Analysis: A fatigued Tory party must be able to stomach a brutal election campaign in 2024

The Conservatives are better at winning, more fond of power and on the whole have an easier time of governing, media scrutiny and reinvention than their Labour opponents.

Yet, the party is hovering around between 15 and 25 points behind Labour in current polling, the deepest pit it has had to drag itself out of since Tony Blair was in office.

There are a myriad of reasons why this is more concerning than when the Tories were being out-polled by the Brexit Party in June 2019, apart from the sheer size of the deficit in public opinion.

Perhaps the most worrying factor on how hard the Tories will fight the next election is the deep, yawning pit of fatigue that the party finds itself in going into 2024.

The malaise that has come in steady ebbs and flows amongst the party’s MPs arguably set in following the ousting of Boris Johnson.

The Tories are tired. The exertion and reputational damage that comes from the party of government tearing its leader kicking and screaming from the top job was such a drain on morale that many backbenchers looked at a career beyond politics.

Roughly 50 Conservative MPs, one-in-seven of its current crop, are set to stand down, with more leaving their decisions until the new year on whether to call it a day.

Then they did it again, expending yet more energy to remove Liz Truss following half a decade of civil wars within the party over policy and personnel.

However, the party still has some fight left in it, seen most recently in its brief flirtation with removing Rishi Sunak over a lack of progress on the party’s favourite tool of self-flagellation: immigration.

Oddly, this is a good sign. The Conservative Party in recent years has been marked out by its ability to systematically blow itself up over one issue or another to the point of existential despair before ruthlessly getting back to the day job of stopping Labour getting into power.

The fact that it still has the energy to care enough about removing its leader shows that fight is still there, and the party is now beginning to flex its muscles.

The next election will be one of the most difficult and bad-tempered fights the party has ever had and its tactics and tone of its messaging will be viscous, as that is what it will take to change the narrative.

Labour knows this, with Sir Keir Starmer telling this year’s Labour conference: “Wherever you think the line is, they’ve already got plans to cross it.”

CCHQ, the party’s campaigning machine, has already started testing this, with staffers mocking up a picture of a BBC news anchor giving the middle finger to attack Labour, much to the displeasure of some Tory backbenchers who didn’t believe it wasn’t quite cricket.

Similarly Richard Holden, the party’s chair, has dusted off the line of “Gordon Brown sold all the gold”, which has been met with a certain degree of nostalgia for attack ads of Christmas past.

Most recently the party has begun to disseminate its briefings on Sir Keir’s legal career to the press, in the works for months since it tried to claim that he failed to prosecute the paedophile while Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP).

Most recently the Telegraph has run stories claiming that the Labour leader previously helped free dangerous prisoners including arsonists, rapists, paedophiles, murderers and terrorists.

A lot of Conservative MPs who dislike getting their hands dirty may find this distasteful given many have nothing personally against him, but the blunt truth is that this is the tactic the party must and will use if it has any hope of winning, and if Conservative MPs don’t like that, then they’re going to really hate the next six to twelve months of it.

The test of how much Conservatives want to win in 2024 will be measured in how many will be able to stomach the means it may take to deny Labour its almost-guaranteed victory at the ballot box, and how many have the energy to go out and campaign for the future of their party.