Will Rishi Sunak get away with ignoring voters on the right?

Conventional wisdom has long held that the Conservatives win elections from the centre ground – including territory just to the right of centre – but lose them if they become 'right wing'.

John Major set out this theory explicitly in a press conference, and most of those in attendance nodded sagely along. For many years, election results appeared consistent with this assessment. Major won in 1992, turning round a Labour opinion poll lead by dumping the poll tax and tacking towards the centre.

Margaret Thatcher’s earlier wins from the right could be put down to the opponents she faced – an exhausted James Callaghan regime in 1979 and unelectable leftists in Michael Foot in 1983 and the 1987 version of Neil Kinnock, when he was still committed to ideas such as unilateral disarmament.

Tony Blair’s landslide win in 1997 could meanwhile be read as a reward for him occupying the centre ground better than did the Tories, given the success of Eurosceptic 'bastards' in dragging the Major administration to the right.

In 2001, William Hague’s immigration-sceptic and anti-Brussels offer flopped, leading to a second Blair landslide. Similarly, Michael Howard in 2005 suffered another bad defeat after stressing immigration control, grammar schools, tax cuts and the right for well-off people to deploy a 'patient passport' which would see most of their private healthcare costs funded by taxpayers.

Then David Cameron came along, urged the party to stop 'banging on about Europe', relegated immigration control, threw his lot in squarely with the NHS, hugged some huskies and, Bob’s your uncle, won nearly 100 seats off Labour in 2010 before winning outright five years later.

The brute logic deployed by centrist Tories was that though right-wing voters might grumble about a diet of soggy centrism they had nowhere else to go, while floating voters in the centre were the decisive electoral block whose backing had to be secured.

But as anyone who has paid much attention to British politics over the past dozen years will know, the rise of Ukip following the formation of the Tory-Lib Dem coalition in 2010 changed the game. Despite Cameron attempting to keep Ukip beyond the pale by slandering its members as 'fruitcakes, loonies and closet racists', the challenger party tore big chunks out of the Conservative poll rating under the charismatic leadership of Nigel Farage.

People wanting to break free from the orbit of Brussels, bring down immigration, incarcerate more criminals, slash foreign aid and cut taxes started voting heavily for Ukip in by-elections, initially mainly at the expense of the Tories. 

Cameron was forced to cover his right flank by pledging an EU referendum. After that, Ukip began attracting growing numbers of socially conservative habitual Labour voters, the upshot of which was an unlikely outright Tory majority in 2015.

Theresa May forgot this lesson during her premiership, culminating in her nine per cent vote share at the 2019 European elections in which she was smashed by another Farage vehicle, the pop-up Brexit Party. Then Boris Johnson covered the right flank again and a parliamentary majority of 80 ensued.

All of which brings us on to Rishi Sunak and an intriguing question: why is he seemingly unbothered about leaving more space to his right than any of his predecessors did and why, so far, is there little sign of an electoral threat emerging there?

The sheer array of issues on which Sunak has left his base unsecured is striking: the highest tax burden since the aftermath of the Second World War, benefits rising faster than wages, unrestrained illegal immigration, record legal immigration, soft-pedalling on Brexit as per reports of a Swiss-style arrangement being considered, lack of resistance to the march of radical identitarian politics in public institutions, an absence of meaningful pro-family policy and tame acquiescence to an unrealistic and unaffordable timetable on carbon neutrality. To call this a target-rich environment for another Faragist uprising would be putting it mildly.

Yet so far only Reform UK, the successor to the Brexit Party that is led by Farage’s friend Richard Tice, is registering any opinion poll support to the right of the Tories. And even it averages just four per cent, with occasional spikes up to twice that level.

In its heyday, Ukip sustained a polling average in the mid-teens. At the 2015 general election it chalked up a vote share of 14 per cent in England. Yet now its popular support is undetectable. Other right-wing micro parties such as Reclaim and the Heritage Party are similarly zero-rated.

Part of this conundrum is down to Labour and Keir Starmer making increasingly audacious bids to scoop up socially conservative voters. But mainly it is a product of there being no high-profile standard bearer for the non-Tory right.

Nigel Farage built so high a profile that he still casts a very long shadow in this neck of the political woods. Nobody has managed to get anywhere near eclipsing him. Yet he knows that having another tilt at breaking the system without a single talismanic cause, as Brexit was, and without a home-banker set of elections, as the European parliamentary ones were, would be a very tall order.

So might Sunak get away with settling back into the Major mindset and banking on right-wing people having Hobson’s choice? I doubt that very much. Some will vote Labour, many more will stay at home. More crucially still, while Farage may not fancy the mid-term slog, he may well find the lure of making a dramatic comeback shortly before the next election far more appealing.

Were I in Sunak’s expensive loafers, I’d be shoring up my right flank well in advance. The biggest worry for Conservatives is whether he has the first idea how to do so.