Reform has eaten the Tory recovery

Why things aren't so rosy for Britain's Grand Old Party

The Con collapse of 2024 was a long-time coming. The party’s performance at the polls should have surprised no one. Labour’s victory, enthusiastic or not, was for the most part guaranteed eighteen months in advance.

To hear, then, this summer, of advisors professing to friends of mine that Labour “didn’t have long to map out what [they] were actually going to do” because they “basically didn’t think they had a chance of winning” until it was too late ranks thin. More colourful writers would suggest a bull’s produce in response.

A significant proportion of the Boris Johnson-backing "Get Brexit Done" base was settled to not turning out again after the Liz Truss debacle of 2022. Keir Starmer had become an inoffensive quantity to a great many mortgage-paying Britons that was the bedrock of fourteen years of Conservative rule. Starmer had passed the smell test. Not good. Not great. But better than the rest. That was it. And it had stayed like that for the best part of two years. Nothing the Sunak administration could do changed the polls in any meaningful way. Victory on 4th July did not creep up on Starmer’s Labour. But if you listen to inside accounts, you’d be forgiven for thinking it did.

Fast forward to one year after the general election and no recovery is in site for Britain's Grand Old Party, the Conservatives. But Labour is polling poorly too. One year in, Keir Starmer is polling worse than every premier in living memory for most, except Gordon Brown.

It’s Reform stealing the show right now.

Farage is 5pts ahead of Labour, and 11pts ahead of the Conservatives. That’s today. It’s upending all expectations and rendering seat-based election forecasts all but useless.

Last November, however, things weren’t quite so unconventional. Because deep beneath the data-tables in the autumn of last year I can find, within hindsight, signs of a Tory recovery.

And its absence now tells us something about Reform’s rise.

Find Out Now deserves kudos for attempting to track the actively inactive - the millions of non-voters who can shake up campaigns and push the needle one way or another if the right messaging is applied. Think the outperforming vote for Leave in 2016 or the arithmetic of the Trump wins in 16 in 24.

Non-voters are appreciably a tough bunch to track, however. They often over-inflate their enthusiasm to vote. And pollsters would naturally weight them down. Find Out Now is one British pollster who shows us where these non-voters say would go if a general election was held today. Unsurprisingly most say they'd stay home. Obviously. They’re the traditionally non-voting. And in November last year that was the case. But in November Reform and the Conservatives were neck and neck among these non-voters - 13 per cent apiece. The Conservatives were, in the opinion polls, bringing out a notable number of non-voters.

In December Reform eked out a small lead among the subset. And in June among them Reform now leads the Cons by 13pts.

The way to look at this is not Reform picking up new non-voters. Rather, Reform is picking up once-upon-a-time Tory non-voters.

The type of voters who stopped voting Tory in 2024 were starting to come back out for them in the early autumn of 2024. And then Reform ate the lot.

In November the Cons had the support of 13 per cent of 2024 non-voters. At the end of May 2025 that figure had fallen to 6 per cent.

Reform, meanwhile, has jumped from 13 per cent to 19 per cent.

The subsamples make for a somewhat bumpy set of monthly numbers. But charted over the past year, the situation has become unimpeachable. Reform has eaten into not just the Tory base, but also, and perhaps more importantly: the Tory recovery.