Interesting, and relatively close to the nub. One point overlooked is the failure of the Lib Dems to advance in many of their key target seats, instead seeing the Conservative vote advance and the Lib Dems fall back - Surrey South West is a good example. A lot of Lib Dems are now openly questioning the sense of the "decapitation strategy" of targetting key Conservative figures in a backdrop of an unpopular Labour government and this could lead to a change of emphasis as they increase the anti-Labour attack.

I agree the Conservatives need to do much more. For too many years before Howard's election all the party has seemed to do is bitch about the leadership and Europe, only occassionaly giving lip service to other matters. Now the party must fundamentally rethink and take postive action over the next four years, not just wait for Labour to screw up.

It's actually much worse than that for them in many ways. Their increase in vote share was a lamentable 0.5% this being a lower increase than even Hague achieved in 2001.

They've had their 3rd worst vote share in 50 years and in urban areas outside London they have no MPs!

The bulk of their gains came in the South of England, in seats which they never should have lost in the first place.

They have less seats than Labour had in their modern nadir of 1983. Tories now have 197 seats and Labour then won 209, a debacle that it took them 3 elections to recover from.

That's not all, among voters under 35 they have fallen even further behind since 1997.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/vote_2005/issues/4520847.stm#graph

The latter may be offset somewhat by higher turnouts in the over 65s and an ageing population. However many people are creatures of habit. Thus, if young people get into the habit of voting Labour or LibDem now then it may prove difficult to win them over at a later date.

I think in time to come the Lib Dems will be seen as having had the poorest results, in terms of what they achieved compared to what was possible. this could have been a breakthrough year for them had they not allowed themselves to be distracted by Iraq . Nevertheless Kennedy will be the only leader still in his job next time round.

There are flaws in the anlysis though. One is the assumption that Labour and Lib Dem voters are basically on the same centre-Left side, and that the Conservatives can only win if they're split.

In fact, the public at large see Tony Blair as a centre right leader (several Yougov polls show this to be so). Some vote Labour for this reason. And plenty who vote for the Lib Dems do so for reasons that have nothing to with ideology, although the voters who switched to them from Labour this time did do so because they considered that Labour is no longer left-wing enough for them.

In 1997 and 2001, Labour was definitely preferred by Lib Dem voters over the Conservatives. This produced huge anti-Conservative tactical voting. This time round, there wasn't much in it, so the tactical voting unwound considerably. It's hard to see any good reason for anti-Conservative tactical voting to return (at least so long as the Conservatives are out of office), and it's much more likely that next time round, voters will have even more reason to vote against the government.

Sean, I think my point was less ambitious than that. Essentially, if I posit that, in a whole range of constituencies (that I'm too lazy to count, admittedly!), 20% of the shift from Labour to Lib Dem was reversed, both the Tory and Lib Dem seat allocations would drop significantly. I don't need to make any general assumptions about the positions of parties on the ideological spectrum.

Another problem for the Conservatives is that among the population at large, there are far more "natural Labour" and "natural Lib Dem" people than "natural Tories".

What the Tories do well is to get their "natural" supporters out to vote, whereas lots of "natural" Labour or Lib Dems are too lazy and stay at home.

In recent elections, the Tories have done relatively well because their vote comes out while the Labour and Lib Dem voters are less likely to come out.

The Tories, then, have less scope to improve their vote because they are already successfully getting it out.

Another problem is that the Tory vote is disproportionately old, so much of their support is literally dying off.

Agree with everything above - the point about the LDs is (unfortunately) particularly pertinent.

Ciarán

I would make the point, however, that the Tories lost so many seats in the first place specifically due to tactical voting against them. All that has happened is that people have stopped voting tactically against the Tories - so rather than the seat allocation not being realistic, I think it has now become realistic.

I don't expect anti-Tory tactical voting to resume prior to the next Tory government.

Willowfield

In fact, I don't think there are many 'natural LibDems' at all, that's their problem.

I'd say about a third of the GB population just is Labour, and a third is Conservative - these people will always vote for their party if they vote at all (but may opt not to vote or, in extreme cases, may vote LibDem in protest). However, very few people are LibDem.

However, this still means that essentially you're right, the Tories need a complete overhaul to have any chance of attracting voters beyond those who already 'are Conservative'.

Lets revisit this thread in a year's time when people's taxes have been whacked up and 'shopping therapy' has been well and truely abandoned

There are a few factors that haven't been taken into consideration in any of the analyses I've seen since the election. The most important of these is the ground war.

