{"id":338710,"date":"2025-08-12T14:57:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-12T14:57:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/338710\/"},"modified":"2025-08-12T14:57:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-12T14:57:10","slug":"conservatives-not-close-to-recognising-how-badly-placed-they-are-says-gauke-conservatives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/338710\/","title":{"rendered":"Conservatives not close to recognising \u2018how badly placed they are\u2019, says Gauke | Conservatives"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Conservatives<\/a> are \u201cnot close to recognising\u201d how badly they are positioned for the next election, the former cabinet minister David Gauke has said.<\/p>\n

Gauke, a former justice secretary who also worked in the Treasury under George Osborne, said many in the party were not willing to fully repudiate Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.<\/p>\n

The party was ignoring heartland voters in the home counties who had turned in droves to the Liberal Democrats and was spending too much time fighting on Reform UK\u2019s turf, he added.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the next election is going to be about immigration and the war on the woke, it\u2019s not going to be the Conservative party that are the beneficiaries of that. It will be Nigel Farage and Reform,\u201d he said, in an interview with the Guardian. \u201cTrying to make those issues more salient is a strategic blunder. First and foremost the Conservatives need to fight the next election on the economy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gauke criticised his party for spending too much time on culture-war issues where Farage was the dominant voice.<\/p>\n

The former MP, who has authored a major sentencing review for Labour<\/a> set to be made law this autumn, said it was not a foregone conclusion that Farage would become prime minister, but depended on Labour kickstarting economic growth.<\/p>\n

He said to do so would mean hard choices for Rachel Reeves on tax rises and the pensions triple lock, as well as seeking a much closer relationship with the EU, saying the Labour chancellor \u201cneeds to talk to the bond markets more than she needs to talk to the parliamentary party or the British public\u201d.<\/p>\n

He said the Tory party had not yet fully confronted why it had become so unpopular and had not undergone the transformation that Labour had after defeat at the 2019 election.<\/p>\n

David Gauke said he wanted the chancellor, Rachel Reeves, to succeed in driving economic growth. Photograph: Anna Gordon\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

\u201cMost of the Labour party [MPs] felt that the Jeremy Corbyn years were an aberration and that they wanted to revert to something different. They found it very easy to repudiate, whereas quite a lot of the Conservative party looks back at the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss time as being proper Conservatism,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t think the Conservative party is close to recognising how badly placed they are, and all the thinking at the moment is the worry about Reform. Yes, Reform are taking Conservative votes, but a lot of that was because the Conservatives just no longer looked functional.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the party had no message that would resonate with the home counties. \u201cThe aspirational, successful, educated voter, they voted Conservative for economic competence, but now looks at the Conservative party and thinks, \u2018you haven\u2019t really been speaking to me for a very long time, probably not since the 2015 election\u2019,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Gauke, who had the Conservative whip removed by Johnson in 2019 for voting to stop a no-deal Brexit<\/a>, said he believed the Labour government had to be more resilient to criticism and unpopularity \u2013 and that the Reform UK surge in the polls was not necessarily a sign Farage was on course to be PM.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere will be a lot of tactical voting against Reform. [Farage] is evidently beatable if Labour can deliver strong economic growth. I think it would be hard for the Conservatives to win the next election, but they can re-establish themselves as the main opposition,\u201d he said. \u201cBut if both try to say \u2018Nigel Farage is right, but please don\u2019t vote for him\u2019, then I think they\u2019re in real trouble.\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of being surprised at the polls, Labour MPs should accept \u201cthat being in government you are going to be unpopular\u201d, he said. \u201cGovernments used to come back from deep levels of unpopularity on a regular basis and it can still be done. All of that has become much harder but it\u2019s still fundamentally true. But you have to have a programme and there\u2019s not been enough of it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gauke said he wanted Reeves to succeed in driving economic growth but that would mean tough political choices because of the high debt interest Britain was paying. \u201cWe are on the naughty step. If we had the same gilt yields as Germany, we would be paying \u00a350bn less in debt interest a year,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

The former chief secretary to the Treasury said it was \u201ca delusion that\u2019s very popular on the left of politics\u201d that enough could be raised by just putting up taxes on the very wealthy.<\/p>\n

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But he said long-term economic confidence would come only if Reeves was prepared to signal she would make hard choices, including on issues that might not immediately score with the Office of Budget Responsibility.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt would show she is facing up to some of those challenges on the pension\u2019s triple lock, on the loss of fuel duty revenue because of moving to electric vehicles. None of these things are electorally popular, but if the markets think, \u2018actually this is a serious government\u2019, then you get into a virtuous circle,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

Keir Starmer and Reeves should also be prepared to ask for more from the EU in terms of trade ties, Gauke said. \u201cThey made some really good progress earlier this year, there was hardly any political reaction. Be bolder. Come back to that. Businesses would love it if we were prepared to be bolder on the EU.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gauke said he was deeply concerned his party would embrace the policy of leaving the ECHR. Photograph: Anna Gordon\/The Guardian<\/p>\n

Gauke, who has spent time with the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood<\/a>, said she had been lord chancellor with a \u201csense of direction\u201d who was effectively driving change at the department.<\/p>\n

Mahmood is known to be seriously considering what the UK could do to reform its approach to the European convention on human rights, including whether the government could act unilaterally on how it interpreted some aspects of the convention when it came to prisons or immigration.<\/p>\n

But Gauke said he was concerned about the UK acting alone, and said it would be more effective for signatory countries to press for change as a collective.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy sense from where Shabana is \u2013 is can it be improved? Is the interpretation of it much broader than we would want? And I think those are the right questions to be asking,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you try and set the dynamic up as \u2018us against the rest\u2019, then you\u2019re just heading for a fall, but a lot of the concerns that the UK has about the operation of the ECHR is reflected in other signatories. You\u2019re going to have to work with other countries.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said he was deeply concerned his own party would embrace the policy of leaving the ECHR, a move favoured by the Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou just end up with a repeat of the Brexit episodes, of our international influence being diminished and our reputation damaged and a big practical issue in Northern Ireland. I don\u2019t know why the country would be attracted to that as an offer,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The Conservatives are \u201cnot close to recognising\u201d how badly they are positioned for the next election, the former…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":338711,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3,4],"tags":[12,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-338710","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-uk","8":"category-united-kingdom","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115016384026189165","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=338710"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/338710\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/338711"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=338710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=338710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=338710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}