There’s a Soviet-era joke about a man who asks permission to emigrate to the West. He is interrogated by officials, who demand to know his reasons. “Are you unhappy with the job we gave you?” He replies: “I have no complaints.”

Then they ask him about his housing, his education and every other aspect of his life in the USSR. Every time, he gives the same answer: “I have no complaints.” Exasperated, the officials confront him: “So, comrade, if you have no complaints, why do you want to leave?”

“Because I would like to have some complaints.”

At the moment, being a member of the Conservative Party feels a bit like that. In contrast to the aftermath of our 1997 landslide defeat, there has been next to no reckoning with the causes of our 2024 humiliation. Which is bizarre, because the need for a full-and-frank internal debate is even more urgent today than it was a quarter of a century ago. Back then, we could at least expect to be the Official Opposition. Now, we can no longer take that status for granted.

Rather than have the necessary conversations about how we got into our predicament and how we get out of it, those have been suppressed in the name of party unity. When party managers cannot keep a lid on the resulting disunity, it us resolved not through debate but defection.

That is why I’m grateful for the existence of Prosper UK, which was launched in January this year by Andy Street, Ruth Davidson and Gavin Barwell, among others. Sat outside the formal structures of the Conservative Party, they are free to dissent from the official line and to provide a forum for open debate.

And yet, I will not be signing up.

Looking down the full list of supporters, it is clear that Prosper UK has a liberal conservative bias. That, however, is not my objection. Though I am a plainly conservative Conservative, I believe that the conversation about the future of the centre-right needs as much intellectual variety as possible. So, the fact that Prosper might come up with solutions I differ with is fine by me. What I do object to, however, is how they frame the problem.

Prosper would have us disregard — or, at least, turn up our noses — at the elephant in the room: Reform UK and the rise of populism.

In making their case, they deploy a supposedly killer fact. Here it is delivered by Ruth Davidson: “For every previous Conservative voter who now supports Reform, 1.3 are now either voting for a left-leaning party or they’re undecided or disengaged.”

On the face of it, this blows apart the conventional wisdom that Reform is our biggest problem. But where exactly does that one-to-1.3 ratio come from? The answer appears to be a More in Common study from December 2025, showing that, for all voters who have voted Conservative in the past, 25% would still do so, 33% would vote Reform, 21% would go for left-leaning parties (mostly Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens) and 20% would not vote or do not know how they would.

These figures are broadly consistent with an Ipsos survey of how people who voted Conservative in 2019 voted in 2024. Thirty-nine percent stuck with their previous choice, 18% switched to Reform, 9% to Labour, 5% to the Lib Dems, 2% to the Greens and 26% stayed at home. So, the same basic pattern — the ex-Tories who have gone to Reform are outnumbered by those heading in other directions.

Does that prove the Prosper UK argument about the direction that the Conservative Party should be heading ?

It does not. For a start, Prosper only gets to its one-to-1.3 ratio by grouping the non-voters and ‘don’t knows’ with the defectors to Labour and the Lib Dems. But why not group them with the defectors to Reform instead? According to MRP polling for Electoral Calculus, the biggest voter shift between the last general election and May 2025 was from non-voters to Reform. This would indicate that the ‘disengaged’ are populist, not centrist, in their inclinations.

If that is true, why did they not vote Reform when they had the chance in 2024? The likeliest answer is that Farage’s outfit was still emerging from minor-party status at that time  — and thus was not on everyone’s radar. For millions of angry ex-Tories, staying at home was the more obvious option.

But what about the ex-Tories who voted Labour or Lib Dem instead? Surely we can count those as centrists?

Well, perhaps not. It is plausible that for some of them, the primary motivation was to punish the party of Johnson, Truss and Sunak for breaking the promises of 2019 — especially on immigration and levelling-up. If so, the most effective revenge would have been to vote for the best-placed non-Tory candidate in each seat, which in 2024 was mostly not Reform. We certainly should not assume that these switchers were all bougie liberals desperate for the return of David Cameron. That much is made clear in an eye-opening analysis of data from the British Election Study Internet Panel, revealing that 2024 Con-to-Lib Dem switchers are a very different bunch from other Lib Dem voters.

It is easy to become confused about where the middle ground of British politics really lies. I fear that Prosper UK are making a serious mistake if they imagine that the “politically homeless” are necessarily economic and social liberals like themselves. Indeed, they may well be the opposite: leaning to the left on economics and to the right on social issues.

There is a related Prosper claim that is also worth a second look: which is that in the majority of seats that the Conservatives lost in their landslide defeat, Reform was the not the biggest challenge. That might be right — except it is not 2024 anymore. Support for populist right has since doubled, while that for Labour has halved. After all, there is a reason why electoral projections show a sea of turquoise washing over the seats that the Tories lost last time, not to mention the seats that they could lose next time. Besides, just look at our losses in the local elections this year — again, overwhelmingly to Farage and friends.

Note that none of this is an argument for right-wing populism. But it does tell us that we must take the causes of the populist revolt seriously — and face up to the failures of a decrepit establishment.]

Original photo taken ob behalf of World Skills UK.