The sheer number of seat that Labour held on to my wafer thin margins (18 by under 1,000 votes), and comparatively few, especially to the Tories, lost by similar margins, indicates that Labour HQ knew exactly where resources needed to be deployed. That in turn required a brilliant pre-election telephone canvassing operation. Labour had it, but didn't need it, in 97 and 01, and they were pulling off wins well off their target list so no-one really noticed it. This time it came good when they really did need it, even with a huge haemorraging of their activist base (to turn it into votes on election day) in their marginals, backed by a ferocious direct mail operation.

E.g., a friend of mine, a life long left-wing Labour voter in Wimbledon (Tory gain from Labour and an obvious key seat in this election) decided after the War he would never vote Labour again. He told a Labour telephone canvasser this earlier in the year. He then received three phone calls, obviously scripted for potential Labour to LibDem defectors, as well as eight pieces of direct mail, including from his popular local MP (twice), Blair, Brown, Charles Clarke* and even Robin Cook (I Hated The War But I'm Still Voting Labour and The LibDems Can't Win Wimbledon). As a result he voted Labour again. He regrets it already, but when the chips were down, that's what he did. In many ways, I think Labour had the campaign of the election, grinding out a very comfortable working majority on 36% of the vote.

Look at Kent, where Labour were defending 8 seats out of 17, all seen as vulnerable, and not only held 7 of them, but held 5 of those by under 1,000 votes. That's how good the Labour ground campaign was - and look at how the perennial Tory target of Dover looks like a safe Labour seat now.

The Tories also obviously fought a brilliant under-the-radar campaign against the LibDems in target seats, particularly focused on tax and crime. This didn't just work in the 'decapitation' seats (handing your target list to the opposition two years before polling day is, indeed, really fucking stupid) but in low-profile vulnerable Tory seats like Surrey South West (as Tim rightly picked up) and New Forest East (where I spent polling day) and Westbury in Wiltshire (which I thought on demographics alone was a LibDem banker with an excellent candidate). It was pretty obvious in the New Forest on polling day that the Tories had been very successful in 'getting at' Tory/LibDem waverers with direct mail, and have learned to fight the LibDems as such, deserving of tactics in our own right, rather than trying to paint us as an adjunct of Labour and fighting with poorly targetted national messages.

The worrying thing for the Tories is that they went backwards against both Labour and the LibDems in the North, Scotland and the Midlands, gained a few seats from Labour but slipped against the LibDems in Wales, and saw the LibDems do the sweep in Cornwall and going backwards in many of their South West targets (how did the Tories fail to gain Hereford or Wellls? Massively increased LibDem majority in Yeovil?)

The LibDems really should have done better, but the Labour "vote LibDem, get Tory" message obviously worked even where it was used completely disingenuously in two way fights where the Tories were nowhere (North London, Scotland, Liverpool, Newcastle and Durham). On the other hand, they still shepherded a few weak MPs home against stiff Tory opposition (Romsey, Wells, excellent but new MP in Eastleigh against a strong local second-time Tory challenger), gained seats expected by the cognoscenti if not the press from Labour (North London's Hornsey, Cambridge, East Dunbartonshire) and a few from nowhere (Manchester Withington, Leeds North West). Solihull must be a frightening intimation for the Tories of much of their remaining high-status suburban vote, and there were a few other nice setups for next time in the Midlands. Not that I'm planning to release the decapitation list!

While the LibDems target list from Labour looks full of areas where they have no historic strength at Westminster level, a lot of them have a strong LibDem local government presence, and aren't old Labour seats but in many cases liberal middle-class areas, just like Withington, B'ham Yardley, Bristol West and Cambridge, which defected massively from the Tories to Labour in the late 80s and early 90s and kept swinging through. Therefore, the LibDems don't need to win Old Labour votes in big numbers but socially liberal centrist voters, to win 3 out of 5 in Edinburgh, 2 out of 3 in Newcastle, 2 out of 5 in Liverpool, Durham, an additional B'ham seat, the other Oxford seat, and large chunks of Inner North and South London and a few of the high status heavily Asian West London seats (this latter group including Watford).

The trick for the LibDems won't be managing the left-right tensions, but managing the metropolitian-peripheral tensions of a coalition that must include both Islington and rural Cornwall. They also need to learn how to counter-attack against the Tories in the South East.

Anyway, British politics look to be a bit more interesting than they have been for a long time.

* - why does anyone think Charles Clark is a vote winner? I mean, really, the man is a complete twonk. Oh, yes, I forgot to add his Norwich South seat (maj. 3,653) to that list of potential Tory->Labour->LibDem swingers. Worth a few hours of anyone's time?

And I forgot to add the real point of my comments on the LibDems: in a reversal of recent history, they got the strategy right but the tactics wrong!

Actually, YF, I'd say the reverse. I think tactically, the Lib Dems were first class, but strategically foolish.

At a tactical level, they pulled off some fine wins. At a strategic level, they went after the urban left-wing vote, without realising this was going to alienate their soft Tory supporters in the Home Counties.

