Mel Stride has called out one “untenable” detail about Conservative Party voters – their age.
The Tory leadership hopeful, former work and pensions secretary who now holds the same role in the shadow cabinet, said the party needs to spend time “working out the answer to a lot of fundamental and difficult questions”.
Speaking to Times Radio on Wednesday, he said that includes “the fact that the average Conservative voter is age 63.”
He continued: “That is completely untenable.
“It is not something that you can solve by leaping onto some magical ideological square.
“It is something you solve through deep, hard work over a sustained period of time.”
Squeezing in his own pitch to be the next leader, he added: “And I believe that I understand that and I’m the right person to take that forward.”
His words come after a January poll from YouGov found only those over 70 planned to vote Tory in the upcoming election.
Then, after the Tories secured their worst electoral defeat ever in July, another set of Focaldata analysis found that a sixth of Conservative voters were likely to die before the next election due to their age.
And in August, Ipsos UK concluded that most (62%) Brits do not care who replaces Rishi Sunak at the helm of the Tory Party.
Responding to this most recent poll, Stride said: “Well, the way I feel is, in a sense, not a huge amount of surprise, because I think we have been a party that has been fighting itself and been introspective in a way that most people from the outside would have found pretty selfish.
“We did some great things when we were in government, absolutely great things,” he claimed. “But there are areas where we failed to deliver.
“And so we have a lot of work to do now to unite our party and to come forward with the right policy platform to reach out both to those that were drawn by reform, but also never to forget that we lost people to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.”
Some within his party have considered wooing the voters the Conservatives lost to populist party Reform UK, although many of them claim they have no intention of turning Tory blue again.
“And now we’ve got five years basically in order to assess that policy platform and to get that right,” Stride said.
“So, look, what’s happening at the moment is that we’ve got to rebuild our party and we’ve got to get a hearing with the British electorate.”
Stride is one of six candidates fighting it out to be the next Tory leader.
He is competing against Kemi Badenoch, Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat.