John Oxley: Until Badenoch can surmount the ’14 years’ challenge, the Tories will struggle to win a hearing

John Oxley is a consultant, writer, and broadcaster. His SubStack is Joxley Writes.

The Conservatives have now had six months in opposition; half a year since the often-ignored warnings of their decline became a reality as the election results rolled in.

In some ways, it has been a good six months. Labour has faltered and struggled with their inheritance. The Government doesn’t have the feeling of invincibility it should do with its massive majority.

Our party is, however, making little headway. Polling puts us on a 24 per cent vote share – almost exactly what we received in that disastrous July.

The political debates over the Christmas period have highlighted a key part of the reason for that. It is the simple repost that comes back to us on any point – “You had fourteen years”. Labour gets to deploy this on the economy and public services. Reform can do the same for migration and other social issues.

The grooming gangs debate has been a perfect example, with both sides trying to skewer the party with the question: “Why does this matter so much to you now?“.

It is one of the most difficult issues the party will have to confront as it rebuilds back to credibility: that the depth of the drubbing of the general election was driven by public anger at how we had governed.

The reality is that much of the fightback will be led by those who held positions of responsibility at that time. They cannot avoid acknowledging responsibility for collective policy decisions or those made by their own departments at that time. They cannot convincingly distance themselves from the fourteen years or launch attacks that lead to easy responses drawing on our own record.

To try and regain the narrative, the party needs to rebuild a convincing story about its time in power. It needs to be both proud of its successes and honest about its failings. It also needs an approach to Labour and Reform, which plays into these strengths and gives reassurance that the Conservatives can deliver. It also needs to remember the electoral success it had at that time and why the public chose to return us to government in four successive elections.

An obvious strength is our record on education. As a party, we should make more of this, both defending it from Labour attacks and pushing a broader narrative on what it means to be Conservative. We should be very proud of the way the Gove reforms pushed Britain up the PISA rankings and how our children are doing better than ever before.

But there is more to it than that. It is a story of how the party stands for wide-ranging opportunities, challenging the status quo, and improving life chances – something we have been reluctant to fully engage with for some time. We should also be, gently and tactfully, trying to reach out to the voters who benefited directly from this, using it as an opportunity to connect with younger voters.

On crime, there is a good story about the party being fluffed. Yes, the party is vulnerable to the mess it lets transpire in the criminal justice system and the laxities in sentencing that it allows to continue. Across a range of metrics, however, crime reached lows at all times under Conservative government. Burglaries and violent crime are hugely down. Through the years of Tory power, more people went to jail and for longer than before.

Rather than trying gotchas against Labour that can easily be deflected back, the party should focus more on this record of broadly delivering what the public wanted.

A clearer strategy for engaging with issues like this will help pull away from points where the obvious response is “You had until last July”.

The party also needs to pull past the desire for infighting and be proud of all its achievements in office – including those on combating COVID and climate change, which it has, at times, leaned towards disavowing. Fighting our own record, especially on things that remain broadly popular, leads to the sort of incoherence we saw towards the end of the last government.

More than that, the party needs to start crafting its vision for the future. One of the harsh realities of opposition is that on a day-to-day basis, little we do will actually matter. While well-aimed opposition might strike a few political blows to the government or extract the odd concession, the Conservative Party will only wield power in 2029 at the earliest. The more we focus on that, the more we might start to look like we can be trusted with the government once more.

The unavoidable reality is that the punch of the “fourteen years” attack hurts so much because we know it to be true. Few on the right are unambiguously happy with how our time in government went. At best, it can perhaps be rationalised as a time disrupted by outside events – from the financial crisis to COVID to the Russian invasion of Ukraine – that were managed better than the alternatives.

That’s not the most convincing sell to the public. Instead, the party would benefit from being more future-focused, giving a new sense that it understands what it is doing, why, and how to get it done, gradually rebuilding the sense that the party has become heavy on talk and short on action.

We need to start pre-empting more on how things will look in 2029 and what leavers we need to pull. The Tories need a vision for how the nation looks and feels in 2040 and the steps it wants to take to get there – a set of ideas and goals that branch out into policy and tactics.

There is only so much we can do about the past, but we can draw a contrast with a Labour government which seems to have arrived in Downing Street short on ideas of where it wants to go or how to get there, despite having had ample time to prepare. By opposing confidently and competently, this might start to bring back the idea we can govern competently.

This necessitates another thing, too: better discipline in how we attack. The party’s approach to grooming gangs has been marred by technical errors. We have called for data to come out that was already published (and was, in fact, only available because of changes we made in government). We’ve tripped over what we did and didn’t do in government.

These errors have been repeated elsewhere, too, with Claire Coutinho attacking Labour over what turned out to be her own policy. This sort of thing is sloppy and only hinders the party’s points further.

2024 was a real low for the Conservatives by any means, but 2025 could be just as difficult. So far, we have failed to make much political headway in opposition. We will soon face difficult local elections, especially with Reform on the rise. There is now little we can do about the actions we got up to in fourteen years of government. Instead, the party must find a way to take some of the sting out of this attack.

This means moving on from attacks that tie us up in our own record and finding more positive visions for the future. There’s no denying that “fourteen years” encapsulates the party’s problems, and only by deflating it can we hope to have a shot at governing again.

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