Phil Burton-Cartledge is the author of The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak, which is published by Verso today. Labour Hub asked him some questions about the book’s key themes.

Q: Your book may be the first detailed analysis of the Truss premiership. It makes the telling point that this was damaging not just to the country in general, but to the Tories’ fragile voter base in particular. Could you expand on this and to what extent has Sunak’s premiership repaired the damage?

A: One reason why the Tories did so well for so long is their attacks appear to alight upon the ‘right’ victims as far as their base and their media allies are concerned. The problem with Truss’s budget is that it felt like a direct attack on the Tories’ own coalition.

In the first place, mortgage holders – regarded as a discrete layer by Party strategists – have tended toward supporting the Conservatives, historically speaking. Because of the Bank of England’s rapid intervention to prevent the Pound from tipping over following Truss’s unfunded tax cuts, this meant higher interest rates for borrowers. Which also had significant knock-on effects for businesses, small and large, that depend on credit lines.

Second, Truss was unlucky with her timing. Rising energy prices and food price inflation coincided with her tax giveaways to the wealthiest, and so it appeared the existing crisis, which her predecessor did nothing to address, was a calamity made much worse by her. Given that for the rest of the Tory coalition the ‘appearance’ of stability is key, she made things a great deal more uncertain to the point that even big business felt threatened. Therefore, she had to go.

What’s been striking about Sunak’s premiership is his promise to do very little. His five pledges from the start of 2023 are: halve inflation, grow the economy, get national debt falling, reduce NHS waiting lists, and stop refugees from crossing the Channel. Four of these basically involve waiting for things to simply play out and hoping that attacking asylum seekers will create a culture war issue as a substitute for Brexit that would re-cohere the 2019 Tory coalition. A quick look at the polls demonstrate how well this is going.

Q: You rightly identify a demographic problem facing the Tory Party, in particular a long term loss of younger and professional voters. In 2019 the so-called ‘red wall’ vote compensated for some of that. Is that now a busted flush, or are the Tories now more likely to chase lower-income, less educated voters, Trump-style, by banging on about migrants, restrictions on car drivers, wokeness and other populist causes?

A: A red wall strategy is a non-starter for Sunak, but that doesn’t mean the Tories are not trying to pursue it because there are no other obvious options. The penny’s finally dropped that the party is losing badly among working age people, which periodically manifests itself  in comment pieces lamenting the loss of Millennials and why younger voters are giving them a wide berth.

The reasons aren’t too difficult to fathom. Pushing policies that hammer living standards while scapegoating powerless groups works against the interests and the values of the rising generation of workers, a point I discuss a bit more in the book.

Furthermore, we need to remember the Tories did not win because they captured low paid workers who didn’t have much formal education: they were successful because they converted large numbers of older workers and retirees. They are more likely to own property and have index-linked pensions than working age people, and identify their material interests with the maintenance of these relatively fixed incomes, and the expanding value of their property and any shares they might own. This puts them at loggerheads with the interests of working age people, particularly those blocked from getting on the housing ladder and acquiring their own property.

Sticking with housing, if the Tories initiated a huge programme of house building, both public and private, this would threaten those property values and curtail the rental market. Therefore, having built up their voter coalition over the last decade or so, the Tories have little choice but to keep servicing and pandering to them. Which is exactly what Sunak is doing with his pitiful attempts at a populist politics.

Q: It looks like the Tories are heading for a massive electoral defeat. But, as you acknowledge in your book, they have dug themselves out of a crisis before. David Cameron was able to ditch the reactionary social conservatism of his predecessors and win, and Boris Johnson dumped the austerity policies of ten years and lifted the party’s fortunes with his boosterism. Can they do it again, how long might it take and what new form of conservatism is most likely to emerge?

A: There is a temptation to fall into magical thinking when dealing with the Tories. Because they’ve got themselves out of scrapes in the past does not mean they always will in the future. The key to determining any Conservative revival is asking where they are going to get their next generation of voters from? Because they’ve boxed out most working age people and have lost swathes of their 2019 support, this side of a general election it’s difficult to see how these numbers can be made up.

Looking into the future, if a Keir Starmer government is seen to be doing badly, are those who’ve been bearing the brunt of the last 13 years of Tory government now going to look at them afresh – even if they apply the lip gloss of touchy-feely liberalism and environmentalism? I very much doubt it.

The Liberal Democrats and Greens are much better placed to do better out of animosity to the next Labour government than the Tories. Even as the post-war generation pass away and hand their property down to their children and grandchildren, it’s hard to believe that this will wipe the memory of this Tory government. Politics is never an exact science, it’s a game of probabilities and it seems highly improbable the Tories could put together a new coalition that constitutes a serious challenge inside of a decade.

Q: The Tory Party has had a lot more high-profile ethnic minority figures than Labour. How likely is it that the Party could make serious inroads into Labour’s ethnic minority voter base – especially given the Starmer leadership’s poor record on promoting candidates from BAME backgrounds?

A: A lot depends on the average socioeconomic profile of the groups you’re talking about! It’s also worth noting the class profile of leading Tory BAME figures. Sunak is the archetypal petty bourgeois made good. Ditto Priti Patel. Kwasi Kwarteng is from the upwardly mobile professional managerial class, and Kemi Badenoch – despite flashing her working class creds because she worked in McDonald’s while a student – is from the same background, before having a career in IT and financial services.

Some might find these figures aspirational, especially if they have similar origins but ultimately it’s policy that counts and as we know, punitive policies on social security, housing, and cuts to the public sector are more likely to hit ethnic minority working class people the hardest. Add to that Sunak’s anti-immigration politics and xenophobia, at the next election it’s likely only the most comfortable among this layer will vote Tory.

Q: Assuming the Tories lose the next election, who are the likely contenders for the crown?

A: The only way the Tories can arrest their long term decline is by reaching out beyond the present electoral coalition they have assembled. This requires something more substantial than a Cameron-style whitewash. To be seen ‘speaking to Britain’ means taking on its concerns, and these chiefly are not refugees in hotels or whatever war on woke horror the Tories are refreshing this week.

Unfortunately for them, there is little to no sign that this is what they are going to do. If the polling forecasts are correct and they suffer a huge 1997-style defeat, the chances are they will gallop off to the right again. Not because of “Tory Corbynism” as John Rentoul sneeringly put it, but because after a traumatic defeat it makes sense to adopt a politics that coheres the base.

Therefore, one of the current crop of right-wingers is likely to come out on top. Badenoch seems to be the best positioned out of the last round of leadership candidates, seeing as Patel and Suella Braverman have blotted their copy books thanks to stupidity and incompetence. There isn’t any figure likely to trouble a new Labour government. If Starmer is planning for two terms in Downing Street, it’s there for the taking.

Phil Burton-Cartledge is a lecturer in sociology at the University of Derby and blogs at All That Is Solid. His latest book, The Party’s Over: The Rise and Fall of the Conservatives from Thatcher to Sunak, is published by Verso He tweets at @philbc3.