Justine Greening, the former Tory MP, argues that the current Tory strategy of going after Reform voters isn’t working. She seems to think the Tories should try to capture centrists instead (which is what David Cameron did, I would argue).
The party has attempted to be a “mini-me” version of Reform UK, and unsurprisingly Reform voters prefer the real thing. And this strategy’s consequential alienation of Conservative-leaning centre-ground voters has seen them head off to either the Lib Dems or Labour, or to the Green party. The party has no winning majority in any age group of voters other than those over 70. This is no basis for a successful electoral strategy for the longer term.
Aka what everyone has been saying for years now.
Going after reform voters is a waste of time, every time the conservatives try to one-up farage he can just come up with increasingly more radical “policies”, after all he’s never actually going to have to implement any of them so who cares about reality and practicality.
The sort of people who vote reform are the sort of people who aren’t exactly politically sophisticated, otherwise they would realise that farage is selling them manure. They are therefore never going to change their minds.
Meanwhile the conservatives are alienating undecided voters with their obsession with hard right politics which by definition are unlikely to appeal to centralists.
This is the level of political insight that a child would be capable of it’s utterly pathetic the conservatives can’t work this out on their own.