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I'm sorry, but the reason Brexit ended in landslide defeat for the Tories is because the Conservatives removed the shield that had allowed them to lie about wanting to stop immigration, and then tried to keep lying anyway. It was absolutely 100% avoidable. An own goal the likes of which politics has rarely seen. The only thing I regret about Brexit is believing them when they said, "we would like to do what you want, but the EU won't let us". That's clearly not a problem here because Trump is just going ahead and doing what he said he was going to do.
Yes. That's an inherent difficulty when you are actually trying to defund a vast left-wing conspiracy. Ideally it wouldn't have come to that, but it has.
That is certainly part of it, but the Conservatives lost as many votes to the left as they did to Reform, and a party which picked up all the Tory and Reform votes* would still not have won a majority. The Conservatives defeat in 2024 was extremely overdetermined, and the fact that they had screwed up everything possible about the implementation of Brexit was most, but not all of it.
* Which they couldn't have done because Reform was mobilising 2019 non-voters with an anti-system message in a way an incumbent party couldn't.
Forgive the brief reply, but my read is different. I think that a lot of those who voted labour did so out of desperation at the state of the tories and distrust of Farage, rather than a sincere desire for left-wing or more moderate government.
The Tories were quite capable of mobilising voters with an anti-system message, and succeeded in doing so in 2019, but they couldn't do so in 2024 because the pro-system MPs had stifled meaningful reform and then regained control of the party. The Tories ran on the worst of all possible platforms: a schizophrenic mix of pro/anti-system rhetoric, a record of dismissing radical politicians like Braverman whilst bringing back corrupt Establishment figures like Cameron, and a record of failure at achieving meaningful change. They had also been mullered by Covid (which I don't blame on them specifically, most of the hysteria was ginned up as a doom loop between the press, the doctors, the public, and Captain Hindsight) and Ukraine (the sanctions produced economic pain which was blamed on Brexit).
If they had been able to push through immigration reform, at least made a start on DOGE-like pruning of the left wing state, and Covid/Ukraine hadn't happened, they would have been fine I think. Some voters would have punished them for perceived failure on Brexit, but not many.
Ultimately, the tl;dr for why the Tories lost in 2024 is that they were so incompetent in government that you couldn't tell whether they were failing to deliver on a right-wing agenda or failing to deliver on a centrist one.
And part of the reason for the incompetence is that they were high on their own supply over Brexit. The discussions within the Conservative party in 2024 were not about "How do we do the hard work of replacing EU policies on agriculture, immigration, customs administration etc?" (which needed doing, and either wasn't done or was botched with visible consequences), it was "How do we spend the £350 million a week Brexit dividend?" (which was always only £160-180 million because Johnson and Cummings lied about the numbers, and which in any case wasn't available for the first few years because the government negotiated a deal including a divorce payment). A large part of why the Boriswave happened is that Cummings thought (he boasted about this on his blog) that Brexit defused the immigration issue without the need to actually reduce immigration, because we had "taken back control."
Another part is that they chose a leader whose character made him unsuitable for executive leadership because he was able to tell the lies needed to win the Brexit referendum.
And another part is that the purge of people who were insufficiently Brexitty left the incoming Conservative govenment short of talent.
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