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Pulled Apart: The Australian And British Conservative Parties Near Death's Door
- Will Allen
- May 11
- 6 min read
Updated: Jun 6
Despite the names, the Australian Liberal and UK Conservative Parties are rather similar. For one, the two parties, which sit on opposite sides of the world, spent the best part of a decade sharing the same political strategist, Lynton Crosby. With the help of Crosby’s deft hand, each party went from strength to strength, conquering their respective electoral systems, and helming government for the best part of a decade (if not more). Now, however, those similarities are gone, and the two parties are united by a gloomier common denominator: the fact they keep losing elections. This similarity has become ever more apparent over the last few weeks, as each party, already bruised, has been pulled limb from limb by voters in Australia and the UK. In this moment, each party faces a reckoning like never before. In fact, things have gotten so bad some are questioning whether the two parties can continue as they are. Broken into pieces by voters, what each party does next could very well determine the path they take.
The two parties are not used to the situations they find themselves in today. For the last decade, each party has faced a very different reality: winning and then winning again. In the UK, the Conservatives, able to reinvent themselves again and again, won four consecutive elections and held power for fourteen long years. In Australia, the Liberal’s, the backbone of the Coalition, ran a similar playbook chopping and changing leaders when they needed to, allowing the party to win three consecutive elections, and cling to government for the best part of a decade. As a result, each party has, over time, slowly forgotten about the harsh reality of opposition and just how lonely it can be for parties. After both clinched victories in 2019, many saw the parties as indomitable. Then, as is always the case when you have been in government for so long, their luck ran out and things began to fall apart, first in Australia and then the UK.
In the twilight zone of each government, each conservative party was brought down by the leader (or several) each party chose to nail its colours to. In the UK, the Conservative Party grew increasingly restless and cycled through successive leaders who were all united by their inability to steer the nation away from disaster. Each new leader the Conservative’s picked, seemed to drive the party into the ground with increasing speed. There were lockdown breaking parties, sexual assault scandals, brutal leadership battles, economic crises, rumours of leaders hiding under desks, and even election launches in the pouring rain. On the opposite side of the world, things fell apart just as quickly for the Liberal Party. Having won a shock majority in parliament, Scott Morrison, so infatuated by power, stamped his authority across Australia. Bulldozing through issues, crises and the electorate, Morrison lost his way almost as quickly as he clinched power. His image was similarly undone by sexual assault scandals and an inability to steer government responsibly. Morrison’s standing was swept away further by his response to multiple floods, and then brutal bush fires. In the end, both parties ended their time in power by turning to men, Morrison and Sunak, who walked their own defiant path away from the wishes of the electorate, and dragged their parties into terminal free fall with them.
Helmed by hopeless men, who were also deeply unpopular, each party watched as the other drove itself to electoral disaster. The Coalition, fronted by the Liberal party, went first in 2022. At the federal election the party was decimated on all fronts, losing seats left and centre to Labor, and a host of teal independents. The UK Conservative Party suffered a similar fate in 2024, losing hundreds of seats as voters abandoned the party at the ballot box. Each loss was remarkably brutal, dispatching both parties in electoral routs. The two parties were battered relentlessly in every corner of each country, losing big names, safe seats, as well as individuals who could have steered each of the parties into a more certain future after such dramatic losses. Fast forward to today, and each party, usually able to reimagine itself, has only accelerated its demise. Both have elected hapless leaders, turned further away from voters and shouted about whatever they think is important, regardless of whether it is. This strategy of yelling into the void, has yielded little for either party. In fact, it has driven them to new lows.
If the 2022 federal election was a disaster for the Liberal Party, the recent 2025 election can only be described as verging on a near death experience for the party. Having learned nothing in defeat, the Liberals drove forward, shouting about work from home (until they didn’t want to), cuts, and petrol stations. This unserious strategy drove the party straight into a wall. On election night, the party’s already diminished share of the vote fell through the floor, again, and swept the party from seat after seat in an electoral bloodbath. As the losses pushed the party further into the wilderness of opposition, voters brutally dispatched the party’s leader from the seat he had held for 20 years, and eradicated the party from countless urban seats. Eviscerated, without a leader and confined largely to country seats, the party finds itself in an even darker place than before. The party has haemorrhaged voters of all ages, and regressed further with women, leaving the party boxed in on all sides by Labor, Teals and the mass of voters who no longer give the party time of day.
To make matters worse, Liberal members who survived the electoral bloodbath, seem destined to begin a brutal round of internal bloodletting, which will only bring more instability as it searches for answers and a new leader. The party also faces the wider challenge of having to find its place in a Coalition that will be remade by this catastrophic loss. With fewer MPs, the party will find it harder to throw its weight around against the group of Nationals, and may have to give up ground to its partners in its shadow cabinet.
In the UK, the Conservative Party has arguably endured an even worse electoral free fall. Having suffered its worst general election defeat at the hands of centre-left left parties, the party is now fighting for its political survival against an insurgent radical right. At the 2025 local elections the Conservatives endured another electoral evisceration losing 674 council seats, and its grip on 16 councils. The party haemorrhaged countless seats, losing two out of every three seats it tried to defend. To make matters worse, the party, so often able to reinvent itself, appears like it is fast running out of road, current polling points to a near total wipeout for the party in parliament, taking it well below 100 seats, and ripping away its title as the official opposition. The risk of annihilation in this moment places the party at a juncture like never before. If the party cannot reinvent itself and reclaim its place in British politics, it will undoubtedly face further electoral evisceration on a scale not seen before.
Sat on opposite sides of the world, both the UK and Australian conservative parties face a more uncertain future than ever. The challenges both face are dramatic, each party has entered a dramatic electoral free fall, one that will be hard to pull out of. On one side of the world, the Liberal Party, obsessed by culture war politics and nuclear power stations, has dragged itself further and further away from the electorate. If it continues down this path, the party, and whoever leads it into the future, will soon find the electorate has stopped listening to whatever it is shouting about. Meanwhile, In the UK, the Conservatives, having shouted about whatever they like for so long, face the same challenge that they must redefine themselves in the eyes of an electorate that has simply given up on them. The party also faces a unique challenge, one that it is ripping itself apart at opposite ends. Faced with the threat of the radical right, the party is lurching to the right, and tearing itself from even more of its electoral foundations. As it counters Reform, the party is haemorrhaging the little support it has left in the leafy suburbs of across the South of England to the Liberal Democrats. As it stands, the party is yet to satisfy anyone, and is accelerating its losses everywhere. As both parties drive themselves towards further disaster, the paths they take in the next months and years will define both parties, for better or worse. United in defeat, the Australian Liberals and UK Conservatives are at a crossroads like never before. If neither party can change course, both will be swept further off the electoral map into electoral oblivion. In fact, if they cannot reinvent themselves for the future, these parties will not exist as they once did, and may, especially in the case of the UK Conservatives, even cease to exist altogether.
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