The Conservatives have lost their way after 14 years in government, Jacob Rees-Mogg has said, in a leaked recording of a meeting with young Tories that lays bare the despondency at high levels of the party. The former business secretary told young activists at a meeting in March he felt the party had squandered its opportunity to achieve anything substantial in the last five years, having won a majority in 2019. His candid comments run counter to the upbeat tone that Rishi Sunak is trying to strike in the final days of the campaign, with the prime minister telling the BBC on Sunday he felt people were better off now than in 2010. In the recording, which has been passed to the Guardian, Rees-Mogg said: “Where I feel we have slightly lost our way after 14 years of government, and why I want to talk to you about the principles of being a Conservative, is that the longer you are in government, the more there’s a risk that you become an administrator rather than remembering why you’re there in the first place. “We need to reinject into ourself that belief, that self-confidence.” When questioned by an attendee why the Tories had not done more with their 2019 majority, Rees-Mogg said: “It’s a fundamental question, why haven’t we, what is the excuse?” He said: “We got a majority [in 2019], and then what happens? Covid. We’re knocked out for two years, we don’t manage to get on with things … And that held us back and then the party decided to eject Boris Johnson, which was a complete stupid thing to do and has held us back from getting on with things since then. “[We’re] further away from the mandate, a divided party, and so on. So that’s why we haven’t done what we should have done but the only real period to do it was from 2019.”
He referred specifically to the failure to reform the planning system as one of the major omissions of the Conservatives in government. He asked who among the audience wanted to own their own home by the age of 35, before adding: “It seems to me that that is a pretty widespread ambition, and yet our planning system is making that as difficult as possible because it is centrally controlled top down and it’s a failure.” Rees-Mogg did not respond to a request to comment further. But his remarks in March highlight the anger many Conservatives feel not only that they might lose the election, but also that they do not have more to show after 14 years in power. The prime minister spent Sunday trying to rebut what he called the “declinist narrative” about Britain’s trajectory since the Tories took office in 2010. He told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg: “[This] is a better place to live than it was in 2010. Of course, I understand that the last few years have been difficult for everyone – we had a once in a century pandemic, followed by a war in Ukraine that drove up everyone’s bills – and of course, that’s been difficult for everybody.”