Conservatives not close to recognising how badly they are positioned for next election, says Gauke

The Conservatives are not even "close to recognising" how badly they are positioned for the next election, the party's former cabinet minister David Gauke has said.

- Jessica Elgot

Gauke, a former justice secretary who also worked in the Treasury under George Osborne, said many in the party were not willing to repudiate Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.

He also warned that the party was ignoring voters in the home counties who had turned in droves to the Lib Dems, and was spending too much time fighting on Reform UK's turf.

"If the next election is going to be about immigration and the 'war on the woke', it's not going to be the Conservative party that are the beneficiaries of that. It will be Nigel Farage and Reform," he said in an interview with the Guardian.

"Trying to make those issues more salient is a strategic blunder. First and foremost the Conservatives need to fight the next election on the economy."

Gauke criticised his party for spending too much time on culture-war issues in which Farage was the dominant voice.

The former MP, who has authored a major sentencing review for Labour set to be made law this autumn, said it was not a foregone conclusion that Farage would become prime minister, but depended on whether Labour kickstarted economic growth.

He said to do so would mean hard choices for Rachel Reeves, on tax rises and the pensions triple lock, as well as seeking a much closer relationship with the EU, saying the Labour chancellor "needs to talk to the bond markets more than she needs to talk to the parliamentary party or the British public".

He said the Tory party had not yet fully confronted why it had become so unpopular and had not undergone the transformation that Labour had after its defeat at the 2019 election.

"Most of the Labour party [MPS] felt that the Jeremy Corbyn years were an aberration and that they wanted to revert to something different. They found it very easy to repudiate, whereas quite a lot of the Conservative party looks back at the Boris Johnson and Liz Truss time as being proper Conservatism," he said.