Competition for the most overused word in media analyses of British politics is always tough, but “existential” has to be a frontrunner – particularly when paired with the word “threat” and particularly when applied to the relationship between the Conservatives and any of the parties led by Nigel Farage.

Hyperbole? Possibly. But possibly not. Either way, Farage’s pet project, Brexit, has brought the Conservative Party to the brink.

The Brexit referendum was meant to stop Farage, but instead it emboldened him

For more than a decade now, Farage’s parties have been eating away at Conservative support, beginning with close to four million people supporting Farage’s United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) at the general election of 2015, giving it nearly 13 per cent of the vote.

True, that result afforded UKIP just the one seat (Clacton, naturally!) in the House of Commons. But it was easily enough to terrify many Tories. After all, it came not before but after David Cameron’s pledge that, if re-elected, his government would hold an in-out referendum on the UK’s membership of the European Union. And that pledge had only been made in the first place in the hope that it would not only put an end to Conservative infighting over Europe but shoot Farage’s fox once and for all.

Sadly for the Tories, neither the 2016 referendum nor its outcome were to fulfil those hopes. In the early summer of 2019, at what were widely assumed to be the last European Parliament elections to be held in the UK, Farage’s Brexit Party won a 30.5 per cent of the vote. Meanwhile, the Conservatives crashed to their lowest share ever, polling a mere 8.8 per cent, finishing in a humiliating fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats, Labour and the Greens.

It wasn’t hard to see why. The Party had spent the previous three years tearing itself apart over precisely how, when and why to leave the European Union. Discipline had already begun to break down badly during the coalition years, and had been further undermined when Cameron had decided to allow his frontbenchers as well as his backbenchers to campaign against his recommendation that, following his less-than-impressive “renegotiation of Britain’s relationship with Brussels“, the country should remain in the EU.

No preparation for a Leave victory meant chaos for the Party

Cameron’s decision not to allow any serious contingency planning in the event he was defeated, along with the Remain campaign’s crucial failure to force the advocates of Leave to specify exactly what kind of Brexit they were looking for, left his successor, the hapless former Home Secretary, Theresa May, fruitlessly thrashing around in search of a Withdrawal Agreement – a multi-dimensional deal that might simultaneously satisfy her party’s disappointed Remainers, its less-than-magnanimous but often-practically-clueless Leavers, and a European Union understandably determined to play hardball.

That extended parliamentary panic, coming on top of a snap general election in 2017 that had seen Jeremy Corbyn (by far the most left-wing leader Labour had elected since the Second World War) managing to deny their party a majority. It saw plenty of Tory MPs who should have known better to throw caution to the wind and their weight behind Boris Johnson’s eternal bid for the leadership.

Johnson’s elevation proved a stunning success in the short-term, netting their party an eighty seat majority on 43 per cent of the vote and supposedly putting the Brexit Party, which secured a measly 644,000 votes and a mere 2 per cent share, firmly back in its box.

In the long-term, however, Johnson’s promotion to Prime Minister proved utterly disastrous. Even before Johnson fatally mishandled the UK’s Covid-19 response and allowed “Partygate” to re-toxify the Tory brand, his (or was it Dominic Cummings’) “by any means necessary” determination to “Get Brexit Done” saw some of the Conservatives’ most forward-thinking, media-friendly MPs thrown out of the party.

That helped tip the party’s ideological balance toward the populist radical right, resulting, first, in the disastrous selection of impetuous zealot Liz Truss to replace Johnson and, second, in her replacement, the potentially more measured and moderate Rishi Sunak. This latter prime minister was unable to resist pressure to make promises he couldn’t possibly keep to “stop the boats” and make costly tax cuts when most voters were crying out for improvements to the country’s cash-starved and creaking public services.

At the 2024 general election, Farage’s party, now renamed Reform UK, won 14.3 per cent of the vote, less than 10 points behind the Tories, who, on 23.7 per cent, recorded their worst ever result in a general election. In no small part that was because around a quarter of voters (amounting to well over three million people), whom Boris Johnson had persuaded to back the Conservatives five years previously, felt badly betrayed by promises that, once the UK had left the EU, immigration would plummet, growth would go “gangbusters” and “levelling up” would be unleashed across the land. It was claimed this would allow potholes to be filled, windfarms to be torn down, the tide of “woke” to be turned back and long waits for GP and hospital treatment to become but a bad memory.

The long Brexit hangover continues for the Conservatives  

Their disillusionment has not dissipated. Indeed, notwithstanding the fact that many right-wing commentators seem to have convinced themselves that Kemi Badenoch represents the way and the truth and the life, one would be hard pushed, given that the party has been stuck on under 20 per cent in the opinion polls since then, to argue that the Conservatives are well on the road to recovery.

In reality, however, both the 2025 and 2026 elections seem to confirm extensive survey research that suggests Leave and Remain identities continue to exercise an outsize influence on voting behaviour and that Leavers have, to an extent that has effectively beached if not broken the Conservative Party, decamped in overwhelming numbers to Reform UK. Indeed, they provide yet more evidence, if any were needed, that, in Western Europe at least, right wing voters (with the exception of a relatively affluent, liberal minority) are increasingly likely to plump for populist, radical alternatives to the more mainstream/centrist outfits which, for more than half a century after 1945, were effectively able to take their support for granted.

There may, of course, still be those who argue that, whatever else it did, Brexit did at least heal the open wound that internal arguments over Europe had created within Tory party. Even if they are right, however, they should ask themselves whether the price paid by the party – and indeed the country – for the stifling consensus thus achieved has been one worth paying.

Tragically, however, they are almost certainly wrong. Currently, the Conservatives are committed to withdrawing the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), playing down the huge risks this poses for the Northern Ireland settlement and the already-thin Trade and Cooperation Agreement with the EU. If those risks can be brought home to the electorate by their opponents, then the Tories’ chances of emerging in good shape after the next election are slimmer than ever.

If, however, they somehow manage to survive beyond it and help Farage to form a government with a small majority, then the attempt to fulfil that pledge – a pledge that by no means all Tory MPs believe in their heart of hearts is feasible, let alone sensible – could well cause that government to implode sooner rather than later. The ensuing chaos, I suspect, really would be the final nail in the Conservative coffin.

Originally published at https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/brexit-10-brexit-might-just-have-killed-the-conservative-party/