Former Conservative Prime Minister Sir John Major delivered a stark warning to his party on Tuesday, cautioning that a shift "too far to the right" risks leaving the Conservatives facing a "bleak" future. Speaking to around a hundred retired Conservative agents at the RAF Club Piccadilly, Major argued the party has alienated traditional supporters and must reunite its various factions to survive.
Major placed blame squarely on internal party dysfunction and poor leadership decisions. "There have been too many internal squabbles. Crises have been handled poorly. The electorate believes we have taken them for granted," he said. The former Prime Minister, who served from 1990 to 1997, warned that fratricidal disputes and chaos driven by "self-centred ambition" had transformed the party from "the greatest political warship in the history of our nation into a wreckage of the high ambitions our party has always been proud to represent."
Policy Positions Under Fire
The criticism extended to current Conservative policy stances that Major believes disconnect the party from mainstream opinion. "So when our party says 'No' to Europe. 'No' to climate change. 'No' to overseas aid - it falls out with the majority of public opinion," he stated. Such positions "may delight a minority of opinion, but not the broad mass of electors in our essentially tolerant and kindly nation."
Major's most pointed warning concerned the risk of losing core supporters to populist alternatives. "This loss of pragmatism, tolerance, nuance ‒ call it what you will ‒ has left many long-term Conservative supporters politically homeless," he explained. He characterized Reform UK as offering "amateur populism" with "foolish promises" that highlight their "unsuitability for power."
The speech comes as current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has pledged to repeal the Climate Change Act and withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights. Major called for the party to reunite "its right wing, its centre, and centre left Conservatives back together in the fold" directly challenging such hardline positions. "If that can be done, then we may - once again - widen our appeal and be a power in the land. The alternative is bleak," he concluded.
Note: This article was created with Artificial Intelligence (AI).
