Joanna Reeves: We need to neutralise the ’14 years’ argument | Conservative Home

Joanna Reeves stood for Parliament and for the Chairmanship of the National convention in 2024. She is the Secretary of the United and Cecil fundraising club.

Any political party needs to be enthusiastically given the energy and commitment of its members to succeed.

These are the people who deliver the leaflets, speak to voters, organise the volunteers (as volunteers themselves) and represent the Party at ground level. Their local knowledge and intel is at the heart of any electoral win.

As the Chair of a constituency association and an active member of the National Convention, I know that the voluntary party has vast quantities of goodwill, energy and willingness to serve, but to harness this, the Party needs to show them that our leaders have direction and purpose.

Having a plan inspires action like nothing else.

I am glad to say that our Leader Kemi Badenoch is hitting her stride and growing in strength every time I see her. The Party’s position on many policy areas is crystallising. Kemi’s speeches on net zero, ‘lawfare’ and and finance hit the spot and as her back-catalogue grows, our members are starting to see the emergence of a message to project on the doorsteps. Something to fight for. So now is the time to use that growing sense of the Party’s identity to begin to think about winning seats back again.

To do so I recommend focussing on two areas.

Firstly, campaigning.

Associations and individual activists are doing their best but it is clear that we need focus and a central plan. Before we begin to think realistically about regaining a majority, I believe that for now, our time will be best spent seeking out the constituencies representing the lowest hanging fruit. Let’s plan around throwing our efforts into identifying a number of seats (say 50 to start with?) to win back, seats that we lost perhaps by a narrow margin, or where buyers’ remorse might be particularly acute.

CCHQ has enough resources at its disposal to analyse perhaps the hundred closest near misses.

From there, let’s engage those Associations and invite them to set out how they will use the time between now and the next parliamentary election to win that seat back. Let them make a pitch for the support they need and how they would use it. Knowing Associations, activists and voluntary party leaders as I do, I believe that an Association that takes up the challenge of offering a pitch will already be halfway there in the fight to winning back a lost seat.

And just as every Association is different, the pitches will be varied and bespoke in their proposals and requirements. Perhaps an Association requires training in digital campaigning, funds to order leaflets, help with a general campaign strategy, a plan for fundraising.

Does the Association have a keen and engaged membership, ripe to be turned into activists, but guidance is needed on how to do that? Would an early candidate selection be appropriate? Could a reliable plan for fundraising be offered? Can Associations be twinned in order to make the most of complementary resources?

For example, Holborn and St Pancras, where I am Association Chair, recently hosted a fundraiser for Neil O’Brien, MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston in Leicestershire, as a form of mutual aid, and it was a huge success. HSPCA was delighted to donate to HOWCA, and Neil was able to help us put together a spectacular slate with Priti Patel, Chris Philip and Mel Stride. Both associations were extremely happy.

Associations know what they need and the Party would, in my view, benefit from trusting them in that. Let the 50 Associations with the best pitch win whatever CCHQ can offer in terms of support. And it is noticeable that coherent, realistic plans raise money, as confidence in a plan supports the growth of the confidence to donate.

A virtuous circle will be generated.

The second area I would focus our minds on for now is how to handle our governmental legacy, as it relates to our developing policy positions.

As we begin to present our nascent policies and criticise the government for theirs, it is all to easy for our opponents to throw back at us the increasingly tired ‘you had 14 years in government’ line. Counter arguments to that have been shared elsewhere and I don’t intend to cover them here, but I do wish to offer a proposed response. The line of attack used against us, that we are responsible for our nation’s woes and that we are arguing against our own record, needs to be neutralised.

Firstly, what not to do. It has been suggested that the party needs to apologise. But what would this achieve? Better in my view to follow a process of explain, correct, attack.

Let’s show that we are realistic and humble where necessary, by identifying where we went wrong.  We must then go on to explain that we are judging – and being judged- with the benefit of hindsight; before reminding voters of the reasons why we took certain decisions or followed certain directions. Let’s freely use that gift of hindsight to identify why policies seemed to go wrong, explain what the reasons were at the time, and how we would do things differently in future circumstances if given another chance to govern.

At the same time, let’s correct the record.

We need to point to our many successes and show where they are being destroyed by the current government. For example, let’s never forget that we created the conditions for the creation of 800 jobs per day; Labour is reversing this as their Labour reforms discourage hiring. Under the Conservatives, education was demonstrably excellent: our children were close to the very top of international tables for maths and English. It was also innovative – just look at Gillian Keegan’s degree apprenticeships. Meanwhile Labour’s reforms in education will have the effect of undoing the wonderful progress that we Conservatives drove.

But let’s also make sure that we attack.

Why have we let Labour off the hook over the penurious state they left the country in in 1979 and 2010? In 1976 Labour needed the IMF to bail out our great nation and in 2008 the Labour old guard led us into the worst financial crisis we have seen.  Let’s remind voters that the same old Labour pattern of spending too much and then needing the Conservatives to come to the rescue has not gone away.

And if we feel that we are not getting cut-through with our explanation, correction and attack approach, we must nonetheless keep plugging away with our message and at the same time, find different platforms and approaches to make ourselves heard.

We need to be getting on with this now.

There will be more to do and different actions required as we progress, but to my mind these are what is required now.

We missed the boat with the local elections but we have more locals next year to prepare for. We allowed the status quo that lost us the general election to carry us adrift into those dismal elections in May. According to the Party Constitution, the authority of the Party rests with the Party Board (where the Party Leader does not have a place).

The members of the Voluntary Party and the representative of the Conservative Councillors Association who sit on the board need to be using their privileged positions to help drive the Party in the right direction and properly represent the experienced and knowledgable grassroots.

Let’s leave the status quo of unchallenged and repeated failed actions behind us and get serious about how we are going to win our way back to government. Let’s empower our Associations and reenergise our supporters. An awful lot is riding on it.

I offer these thoughts as practical, manageable steps that would make a difference now.