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The frontrunner to win the Conservative leadership contest plans to “win a culture war” with younger voters, in order to get the party back into Government.
Robert Jenrick’s campaign manager told a fringe meeting at the party’s conference in Birmingham on Sunday that they now “actually have to win a culture war” in order to make young people “recognise the significance and value of Conservatism” again.
According to polling by YouGov, just eight per cent of voters under the ago of 30 backed Rishi Sunak’s party at the last general election, compared to more than 40% who backed Labour.
Former Conservative adviser Robert Colvile told the meeting, hosted by his Centre for Policy Studies think tank, that as a result “being a Tory under 50 is now a very weird thing”.
Conservative MP Danny Kruger, who is running Jenrick’s campaign, linked this collapse in support to the domination of progressive values in education and social media.
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“I think the challenge for us is the values that we stand for are not the progressive values that have dominated the thinking in education and social media and the sort of news and culture that young people have taken in”, he said, adding that they would therefore need to fight an “air war” in order to trigger a “switch” in outlook among young people.
“I believe, and I see, actually a desire for some of those small-c conservative values of rootedness, responsibility… honor, duty, Victorian ideas that I think would resonate [with young people] if we conveyed them with authority”, he told the meeting.
Jenrick, who resigned as immigration minister under Rishi Sunak, is currently leading the race among Conservative MPs.
Although focusing mostly on his former brief of immigration, Jenrick has also sought to exploit divisions over the current conflict in the Middle East, repeatedly posing for pictures while wearing a “Hamas are Terrorists” t-shirt.
He has also claimed that “woke culture” is putting English identity at risk.
Jenrick is also expected to try and drive a wedge between the two parties on climate change, with Kruger telling the meeting that the “environmental lobby” had “overreached itself” and that the party should now attack Labour for their “madcap” climate plans.
Jenrick’s closest current rival Kemi Badenoch has also signalled plans to continue the culture wars of the last Government, telling the BBC on Sunday that the country needs to recognise that some of the cultures of some people coming to live in the UK are not “equally valid” to others.
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Although all members of the panel conceded that the general election had been disastrous for the party, defeated Conservative leadership candidate Mel Stride said they should all be cheered by the rapid decline in support for the Prime Minister Keir Starmer since the election, saying that their party could now expect to “naturally” regain some support.
One audience member agreed, saying that the real failure had been for the party to not properly communicate the good job they had done in government.
“Actually there are many things that we’ve done in government that have been good, and we need to get control of our legacy and put that out in the voters’ minds”, she said.
However, former Conservative adviser Rachel Woolf warned the panel not to underestimate the scale of dislike for the party, saying that, “We cannot for one second convince ourselves that we’re not loathed. We are, and we haven’t done any of the necessary steps [to turn things around]”