Losing It: The Conservative Party and the 2024 General Election
Michael A. Ashcroft
Biteback Publishing, 2024, £10 pbk
There are two people inside Lord Ashcroft. One is Mr Hyde, who co-wrote what was intended to be a damaging biography of David Cameron. It contained a baseless story about a pig’s head, which useful idiots among the online left, as Hyde had no doubt intended, spread far and wide.
But Losing It is written by the impartial psephologist Dr Jekyll. It contains the fruits of two large opinion polls Ashcroft funded just after last year’s general election, and of 24 focus groups conducted with people who voted Conservative in 2019 but switched to another party in 2024.
Having studied all this data, Ashcroft puts forward three principal reasons for the Conservatives defeat: it’s hard for any party to keep winning after 14 years in power; the coalition of voters Boris Johnson put together to win in 2019 was, like its architect, always likely to prove unstable; and the Conservative administration became – “to use a technical term from political science” – a total shambles.
It was this last point, he argues, that turned a likely defeat into a rout where the party lost half its vote and two-thirds of its MPs. The Conservatives forfeited the trust of voters because “senior Tories seemed to be playing out a soap opera for their own amusement, rather than tackling the country’s mounting problems”.
Ashcroft goes on to present the findings from his polls, interspersing the tables and charts with quotations from focus group participants. Liberal Democrat readers will find that someone voting for us in 2024 was most likely to be motivated by a wish to keep another party out (no wonder we can struggle under PR), and that the one factor on which we lead the other parties among voters as a whole is having our heart in the right place. This left me feeling at once pleased and a little patronised.
So we must thank Dr Jekyll for Losing It, even as we wonder what advantage Mr Hyde hopes its publication will bring in his internal Conservative Party politicking.
Jonathan Calder
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