Keir Starmer, leader of Britain’s Labour party, won a crushing victory over the Conservatives last week, taking 412 seats to the Conservatives’ 121. Labour defeated a hapless and divided Tory Party that lost votes to Nigel Farage’s Reform on the right, seats to the Liberal Democrats in the centre, as well as suffering a general loss of support as traditional Tories, demoralised and exhausted by their party’s incompetent government and error-strewn campaign, stayed at home. The Conservatives’ fate raises important questions for the centre-right across the Western world, and highlights the difficulty of maintaining a “people’s party”-style coalition encompassing national conservatives on its right wing, and right-leaning liberals on its left.

The fourteen years of Conservative power owe a lot to luck. In 2019, facing off against a Labour party under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for anti-semitism, Boris Johnson won an apparently unassailable majority of 80, but the Conservatives proved unable to supply stable government, replacing him with Liz Truss, and then after Truss provoked a financial markets crisis, Rishi Sunak.

They had misread their victory as an endorsement of Johnson’s Brexit-infused redistributive populism, when it was in fact a rejection of the pro-Communist and pro-terrorist Labour leader. In 2019, Labour’s vote fell by by more than 3 million votes. The Conservatives’ increased by just 300,000. Labour lost ten times as many votes as the Conservatives gained.

Labour’s Corbyn-induced weakness allowed the Tories to absorb enough of a long-established anti-European anti-system vote, while keeping hold of moderate Tories, even more scared of a Corbyn victory. The Tories were able to exploit a fact of politics in Western Europe. Despite recent fragmentation, it is still heavily shaped by left- and right-wing identities, even when voter coalitions don’t correspond to the issues over which elections are fought as they once did.

When the other side appears threatening and populist — as Theresa May’s Tories did in 2017, just months after her notorious Conference speech in which she thundered “if you believe you are a citizen of the world, you’re a citizen of nowhere,” and as Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour did in 2019, when his party was under investigation by the Equality and Human Rights Commission for anti-semitism — the old tribe coalesces to defend its interests. Absent the threat it becomes easy prey for populists on its own side.

The Tory extreme, currently represented by Nigel Farage in the guise of his Reform party, is a familiar beast – it hates immigration, is suspicious of international alliances, deplores urban liberal elite culture, and talks in simple (some would say simplistic) language. It is, like so many other “nationalist” movements, currently pro-Russian, but its place in Britain goes deeper.

There has always been a section of the vote unhappy with the compromises the Tories have had to make with the centre in order to win the well-heeled suburbs of England’s big cities. In 1997, it took the form of the Referendum Party (whose main policy was to have a referendum on joining what would become the Euro), for many years it channelled British anti-Europeanism into UKIP, and had limited success as the Brexit party (it was forced to stand down in many Tory seats in 2019, lest the Brexit it supposedly existed to achieve was scuppered by an accidental Tory defeat). Reform’s number of votes this year is just 300,000 more than the 3.8 million votes UKIP obtained in 2015.

The Tories’ mistake was to treat their voters as a constituency who could be brought back into the fold by addressing specific concerns. This is to fall into the populists’ trap. Populists claim that they want to deal with issues important to groups of voters and which have been neglected by the mainstream. They may often believe that’s what they are doing. Leading Brexiteers, such as Michael Gove or Bernard Jenkin, were convinced that leaving the EU would solve a number of Britain’s problems, and thought they cold squash UKIP and improve their country at the same time. But that isn’t the mechanism by which populist fringes affect politics.

Rather, the populist party’s aim is to build support around one or two issues, and keep those issues going to prevent their support evaporating back to those mainstream parties actually able to form a government. Attempting to address what attracts voters to populist parties is thus usually a mistake. When a mainstream party tries to adopt their agenda, it increases what political scientists call its salience, that is, its importance in public debate, and turns attention towards matters on which the populists do well, strengthening them. When the populists are on the same side as the mainstream party, the mainstream party is weakened and the populists are strengthened, as Les Républicains have found out in France.

The task for the mainstream party trying to win back votes it has lost to populists on its own side is therefore different. The issues the populists choose tend to divide the mainstream party, and bring those voters closest to the populist interpretation closer to them. The mainstream party needs to practice the manoeuvre in reverse. Find out what issues, other than the ones currently exploited by the populists, concern the populist voters, and propose — or better still if the mainstream party is in government — implement policies to address them. Optimally, it should find issues that allow the mainstream party to stick its broad coalition back together, and exploit divisions within the populists’ support base. What these issues are of course depend on circumstances and the political culture in question, but the Irish government, which has been gaining support at Sinn Féin’s expense now that it has begun addressing housing policy, could be an example (Sinn Féin does purport to address housing policy, but the main thrust of its argument, other than Irish nationalism, is an anti-capitalist critique considerably broader than its populist appeals to address the housing crisis through unviable policies like rent control).

Centre-right parties need not be paralysed by right-wing populists. They, and in particular those of their members who may be ideologically closer to what the populists currently advocate, need to resist the temptation to adopt the populist agenda. It may seem to them that this would kill two birds with one stone: defeat the populist by adopting policies they might want to enact anyway, but it often ends up weakening, if not destroying, the centre-right party instead. Better instead to listen to the populists’ voters, not their leaders, and find out how to divide a portion of their voter base from their leadership. As well as winning votes back, it also sucks attention from the populists’ leaders, depriving them of the oxygen of publicity they crave.