LEAVE the Conservative Party and save your country!

But Labour haven't delivered either and they're on their 5th day now!

Not sure how you would get back defectors to Labour or the Fib Dums without moving further left which I don't think is a good idea. As I saw it, most Tory 'defectors' went to Reform. My own constituency is a good example where the Conservative vote dropped 25% - Lib Dems were up 6%, Reform up 19% (from zero) and Labour no change.

My analysis would be that they lost votes to everyone, because everyone on all sides were sick of them. Reform just made the choice for where to go easier for a certain segment of the electorate, and probably took a lot of votes which would have gone to Labour or stayed at home.

I don't think the Conservatives need to go chasing them, they just need to look less useless and wait for the Reform MPs to get into their inevitable scandals.

Yes the Tory problem wasn't that they weren't x flavour of ideology.

They were just dogshit and we all hate them.

Sort themselves out, stop being corrupt, stop pretending the rules are for someone else and not you and your mates, start putting the country before the party and they might get a chance.

Being put out of power will at least help solve the final one, as, bluntly, no-one gives a shit about the tories for a bit.

Still too early to tell then? I suppose 5 days was a bit too tight to expect anything considering there was a weekend in there.

You're conflating votes and seats, but Reform's votes are spread thinly across the country. They're enough to lose a marginal but unlikely to be enough to win outright. Reform voters also live in lalaland where they can have more of everything and somebody else will pay for it. They are not economic conservatives even if they are socially conservative.

If you look at where voters have moved between 2019 and 2023, the Conservatives lost exactly the same proportion to Labour, LD and Green as they did to Reform. I'm sure you would like them to shift right but there's no evidence there are enough seats in that direction to form a majority.

UKIP/Brexit/Reform have had more or less the same vote share for the last decade; they've just been slightly more tactical in this election than the previous few.

Not sure you can generalise in that way about Reform voters, as presumably some Tory defectors to Reform to make a point would have tended to have some economic sense which they would not have deserted them as soon as they changed their voting intention.

Also as places like France, Netherlands, Austria etc have shown in terms of a rightward drift, sometimes the voters will align with you rather than the other way round. Especially if (as I expect) Labour don't deliver.

They should probably do that. Stick with Rishi too.

It's difficult to see how the conservatives could move to the right but also maintain any notional reputation for fiscal responsibility at least in terms of tax cuts.

In terms of other policies, they already had Rwanda, it cost a bomb and never got off the ground. They were going to introduce a poorly thought out version of national service. Both of these sound pretty right wing, neither of them moved the dial successfully.

But above all, if they try and move to the right, they will be continually outmanoeuvred by Reform and there must surely come a point when even you would go, that's a bit much?

The last line lol

Gone up in my opinions with the Braverman comment

It would be even sweeter if it were 52/48 in favour of a merger.

Gotta love the arrogance of thinking that Reform would just obviously want to merge with them rather than tell them to get stuffed.

I can’t see a complete merger only a split in the tory party. There must be a few old school tories that find Farage and the Reformers quite distasteful.

Otoh, it offers Farage a road to becoming PM.