The Conservatives are “not close to recognising” how badly they are positioned for the next election, the former cabinet minister David Gauke has said.
Gauke, a former justice secretary who also worked in the Treasury under George Osborne, said many in the party were not willing to fully repudiate Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
The party was ignoring heartland voters in the home counties who had turned in droves to the Liberal Democrats and was spending too much time fighting on Reform UK’s turf, he added.
“If the next election is going to be about immigration and the war on the woke, it’s not going to be the Conservative party that are the beneficiaries of that. It will be Nigel Farage and Reform,” he said, in an interview with the Guardian. “Trying to make those issues more salient is a strategic blunder. First and foremost the Conservatives need to fight the next election on the economy.”
Gauke criticised his party for spending too much time on culture-war issues where Farage was the dominant voice.
The former MP, who has authored a major sentencing review for Labour set to be made law this autumn, said it was not a foregone conclusion that Farage would become prime minister, but depended on Labour kickstarting economic growth.
He said to do so would mean hard choices for Rachel Reeves on tax rises and the pensions triple lock, as well as seeking a much closer relationship with the EU, saying the Labour chancellor “needs to talk to the bond markets more than she needs to talk to the parliamentary party or the British public”.
He said the Tory party had not yet fully confronted why it had become so unpopular and had not undergone the transformation that Labour had after defeat at the 2019 election.
“Most of the Labour party [MPs] felt that the Jeremy Corbyn years were an aberration and that they wanted to revert to something different. They found it very easy to repudiate, whereas quite a lot of the Conservative party looks back at the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss time as being proper Conservatism,” he said.
“I don’t think the Conservative party is close to recognising how badly placed they are, and all the thinking at the moment is the worry about Reform. Yes, Reform are taking Conservative votes, but a lot of that was because the Conservatives just no longer looked functional.”
He said the party had no message that would resonate with the home counties. “The aspirational, successful, educated voter, they voted Conservative for economic competence, but now looks at the Conservative party and thinks, ‘you haven’t really been speaking to me for a very long time, probably not since the 2015 election’,” he said.
Gauke, who had the Conservative whip removed by Johnson in 2019 for voting to stop a no-deal Brexit, said he believed the Labour government had to be more resilient to criticism and unpopularity – and that the Reform UK surge in the polls was not necessarily a sign Farage was on course to be PM.
“There will be a lot of tactical voting against Reform. [Farage] is evidently beatable if Labour can deliver strong economic growth. I think it would be hard for the Conservatives to win the next election, but they can re-establish themselves as the main opposition,” he said. “But if both try to say ‘Nigel Farage is right, but please don’t vote for him’, then I think they’re in real trouble.”
Instead of being surprised at the polls, Labour MPs should accept “that being in government you are going to be unpopular”, he said. “Governments used to come back from deep levels of unpopularity on a regular basis and it can still be done. All of that has become much harder but it’s still fundamentally true. But you have to have a programme and there’s not been enough of it.”
Gauke said he wanted Reeves to succeed in driving economic growth but that would mean tough political choices because of the high debt interest Britain was paying. “We are on the naughty step. If we had the same gilt yields as Germany, we would be paying £50bn less in debt interest a year,” he said.
The former chief secretary to the Treasury said it was “a delusion that’s very popular on the left of politics” that enough could be raised by just putting up taxes on the very wealthy.
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But he said long-term economic confidence would come only if Reeves was prepared to signal she would make hard choices, including on issues that might not immediately score with the Office of Budget Responsibility.
“It would show she is facing up to some of those challenges on the pension’s triple lock, on the loss of fuel duty revenue because of moving to electric vehicles. None of these things are electorally popular, but if the markets think, ‘actually this is a serious government’, then you get into a virtuous circle,” he said.
Keir Starmer and Reeves should also be prepared to ask for more from the EU in terms of trade ties, Gauke said. “They made some really good progress earlier this year, there was hardly any political reaction. Be bolder. Come back to that. Businesses would love it if we were prepared to be bolder on the EU.”
Gauke, who has spent time with the justice secretary, Shabana Mahmood, said she had been lord chancellor with a “sense of direction” who was effectively driving change at the department.
Mahmood is known to be seriously considering what the UK could do to reform its approach to the European convention on human rights, including whether the government could act unilaterally on how it interpreted some aspects of the convention when it came to prisons or immigration.
But Gauke said he was concerned about the UK acting alone, and said it would be more effective for signatory countries to press for change as a collective.
“My sense from where Shabana is – is can it be improved? Is the interpretation of it much broader than we would want? And I think those are the right questions to be asking,” he said. “If you try and set the dynamic up as ‘us against the rest’, then you’re just heading for a fall, but a lot of the concerns that the UK has about the operation of the ECHR is reflected in other signatories. You’re going to have to work with other countries.”
He said he was deeply concerned his own party would embrace the policy of leaving the ECHR, a move favoured by the Tory leadership hopeful Robert Jenrick.
“You just end up with a repeat of the Brexit episodes, of our international influence being diminished and our reputation damaged and a big practical issue in Northern Ireland. I don’t know why the country would be attracted to that as an offer,” he said.