Future of conservatism with Nick Timothy

This interview was first published in the UCL Policy Lab Magazine 10, in September 2025.

In a country with a Labour government, Conservative ideas often seem to set the agenda. With the Party itself reduced to a rump in parliament, the issues that the Conservatives themselves often campaign and win on, remain at the top of voter priorities. After 15 years in power, what strange death is this?

If there is one person who can make sense of it all, it is Nick Timothy, the prolific writer, deep thinker, current Conservative MP for West Suffolk, and formerly one of the most important political advisers in the country under Theresa May’s premiership.

The train line to Newmarket, which I travel on to meet Timothy, was built in 1840. The story goes that MPs and Lords expedited its construction to allow them to have easy access to the racing, which has gone on here since Charles I first rode through the town in 1640.

In age, the Conservative Party beats Newmarket’s train line by six years. Founded in 1831, it is the oldest democratic party in the world. It began its work when Queen Victoria was just 15. Any discussion of conservative Britain and its future must begin with an understanding of the Tory Party’s dominance in British politics.

The Party has been foundational to the creation of Victorian, Edwardian, Pre-War, Post-War and now modern Britain. However seemingly obvious it is, the idea that the political right in Britain could ever sit under another banner is nothing short of monumental, even era-defining. If it were to happen, there would be no event as significant, even the effective end of the Liberals as a governing force at the start of the last century.

It is, of course, natural to focus on the appeal – or lack thereof – of  Reform. Unpacking their meteoric rise and headline-grabbing announcements, attuned to the whirring social media age in which we live, is a task that commentators seem never to tire of. Yet it is the Conservative Party, that bastion of reinvention, whose success or failure is as much the driver of where conservatism and the country go from here.

The statistics speak for themselves: the Tory Party has delivered 57 Prime Ministers to Labour’s seven. In the 191 years since their founding, they have ruled Britain for 118 years. In short, they are, or have been, the point from which politics could be argued or debated.

With their conservative mantle potentially being passed to Reform, and the risk of fragmentation of this grand old party, what is driving them, and is it possible for them to wrestle back control?

Few have thought more or been at the centre of recent debates on the future of conservatism than Nick Timothy. When I sat down with him over a lovely ploughman’s lunch, I started by asking him what, if anything, he has found surprising about the life of an MP.

“Time, and the lack of it,” Timothy explains. “I told my wife it wouldn’t be much different from our life to date. But the commitment to the job is total. I have to run the team at 100% all the time, to ensure people get back to constituents.”

When I ask how many hours a week, he shrugs and says frankly, “Well, I do sleep.”

Speak to anyone in Westminster, and changes in technology have left MPs grappling with an ever-growing workload. For Timothy, this is all part of the territory. But how does he make time to grapple with big ideas and reflect on where the party goes next?

“I try to read widely, and I think there are new and different ways to get ideas out, be that Substack or the kinds of short-form videos my colleagues have become famed for.” For Timothy, ideas are as much about a communication of values as they are about specific proposals or debates.

The Conservative Party, of course, has lurched from one leader to the next in recent years, but it's perhaps Truss who spoke so clearly against the kind of conservatism that Timothy has long championed. In many ways, Truss as Prime Minister wasn’t really a conservative at all. She offered an untrammelled liberalism, free-market red meat with individual rights at its core. It is hard to remember now, but Truss was once a fully signed-up member on trans rights and went to battle with the Home Office to support greater migration. With her dramatic fall, one could think that those instincts have been put to bed.

Yet economic thinking in the Conservative Party does, from the outside at least, appear to bear her influence still. Has the energetic YIMBY movement captured the right? And how does it align with Timothy’s philosophy, which has always championed a more mixed model, with free markets living alongside state intervention on behalf of those whom his old boss, Theresa May, called “the strategic state”?

The political figure who comes most to mind when reading Timothy’s writing is Joseph Chamberlain, that great civic leader of Birmingham, who moved between parties through his career, creating new ideological alignments as he did.

Writing of the importance of Chamberlain, Timothy once said: “He believed that the state must remain small, capitalism must be preserved and private property protected, but working-class children needed to be educated, workers protected from industrial injuries and unscrupulous bosses, and the ownership of property extended to people of all classes.”

But how does he see the current Conservative economic orthodoxy, and is it in contradiction to his own form of worker-led or class-infused conservatism?

"I'm not sure I see the tension between the two,” comes the reply. “You're only using Chamberlain as a proxy. Chamberlain was a builder. I think the argument that I and others have made over time has actually included the need to build volumes and to make things like the cost of construction for infrastructure projects and things like that more realistic."

For Timothy and many of his Conservative colleagues, these high costs and burdens of bureaucracy weigh down on the country. In some senses, this feels like a broader political consensus now. Momentarily, I feel like I could be talking to a member of the government or a Labour backbencher with their calls to “build, baby, build”. Across the country, elected officials baulk at the kinds of limits that are placed on their power.

