If you want to know what’s worrying the Tory party, look at who’s leaving

Rising stars rarely quit the race of their own accord if everything is going well, writes Marie Le Conte

This vicious circle will be a tough one to break (UK Parliament)

At first glance, Chloe Smith, William Wragg and Dehenna Davison have little in common, aside from the fact that they are all standing down at the next election.

Smith was elected in 2009 and campaigned for Remain. Wragg won in 2015, was a hard Brexiteer and made his name calling for Boris Johnson and Liz Truss’ resignation. Davison is the figurehead of the Red Wall, a 2019er through and through who backed Boris then Liz.

They represent different wings of the Conservative Party and have different ideologies and leadership preferences. Still, all of them will be leaving parliament in 2024, or 2025 at the latest. This should, in itself, be worrying for the party. Rising stars rarely quit the race of their own accord if everything is going well.

What is probably worse, however, is the one other thing that unites them. Chloe Smith, William Wragg and Dehenna Davison all became MPs before turning 30. Though the latter came in at a time when the tide had already turned, the first two weren’t entirely aberrations.

Once upon a time (say, around 10 years ago) it wasn’t exactly rare for a young person to be a Conservative. Young voters usually leaned left but not to an absurd extent. This is no longer the case.

In 2019 when, lest we forget, the Tories won their biggest majority in a generation, only 21 per cent of 18 to 24 year olds voted for the party. The figures for 25 to 29 year olds (23 per cent) and 30 to 39 year olds (30 per cent) weren’t exactly impressive either. At risk of stating the blindingly obvious, the Conservatives’ polling figures today do not even remotely look the same as they did three years ago.

In short: young, even youngish Tories largely are a thing of the past. It is a problem for the party if it wishes to win the next election, of course, but at least they can comfort themselves with the knowledge that older voters remain harder to reach for Labour. What should terrify them is everything else.

If there suddenly aren’t any clever and decent people in their twenties being tempted by the right, the party will find itself with a dearth of parliamentary candidates. It will also be left without capable and sharp special advisers, or thoughtful and interesting wonks and think tankers. It can also forget about sympathetic people fighting their fights in politics-adjacent jobs in both the public and private sector.

This isn’t a short-term problem. If today’s bright young things have never considered voting Tory, they will be creating workplaces and social environments in which a consensus seems settled. When tomorrow’s bright young things come join them, they will be shaped by the spaces built by those who came before them.

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You can already see it in the debates surrounding the “never kissed a Tory” slogan, silly as they may seem. To older Tories and frothing columnists, they are a sign of a generation too woke for its own good. If you actually are in your 20s, it is less of a political statement and more of a fact of life. Young Tories are in such short supply that finding and snogging one would require both intent and effort.

This vicious circle will be a tough one to break. The more the Conservatives keep desperately holding onto their older voters, the more they will keep alienating younger people who would, in another life, be natural Conservatives. The fewer young people want to work for or around the party, the worse they will become at appealing to those younger people. Rinse; repeat.

Much has been made of the unfairness of the party’s war on youths but little has come from it, either because they do not care or feel they can work around it. Perhaps they will start to listen if they realise that they aren’t only shafting young people. In the long run, they’re also shafting themselves.