising in public health, and a policy fellow at a British think tank.
YouGov’s opinion poll last week had the Conservatives not in the position they had been in for some time – vying for the lead with Reform and Labour – but apart, pushed aside.
Placed not into third but into fourth.
Now it was just one opinion poll but the trend lines formed from it and the rest are hardly better. In each the Conservatives are now within the margin of error of the Liberal Democrats who are clearly vying for third. This is an aberration. Yes it has happened before but it has happened only once – the summer of 2019 where both the nascent Brexit Party and the Bollocks to Brexit brigade overtook the two main parties.
What is so remarkable now is that it is a ‘normal time’ – the country is governed by a single party with a large majority, there are no existential international crises crises like Covid, Brexit or subprime mortgages, the Prime Minister was actually determined at a general election. It’s the first ‘normal time’ in the strictest sense since 2007, and yet it does not in any sense feel that way.
In 2019 it was obvious what needed to be done to fix the polling problem – the Conservatives needed to deliver Brexit and Labour needed to oppose it. They needed to re-establish their respective hegemonies over their respective electoral cleavages. Now there is what solution? What is to be done?
Badenoch seems to have taken the attitude that she can wait – that slowness is certainty. This would be a perfectly valid strategy if Britain was in 1980 – no mobile phones, no 24/7 news, no social media, no devolved assemblies – yet in 2025 it ignores something fundamental.
That momentum is everything.
It is scarcely mentioned but what ultimately killed Change UK, The Independent Group, The Independent Group for Change, TIG…. or whatever it was called, was the timing of its creation.
Founded in February, registered in April, it went straight into local elections where the LibDems with actual candidates were able to occupy their space. That spatial occupation only increased at the European Parliament elections despite Change UK’s handicaps having been abolished – infrastructure being largely irrelevant, only 73 candidates needing to be fielded – yet by then it was too late. The local elections had already sent Change UK from 10 per cent to 5 per cent, and the European Parliament elections then sent them from 5 to 0.
Momentum matters.
Starmer for his part has embraced a bizarre combo of a ‘deliverism’ that fails to deliver because it cannot, the Conservative’s mistake of governing left and talking right (alienating what would usually be the Labour base for seemingly no gain), and a mismatch of small value high salience cuts with large low salience spending increases whose benefits will be felt after the next election if ever.
Yet unlike the Conservatives, Starmer at least has one thing going for him. Labour is the non-Reform choice.
Yes, he has alienated his base, yes his government is woefully unpopular, but so long as he is able to maintain Labour’s second place there remains a hope, albeit small, of being the non-Reform option in a single issue question: for or against Reform. When Liberal Democrats or Greens are faced with that will they really not compress into Labour? At least at a constituency level? It’s the reasoning Macron relied on to deliver two consecutive wins against Marine Le Pen and it holds true enough even in election systems without a second round. In a polarised environment, being a pole helps.
What makes this polling potentially fatal for the Conservatives however is a simple principle – Duverger’s Law. It is the political science expression of what we all know to be true, put simply it is that elections conducted under first past the post must trend towards two parties. Where there are parties X, Y and Z, with X and Y on 25 percent each and Y on 50, then Y will always win unless X or Y merge or one ceases to exist. X and Y’s voters know that and if the parties do not sort the problem out then they will.
It’s what happened in Canada after the much talked about 1993 election – the one where the long incumbent Progressive Conservatives came 5th and that suddenly entered British discourse post-Truss. Voters who wanted rid of the Liberals had no choice but to go to Reform – a slow process that would lead either to Reform replacing the PCs or, as did happen, a merger.
Just repeating some variance of “we’re the world’s oldest political party” or “we’re the democratic world’s most successful governing party” will not spare the Conservatives from the fundamentals of game theory. Party swaps have happened before and they can happen again. The 100 year Whig Supremacy did not stop the Liberals being replaced in 1923, and there’s no reason to believe that historic Conservative dominance would mean future success.
As every investment disclaimer reads ‘past performance may not be indicative of future results’.
For the game not to be fatal there are three options – to change the player, to change the rules, or to quit playing.
Changing the rules means looking at some form of proportional representation. It enables a 15 per cent party to continue on, it breaks Duverger’s Law, and it may mean like in Denmark in 1975 or Norway in 1997, 2005, or 2009 that a party replaced can come back and replace its replacement. Changing the player is a high risk but when you are playing political Russian roulette, everything is. Worst of all, quitting playing will need the consent of the other players – something Farage has no reason to give.
I have no preference on what must be done, but something must be done and it must be done soon after all momentum is everything and it is cumulative. By 2026’s Senedd and local elections, it may be too late. JFDI.
