We Tories have lost the professional classes to Labour. Here’s how to win them back | Paul Goodman

In the past 50 years, Britain has changed and so have the voters the party once relied on. To survive, the Conservatives must adapt

• Paul Goodman is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange

In this year’s general election, 19% of graduates voted Conservative, only three percentage points more than voted Liberal Democrat; 43% voted Labour. You might expect such a finding after a contest in which the Tories crashed to their lowest-ever number of Commons seats. But the contrast with non-graduates is striking. The Conservatives gained a bigger share than any of their competitors among those with other types of qualifications – 32% to Labour’s 30%. Among those with no qualifications at all, their lead was bigger: they took 39% and Labour 28%.

Look back five years to a very different election – Boris Johnson’s crushing 2019 victory – and the pattern is much the same. The Tories may have won that poll, but they lost among graduates, with 34% to Labour’s 39%. And in the general election of 2017, Labour’s lead among them was 15 points. The tale of the Conservatives’ downturn among graduates last year is part of a longer decline.

Lord Goodman of Wycombe is a senior fellow at Policy Exchange