Conservative Party

The Conservative Party is one of the two historic parties of UK Government, having governed for the majority of the twentieth century. It governed continuously from 2010 to 2024 through five prime ministers: Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak. After a devastating defeat at the July 2024 general election, the party is now the official opposition in the UK Parliament, led by Kemi Badenoch (since November 2024). It sits between Reform UK on the populist right and a recovering Labour on the centre-Left, squeezed on both flanks.

National polls put the Conservatives at approximately 19%. In Scotland, the party finished on 12 Holyrood seats at the 7 May 2026 elections, its worst Scottish result since 1999, ceding official opposition to Scottish Labour. Russell Findlay survived leadership pressure by co-opting rivals Murdo Fraser and Meghan Gallacher to frontbench posts. In Wales, Welsh Conservatives won 1 Senedd seat under the new closed-list PR system. The party's eastern English county council base has been absorbed by Reform: Essex, Norfolk and Suffolk county halls all flipped to Reform UK on 7 May. On 13 May, Badenoch used the King's Speech debate to catalogue 24 government U-turns in the Starmer administration's first year, positioning the party as the long-term beneficiary of Labour's crisis while acknowledging that the structural Reform squeeze on the right remains the primary threat to any Conservative revival.