The Conservative Party has been reeling from “disastrous” exit polls which predicted it would win just 131 seats – its worst election result since the party was formed.
Rishi Sunak’s party is forecast to lose 241 seats overnight, giving Labour a comfortable majority of 170 seats, according to exit polls from the BBC, ITV and Sky.
Senior Conservative leaders and candidates said the prediction was an “incredible rejection” of the party’s calls for major reform, with former leader William Hague saying it would be “historically catastrophic” if it were to happen.
The exit poll has sparked debate about the future of the Conservative party, with some leading voices calling for it to move to the right and suggesting it could join forces with Nigel Farage’s rebel party, Reform UK.
Former business secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg said the Conservative party “took the vote of its own party for granted” and that MPs had made a mistake by ousting Boris Johnson, who was elected by the people. “Failure to deliver on the core principles of the Conservative party has cost us dearly,” he told the BBC.
Asked whether he thought the Conservatives should have worked with Farage, Mr Rees-Mogg said: “The way things are, it seems disaster was inevitable. You’ll have to ask Nigel what his plans are. I think he’s looking and wanting a realignment of the right in British politics and it will be interesting to see whether he can achieve that.”
Health secretary and former leadership candidate Andrea Leadsom said the Conservatives had made a mistake by not fighting harder against Reform UK, as it was predicted to win 13 seats and come second in many constituencies.
Others said the Conservatives must return to a centre-right position, with former Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne saying working with the Reform Party would be a “disastrous path”.
He added: “If this [the exit poll] If he’s right, there will be Reform MPs and there will be big talk and debate within the Conservative party, which will mean if we can merge with the Reforms, we can come back. I think that would be a disastrous path for the Conservative party, but that will be a debate.”
Conservative peer and universities minister Jo Johnson told the BBC that the Conservatives had made a mistake in attempting “light-duty reform” and that the results suggested the party was in danger of being “driven out of the nation’s capital”.
He added: “It’s a damning indictment of their appeal to tolerant liberal voters in metropolitan areas. What future does a party have if it wants to abandon metropolitan areas?”
Former Justice Secretary Robert Buckland, who is seeking re-election in his Swindon South constituency, told Sky News that the party had a “long way to go” and “we have failed to offer an attractive proposition to young, ambitious people who want to own their own home, who want to be part of society and who want to believe in a future that is more hopeful than the past.”
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Former defence minister James Heapy said he expected the Conservatives’ seat count to be below 131 by Friday morning. “This is an incredible denial of what Brandon predicted. [Lewis] And our colleagues have delivered in government over the last five years,” he told GB News.
“And whether or not each of us believes we were part of the various factions that brought down the Prime Minister, whatever faction of the party we belong to, if anyone is watching this tonight as a Conservative MP from 2019 to 2024 and saying: ‘This has nothing to do with me’, then they’re not getting the point.”
Asked who was to blame for the defeat, Mr Hague told Times Radio: “It is a huge mistake for the Conservative party to think they can conveniently blame one person, even Liz Truss, when really, as a party, they need to understand that big changes have to happen.”
“There will undoubtedly be condemnation, there will be shock, anger and denial,” former minister Steve Baker told BBC News, adding that Mr Sunak would be “considering whether his role is to stick around for a while to get through the condemnation stage” but that it was “a matter for him alone”.
