Does the Conservative Party have a future?

When: Monday, June 23, 2025, 6:30 PM - 8:00 PM
Where: David Sizer Lecture Theatre, Francis Bancroft Building, Mile End

You are warmly invited to join the Mile End Institute for our final event of this academic year and to explore the causes of the Conservative Party's problems, the challenges of Opposition and the prospects for the party in future.

In 2024, the Conservative Party suffered the worst defeat in its 200-year history. It has had six different leaders in the last 9 years, languishes in third place in the polls, and faces for the first time a serious challenger party on the right. Could the most electorally successful party in British history now share the fate of the Republican Party in France, pushed into a humilating fifth place in the presidential elections in 2022? Or can the Conservative Party do what it has done after other shattering defeats - in 1832, 1868, 1906, 1945 and 1997 - and reinvent itself for a new age of political dominance?

In this event, we bring together two of Britain's leading experts on the history of the Conservative Party and the history of Opposition, Tim Bale and Nigel Fletcher, in conversation with Rachel Cunliffe, the Associate Political Editor of the New Statesman, to explore the causes of the Conservatives' problems, the challenges of opposition and the prospects for the party in future.

You are warmly invited to join us for our final event of this academic year and to celebrate the publication of the paperbacks of Tim's The Conservatives after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation and Nigel's Institutionalised Dissent: The Official Opposition in the UK since 1973.

This event will take place in the David Sizer Lecture Theatre in the Francis Bancroft Building which is number 31 on this map of Queen Mary's Mile End campus. Doors will open at 6pm to allow us to start at 6.30pm sharp.