In the case of Timothy, these extend to net-zero regulations and calls for more workers’ rights, but for both he and Labour MPs, they seem to intersect on questions of planning, building regulations, and public services. He instinctively sympathises with the small business struggling to cope with numerous well-meaning regulations, and the community group must navigate the top-down systems of a centralised state.

On top of this, Timothy argues there is a cycle of what he characterises as failed state intervention - one failed intervention only results in the further need for intervention.

This, in the end, is what Timothy sees as the weakness at the heart of the UK’s economic policy and public services. The state expands to fix or make discounts for those at the bottom of the system, until the system becomes too large to sustain the services the vast majority depend on.

But does he not still think that some of this talk of a bloated state and need for lower taxes run up against voter demands for improvements in their communities, not to mention his own demands for a strategic state?

“If you want to have a stronger and more strategic state, it's got to be a smaller one,” he explains, “because you can't be strategic if you're trying to do too much. There's no point in having a small state that is so small that it's ineffective,” Timothy says.

This goes right to the core of the future of conservative thinking. We only have to look across the Atlantic and see Donald Trump buying up part of IBM to know that a lot of political shapeshifting is happening—deficit hawks becoming big spenders, free-marketers becoming state interventionists.

Timothy believes there is a clear dividing line between the Conservatives and Reform. Fundamentally, it comes down to a belief in “fiscal discipline”, the cornerstone of Tory dominance in the leafy parts of England over the centuries.

“I think it is one of the points of difference between the Conservatives and Reform because Reform have gone for this sort of higher day-to-day spend approach, whereas the Conservatives have continued to emphasise fiscal responsibility.” Timothy points to Reform's commitments on the two-child limit and other parts of the welfare state as yet another unfunded commitment.

For all the centrality of these debates about economic policy or public services, there are also cultural arguments at the heart of the conservative debate. With migration, national identity, trans rights and the place of “woke” attitudes now top of the agenda, there are many who think they are driving Reform support.

For Timothy, this comes down to who owns and captures a new “common sense” -  a mode of politics which fits with the values of the many working-class and lower-middle-class voters that the parties are fighting for.

As Timothy is quick to point out, working-class conservatism rooted in everyday cultural values is nothing new, and it indeed wasn’t invented by Dominic Cummings or Boris Johnson. In some sense, it lay dormant perhaps, but it’s now back, alive and well.

Timothy is clear in his belief that “voters are never wrong”. In some sense, he fundamentally believes in the spirit of the British voter to deliver a kind of check on the tendencies of elite politics to unmoor itself from the general opinion of ordinary people.

Nothing more defines this for Timothy than the debates around migration, small boats and culture. "On immigration, consistently for years, two-thirds plus of the country has said immigration is far too high and it needs to come down. That is not reflected in the opinion of parliamentarians or the people making the decisions. Brexit was supposed to allow us to control and reduce immigration, and then migration of almost a million in a year is frankly insane."

For Timothy, the need to respond to public demands for control is a core principle of conservatism—even the nation’s democratic tradition itself. Timothy argues that politicians should act based on what is wanted by the country and its people, to ensure that the risk of anarchy or revolution is kept at bay by the making of order.

This isn’t individual rights-based liberalism. It is something quite different. "If you heed Burke, which we all should, he basically says people are qualified for liberty in proportion to the extent to which they are prepared to place moral constraints on themselves. And the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without. I.e., the state needs to do things if you're not prepared to do it yourself."

Again, Timothy and other conservatives are attempting to own the mantle of the everyman. Today, it feels as if the fight to define and own this way of thinking, grounded in a respect for ordinary people, will be a defining battle for politics. It will take place both across and within parties.

This talk of ‘common sense’ is on show when, a few days after speaking with Timothy, I attended the Reform Party conference in Birmingham’s National Exhibition Centre.

Energised, the conference floor was packed with former Tory members and councillors. Between the speeches, the stalwart of daytime TV, Jeremy Kyle, chats with members - ex-policemen, suburban retirees, recently graduated business studies students, and “worried parents.” They feel like the working-class Tories Timothy spoke about and the ones I, and I expect he, grew up amongst.

More than anything, there was an unquestionable ‘realness’ to this slightly strange, high-production conference. Amongst the lasers, smoke machines and singing, stood a very ordinary army of voters rebelling against a party that has long held their affections.

What they want, it seems, is a ‘fair crack’, which they see also as requiring major restrictions on migration. They aim to dismantle the system that has prevented this from happening, eliminating the caution. The country is broken, they say, and it’s just common sense to know that reform – and perhaps Reform - is needed.

Whether it is they or the Conservative Party who win this battle for ‘common sense’ will help shape not just the future of conservatism but the political soul of Britain itself.

What Nick Timothy says and does will be at the heart of that debate.