How the Tories Bit the Dust – and Started Their Next Civil War

Shortly after the exit poll dropped showing a Labour landslide and a Tory massacre of historic proportions, the BBC beamed a graphic of big Tory beasts and their projected chances of keeping their seats. Jacob Rees-Mogg was at 50%. Penny Mordaunt had 25%. Worst off was Steve Baker, on less than 1%.

Baker, sitting on the BBC’s pundit sofa, looked up at a picture of his career as an MP ending and smiled gamely.

It set the tone for a brutal night of Tories eating shit.

“I do think the dynamic in Wycombe is slightly different to what’s in the polls,” Baker said, hopefully. Not for the first time, reality seemed hard to accept for the climate-sceptic, as he suggested there could still be a “path to winning narrowly”. Reader, there was not.

The battle for the soul of the Conservative party got underway early. Everywhere you looked, Tories were looking for excuses and casting recriminations.

Andrea Leadsom, the former health minister and one-time leadership hopeful, told the BBC she had spoken to some people who were “sick of all this woke stuff” and didn’t like the Tories “trying to be more leftwing than Labour”. Hmm. Over on ITV, George Osborne said that today’s Tories should have been more like him.

Rees-Mogg, looking pinker than usual, claimed the party “took its core vote for granted” and had failed to live up to “Conservative core principles”.

Rees-Mogg embodies “Conservative core principles” to the point of ghoulish self parody, but voters rejected him too. Confirmation that he’d bitten the dust didn’t come through until drizzly daylight was breaking. It was worth the wait. He stood at the election count, with his novelty sized rosette, learning of his loss next to a man wearing a baked beans balaclava: vox populi, vox dei.

The first Tory scalp of the night came from Swindon South, where ex-minister Robert Buckland lost his seat. “What are we saying, particularly to younger voters?” he reflected. “We should be representing with passion the hopes of the next generation,” said the man who once voted against making rented homes “fit for human habitation” while he was a landlord.

He was spitting feathers. The coming Conservative party bust-up would be “bald men arguing over a comb,” he said, and blasted the “astonishing ill discipline” of colleagues such as Suella Braverman, who had written in the Telegraph that the election was over before polling day. A turn to the right would be “a disastrous mistake”, he said.

Braverman continued her leadership pitch from the podium in Fareham by sticking the knife into her party once again. “There is only one thing I can say: sorry. I’m sorry that my party didn’t listen to you. The Conservative party has let you down. You, the Great British people, voted for us over 14 years and we did not keep our promises.”

She warned of “many more bad nights to come” if the Tories don’t learn their lesson – presumably by voting her in as leader and taking a hard turn to the right.

There were a few let-ups for the beleaguered Conservatives. Arch Brexiteer Mark Francois held onto his seat in Rayleigh and Wickford. Jeremy Hunt clung on by 900 votes, and could be a big voice in the coming leadership contest, as could Kemi Badenoch, who also retained her seat. Richard Holden, chairman of the party, endured a nail-biting night as Basildon and Billericay went to a recount – and held onto his seat by just 20 votes.

Iain Duncan Smith snuck through in Chingford after the vote against him was split between Labour’s Shama Tatler and independent Faiza Shaheen, whom the party had unceremoniously purged.

But the Tory losses came thick and fast. Here was Mordaunt on the verge of tears, losing her seat by about 700 votes. There was Grant Shapps delivering platitudes of defeat. Andrea Jenkyns, Michael Fabricant, Miriam Cates, Therese Coffey, Liam Fox, Johny Mercer. Liz Truss by just a few hundred votes, bless her. Gone, gone, gone – ashen-faced Tories everywhere.

A night of watching Tories bite the dust after 14 long years was tempered by its ultimate cause: a solid night for Reform UK. In a sign of what’s to come, Nigel Farage released a social media video hailing the positive exit poll and claiming that “not a single” Reform representative had been on the TV, and that the media was “in denial” – even as party co-deputy leader David Bull was doing the rounds on the BBC. Farage won in Clacton handily. Eighth time lucky.

So begins the next Tory civil war. In a party that hasn’t been overburdened with talent, it’s a battle that looks set to be defined by which of their biggest names are still elected representatives. And for the losers, they will have to make do with highly paid consultancy work, Telegraph columns and thinktank gigs.