Now it may actually be sensible for them to position themselves as the most left-wing of the three parties, as they can continue to pick up disaffected Labour voters, but it would require a strategic decision to be prepared to lose the soft Tories.

WRT the future, by the time of the next election, Labour's local government base will be even weaker than it is now. Labour is set to lose about half its London boroughs next year. This matters, as we found in the mid nineties, because (a) your activist base falls away, and (b) people get out of the habit of voting for you. Almost all the Conservative gains came in areas of local government success over the past few years, although there were seats where local success did not translate into winning the seat.

I would imagine that at the next election, Labour will be pretty well cleared out of the South (outside London). However, our poor performance in the North, Scotland, and parts of the Midlands, is indeed a worry.

"Another problem is that the Tory vote is disproportionately old, so much of their support is literally dying off."

Actually the number of old people is growing. Its a good demographic to apppeal to.

Old people are the future.

Any party needs new young talent though to thrive.

Peoples' political priorities do change though as they get older, and in general, people tend to move rightwards. Older people are also much more likely to go out and vote.

The most encouraging thing about these results for the Conservatives was that their votes and seats increased quite strongly in the most economically dynamic parts of Britain, ie Greater London, East Anglia, the Home Counties, the M3 and M4 corridors.

The most worrying thing for the Conservatives is that their vote stagnated or even decreased in parts of Britain that are dependent on high levels of public spending (the urban North and Midlands, and much of Scotland). Labour held onto its core support well, with the exception of Muslim voters and the intelligentsia.

Sean:

Now it may actually be sensible for them to position themselves as the most left-wing of the three parties, as they can continue to pick up disaffected Labour voters, but it would require a strategic decision to be prepared to lose the soft Tories.

That is the Lib Dem dilemma in one simple bite! Their party headquarters should begin this term trying to figure out how to circumvent this problem above all others.

Back to Ciaran's analysis of the Tory problem. Even after the next election, they are still likely to be stuck in the mass Tory ghetto of the south of England. Breaking out of that ghetto is essential if the party is to have a chance of winning the next election (or even the one after next).

Your next party leader will have to go beyond Howard's effective consolidation routine. S/he is going to have to do what Thatcher/Reagan/Bush and most especially Blair have all done: ie make friends with people you've never been friends with before.

I have my doubts whether that can be done on the old Thatcherite messages of tax and spend which the party has wasted a lot of time and energy on over the last eight years. When the people you want to convert hear you say tax cuts what they actually hear is dilapidated schools and hospital trusts revving up close to the red.

Thatcher proved you could float off government assets and the world didn't collapse. But the revolution ran out steam as it got closer and closer to health and education and other sensitive forms of mass provision of key services.

A new Tory leader will need to find a way of explaining the party's plans for smaller government that quells such anxieties. As Blair was a figure from Labour's right who has made a fair pitch at defending the concept and practice of public services, perhaps you need a figure from your left to extoll the virtues of smaller government?

With a big idea or two in his/her pocket, you might stand a half decent chance of breaking out of the Tory ghetto.

More excellent analysis above.

The Conservatives are foolish to go on about low taxes etc. It's a bit like going round the doors selling grass on the basis it's green. The people know that, but what else can you offer?

The LibDems' problem is obvious from the above - apparently they've gone too far from the left, and for electoral reasons they need to move back to the centre, or something... but do they not actually stand for anything? I think they are wise to try to collar the Green vote, that brings youth into the party and can, combined with social-liberal policies on other issues, give the potential to stand for something fairly clearly.

Actually, I think we finished up with the worst of both worlds on taxation and spending. Labour will always accuse us of planning to slash public spending (notwithstanding that the only post-war government that has ever cut public spending in real terms was Jim Callaghan's). That is a given, and we should just take it on the chin.

We were so keen to dispell this argument that we promised to spend just as much as Labour on health, education, pensions, and even overseas aid, and more than Labour on defence and law and order. That left us offering really quite miniscule tax reductions (indeed our spending plans would have still seen tax rising slightly as a proportion of GDP).

Polls consistently showed that almost as many people thought that taxation would rise under a Conservative government as thought it would rise under a Labour one, so we were able to derive little benefit from the issue.

The LibDems really should have done better, but the Labour "vote LibDem, get Tory" message obviously worked even where it was used completely disingenuously in two way fights where the Tories were nowhere (North London, Scotland, Liverpool, Newcastle and Durham).

Excpet that at the wider level, Kennedy had announced that in a hung Parliament the Lib Dems would not keep in office a government that had been "rejected" by the voters, with the only alternative the Conservatices (I've yet to meet a Lib Dem who thought this would be the election where they would magically arrive at No 10) so arguably the Labour slogan was accurate.