Among the many questions Conservatives members at the party conference in Manchester are asking themselves: how they can win the support of young people?

Conservative members and voters have always skewed older than other parties, but now it is more pronounced.

Pollster Luke Tryl, from More in Common, told a Tory conference fringe meeting: “At the last election the average age someone started voting Conservative was in their 60s. It’s now even later.

“The Conservatives are basically only being kept afloat in the polls at the moment by the over 75 age category. Obviously, for demographic reasons, that is not a sustainable place to be.”

At another event, pollster James Johnson of JL Partners began his presentation on the attitudes of voters under 40 with the ominous words: “Conservative Party members turn away now.”

One Young Conservative sought to offer some good news by telling the event that at Keele University the Conservative Society now had the biggest membership in a decade.

He paused to allow for some impressed noises from the audience before adding: “We now have 11 members.”

With 16-year-olds likely to get the vote at the next election, the problem could become yet more acute.

“The party has been a bit lazy on this,” says shadow housing minister Paul Holmes.

“We need to pull our finger out of our bums.”

But what – if anything – can Conservatives do to fix the problem?

“We need to be where the voters are,” says Luke Evans a Conservative MP, shadow minister and keen Tik-Toker.

He says his colleagues should be embracing the social media platform more but warns colleagues to avoid the “Millennial Pause” – the two-second gap the older generation leave at the beginning of videos before starting to talk.

“That’s the biggest turn off,” he says.

At another event, one audience member said the party needed to copy the approach of American right-wing online influencers.

They suggested that the Conservatives should run a campaign encouraging young people to send in stories of left-wing behaviour that they argue could be mocked online – for example, a teacher calling Winston Churchill a fascist or a classmate identifying as a cat.

Blake Stephenson, the MP for Mid Bedfordshire, agrees that Conservatives had to “communicate in a way they want to consume the information”.

“Unfortunately, we live in a world where anything beyond 10 or 15 seconds is just sort of too much for people and they just scroll up.

“At this conference we’re talking about very complicated policy areas… and we’re saying quite rightly that the solutions are not easy.

“If anyone tells you that the solutions to any of these complicated problems are easy, then they are sort of sending you up the river.

“But yet we need to project complicated responses and answers to complicated questions in 20 seconds.”

Former minister and former Conservative leadership contender Tom Tugendhat says young people were not “drifting away from the centre” but “drifting away from what doesn’t work for them”.

Young people were “realising the entire economy is now geared towards a bunch of people who are aging,” he says.

“They are not stupid – they are choosing parties that are revolutionary.”

Fred Lynam from the Young Conservatives says the party has a “difficult hill to climb – even more difficult with young voters”.

“The way it will happen is by giving young people a stake in society – then they will feel like they have got something to conserve.

“That is why they are flocking to Your Party, the Greens and Reform because they are arguing that we need to tear it down, because it is not working.”

Several panellists at conference events say that offering policies that made it easier for young people to buy a home would help.

Shadow chancellor Mel Stride has announced that the Conservatives would give young people a £5,000 tax rebate in their first job, in a bid to help them buy their first home; and in her keynote speech, Kemi Badenoch promised a Conservative government would scrap stamp duty on homes.

At the beginning of conference, Badenoch said Conservatives needed to “face up” to what they got wrong, pointing to the rise in small boats crossings and – without mentioning her by name – Liz Truss’s mini budget as examples.

But some at conference have argued that too much hand-wringing could blur the Conservatives message to young people.

“By the next election there will be voters who haven’t experienced a Conservative government in their adult life so that need for contrition is probably less,” says Lynam.

Blake Stephenson says that during the 2024 election campaign he had experienced a lot of anger from voters and that “humility is important”.

“How long will the blood letting take. I don’t know. I hope fairly quickly.”

“The facts of life are Conservative” is a quote from former PM Margaret Thatcher which has been trotted out at fringe events.

It reflects a sense among some at conference that voters in the younger demographic will inevitably turn to the Conservatives, because their arguments will be proved right in time – particularly if, as some delegates predict, there will be an economic crisis in the next few years.

Rebecca Paul says young people have “bad associations” with the last Conservative government which “tried to keep everyone happy and ended up with a mishmash of policies”.

She says Badenoch wouldn’t make the same mistakes. “She is honest. She will tell you things you don’t want to hear.

“We need to come up with sensible policies. People will in time start listening to us.

“Tough gig but we’re going to be back.”

Julian Ellacott, chair of the Conservative’s National Convention, told one fringe event the research suggested it would take two years before voters of all ages started listening to the Conservatives again.

“The answer is – who knows. We have to stick to our job, focus on our own game.

“It will take as long as it takes but we mustn’t be like magpies and get distracted by shiny things.

“We need to get the core things right.”