The Conservative Party in Britain are doing their best impression of the Soviets at Chernobyl, who believed the reactor was still working after it had exploded. Two weeks ago at their conference, sealed off from reality, MPs dutifully cheered the dear leader, and afterwards some even remarked that the party was back. In the Welsh Valleys, reality proved itself a vengeful god. Polling 2 per cent in the Caerphilly by-election for the Senedd—a mere 690 votes—the party achieved its worst performance in its history.
Now, let us not forget that by-elections present wonderful opportunities for journalists to sell headlines by over-interpreting the outcome. One result a trend does not make. The British media are predictably spinning a yarn about the strength of the anti-Reform UK vote—the party had high hopes of winning the seat, but came second to Plaid Cymru with 36 per cent. As it happens, that was an improvement from 1.7 per cent on the previous election in 2021, so essentially from a standing start. The seat is a hotbed of left-wing politics: going back from the last election to its creation in 1999, the combined Labour Party and Plaid Cymru votes read 74 per cent, 65 per cent, 79 per cent, 60 per cent, 75 per cent, 78 per cent. This time round, it was 58 per cent, which makes Reform’s rise therefore quite remarkable.
You would be forgiven for not paying much attention to the Hamilton, Larkhall and Stonehouse by-election to the Scottish Parliament in June this year, but it was here that one could already perceive that the facts of British politics had changed. In a similar scenario to yesterday’s result in Wales, in a safe lefty seat having never contested it before with no campaigning infrastructure or prior presence there whatsoever, Reform UK achieved 26 per cent of the vote. The combined Labour and SNP vote was still over 70 per cent, as it had always been since the seat’s inception. The Conservative Party, however, had fallen to 6 per cent.
‘These results in Scotland and Wales show…that the Conservative Party has already been replaced by Reform UK as the party of the right’
These results in Scotland and Wales show, as will be brutally apparent in England’s local elections in May 2026, not just that the Conservative Party has already been replaced by Reform UK as the party of the right, but that it has ceased to be a national party at all. What they have lacked in true conservative instincts, they used to make up for in campaigning skill. To be an activist is now an embarrassment, to be a voter is now a humiliation. They can no longer compete to be a party of government.
Tory MPs seem to fluctuate between a state of aporia and a state of delusion. At the beginning of the year, I remarked to one—whose name is always followed by the epithet of ‘rising star’—that from the outside, there did not seem to be any strategy to deal with Reform UK. In reply, I was asked: ‘What would that look like?’. Even now, sitting MPs will tell me: ‘It’s too early to tell.’
While they can hide the meltdown from themselves, the public can see the tale has been told. If I am permitted to offer any advice to Hungarian or European conservatives, by all means include their parliamentarians on panels about historical events, but anything concerning the present is time wasted. As Day of the Dead approaches, it would be appropriate to have any living Conservative Party politician in your thoughts.
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