The Tory tipping point

The news that 83 per cent of Conservative voters are over 45, compared to 53 per cent of Labour voters, is depressing. That was a finding of a poll carried out by Hanbury Strategy for Onward, a right-of-centre think tank that’s just produced a report called ‘Generation Why?’. More alarmingly, Hanbury discovered that the ‘tipping point age’ — the median age at which a person is more likely to vote Conservative than Labour — is 51. That’s up from 47 at the 2017 general election and 34 just beforehand. ‘Yikes!’ as Lynton Crosby might say.

No doubt the Tories’ close identification with Brexit and its stumbling attempts to get over the finish line have contributed to this dire state of affairs, but its cack-handed attempts to appear politically correct can’t have helped. I’m thinking of the proposed changes to the Gender Recognition Act, the government’s insistence that companies disclose their ‘gender pay gap’, and Theresa May’s ‘race disparity audit’. Trying to get ‘down with the kids’, like a vicar swinging his hips at the church disco, is a guaranteed way of turning yourself into a laughing stock in front of the younger generation. According to Hanbury, just 4 per cent of voters under the age of 24 are intending to vote Conservative.

For some MPs who fancy their chances in the forthcoming leadership election, the answer is to become even more woke. No, seriously. Penny Mordaunt, the front-running woke candidate — incredibly, there’s more than one — welcomed Onward’s report and said it showed how important it was for the Conservatives to try to appeal to ‘young women’ and other ‘marginalised’ groups. Newsflash Penny: it’s young men that are becoming increasingly ‘marginalised’, not young women. In 2017, 30,000 more women were admitted to university in Britain than men.