EXCLUSIVE: What do ex-Conservatives want? We asked more than 2,000 of them - here's what they said

Findings from a unique survey of Conservative Party defectors

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Results of the 2019 general election (left) and the 2024 election (right)

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Today is another huge day in British politics. In the race to become the next leader of the Conservative Party three candidates will be whittled down to two and those two will then be put in front of Conservative Party members for a vote. Ballot papers will go out on October 15. Voting will close on October 31. And the new leader will be announced on November 2. It will either be Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly, or Robert Jenrick, with one of them being knocked out of the contest at 3.30pm today.

And what a truly enormous job it will be.

For a start, whoever wins the race will have to try and bring the Tories back from their worst election result in history —a result which, only three months ago, saw them plummet to just 23.7% of the national vote and 121 seats in the House of Commons.

At the same time, they’ll also have to fend off the growing threat from Nigel Farage and the Reform Party, who only a few days ago hit 20% in the national polls, with pollsters BMG. While the Tories, astonishingly, lost one in four of their 2019 vote to Farage, they simultaneously bled votes to Labour, the Liberal Democrats and, crucially, ‘none of the above’, with many ex-Conservatives who backed the party in 2019 simply not voting at all in 2024. Their electorate, in short, exploded.

Which raises the question: what do these ex-Conservative voters, people who voted Tory in 2019 but not again in 2024, actually want?

Answering this question will not only be critical for the next leader of the Conservative Party but also Nigel Farage and Reform, who are constantly looking for new opportunities to peel off even more of the Conservative Party’s electorate as they look to get beyond the 14-18% range in the polls into the 20-30% territory.

This is why, exclusively for our Substack, on this crucial day in the history of the Conservative Party, I can now share with you findings from a unique survey of some 2,077 ex-Conservative voters, people who voted Tory in 2019 and then abandoned the party in 2024. As far as I’m aware, this survey, undertaken by me in the aftermath of the Conservative Party’s historic defeat back in July, is one of the most comprehensive and detailed surveys of these voters that has been done to date.

It answers many fundamental questions that will, in turn, define the future trajectory of the Conservative Party. What do these ex-Conservatives think about immigration in Britain? What about leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR)? What about the so-called ‘culture wars’? And what about the future direction of the Conservative Party —do they want the party to move left, right, or toward the centre?

And it also answers many fundamental questions that will be central to the future of Reform, showing what the many people who abandoned the Tories for Reform believe. So, let’s jump straight in and explore the exclusive findings …

Here are the exclusive findings