Can the Tories be saved?

Are rumours of the Tories’ demise greatly exaggerated? Jack Rankin, MP for Windsor, joins Michael Murphy to talk about the past, future and failings of the Tories. He argues that the Conservative Party has learnt the necessary lessons from its stunning defeat to Keir Starmer’s Labour Party in 2024. Rankin, who won his seat during that election, arrived in Parliament at a seemingly inauspicious moment — yet he believes he bought low and is ready to sell high come the next general election.

Rankin has called for wholesale change to Britain’s political settlement; he is, paradoxically, something of a Tory revolutionary. He has endorsed the Great Repeal Act, a suite of legislation designed to undo the vast constitutional changes of the Blair-Brown years that handed power from Parliament to unelected bodies.

He also confesses that he once felt the parliamentary Conservative Party was stocked with MPs whose rightful home was the Liberal Democrats. Since then, he has grown more optimistic abou…