British politics is starting to look post-Conservative. That isn’t a forecast of extinction for Kemi Badenoch’s party, just an observation of decline. Their agenda-setting days are behind them. Their loyal voters are old and they are not recruiting new ones.
There is vigour on the right of the political spectrum, but the most energised people prefer burning things to conserving them. In parliament, Badenoch is still leader of the official opposition but in swaths of the country, the role of chief antagonist to the government has been usurped by Nigel Farage. Every speech at the Tory conference in Manchester has been a strangulated plea for relevance.
Is it terminal? Another way to ask the same question: if the Conservative party didn’t exist, would there be any need to invent it? To answer yes is to locate a gap in the political market that Reform UK could never fill. The possible vacancy is defined by that depleted, demoralised band of one nation Tories who stand well to the right of Labour on economic issues but feel no cultural affinity with Farage’s immigrant-baiting, culture-warrior radicalism.
Conservative moderates are more numerous in the Lords than the Commons, but they’re hardly assertive in either chamber.
They see an opportunity for a sensible, centre-right party to advance on to terrain that will fall vacant if, as they expect, Keir Starmer is dragged leftwards by a rebellious Labour party that doesn’t trust its leader’s progressive instincts. The Liberal Democrats, not wanting to be outflanked on social conscientiousness, will drift with that tide.
In theory, that would open space for revival of an old-fashioned, pro-enterprise, fiscally disciplined, mild-mannered Tory party, offering sound economic management and rejecting Reform’s swivel-eyed school of crank conspiracies and race-obsessed grievance mining.
Proponents of a centre-facing Tory strategy say there is proof of demand for such a programme in private discussions with British business leaders and in publicly declared donations to the Tories, which are greater than the sums flowing into Farage’s or Starmer’s coffers. But corporate sponsorship of a mainstream Conservative revival is not evidence of voter appetite for one.
It is notoriously hard for a party evicted from power after a long incumbency to even get a hearing from people who are thoroughly sick of the sight of them.
Badenoch understood that much about her predicament when taking over the leadership last November. She told her party there would be no “quick fix”. She promised more “thoughtful Conservatism”, which would distinguish itself in rigour and credibility from the habit of “kneejerk” policy announcements that are designed to grab attention but cannot work in government.
What followed was a detour into semi-coherent ideological abstraction. There were speeches that melded political theory to niche social media fixations; rhetorical meanderings in labyrinthine arguments about the threat to western civilisation posed by woke bureaucracies and militantly censorious liberals. As an analysis of what ails Britain, it was convoluted, idiosyncratic and no match for Farage’s campaign-ready diagnosis that it all comes down to immigration.
The party’s poll ratings have dropped lower than they were at the last election. Talk of defections to Reform is constant. Only despondent paralysis restrains the Tories’ twitchy regicidal impulse.
In a desperate effort to generate some sense of momentum at this year’s conference, Badenoch has abandoned her former reluctance to make premature policy. Tory pledges in the past few days include cutting £47bn from Whitehall budgets; reducing the number of civil servants by about a quarter; withdrawing benefits from foreigners even if they are legally entitled to reside in the UK; repealing the Climate Change Act and withdrawing Britain from the European convention on human rights and other treaties that might impede deportation of undesirables. Those removals would be expedited by a new body, modelled on Donald Trump’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (Ice).
Pride forbids Badenoch admitting that this frantic display of policy pyrotechnics represents an abandonment of her old strategy. She clings to the idea that seriousness and practicality are the traits that will distinguish Conservatives from Reform. “We’ve started doing politics in a new way,” she boasted, in a curtain-raising speech in Manchester. “No more making the announcement first and working out the policy detail second.”
Except that is exactly what they have done. The advertised budget cuts assume a fictitious mountain of surplus bureaucracy that can be incinerated with no impact on public services. The abandonment of climate commitments channels a dogmatic horror of green energy as a leftwing plot against bill-paying consumers instead of a pathway to cheaper power, an escape route from reliance on oil-exporting despots and a future growth industry. Unilateral repudiation of international treaties makes no allowance for the reaction of other countries that would, under Badenoch’s plans, be expected to receive the tens of thousands of people Britain would send to them.
At a glance, Badenoch’s programme is pure Faragism. The difference, measurable only with close attention to the Tory leader’s speeches and interviews, is her sanctimonious confidence that bad policy turns good once she has declared it to be the product of her ponderous method. She seems sincerely to believe that she has spent the past year preparing her party as a force for government based on a set of Conservative principles that are recognisably unlike the vandalistic populism of her more successful radical rightwing rivals.
She extols the value of historic institutions and the rule of law. “I reject the politics that everything must go, everything must be torn down, that everything is broken,” she says – hinting at disapproval of Reform’s more histrionic denunciations of modern Britain. Then she endorses Ice, Trump’s paramilitary kidnap squad, as the template for a putative Tory immigration regime.
Badenoch has spent a year immersed in pseudo-intellectual laundering of radical nationalist positions, all the while imagining she was heading to some other, more sophisticated destination. She really thought she was rehabilitating the Tories, but she has reduced them to a low-wattage thinktank attached to a warehouse storing future parliamentary candidates for Farage.
For the remnant of moderate centre-right Conservatives hoping for some pathway back to credibility, Badenoch’s leadership has been the worst of all worlds. Her claim to be thoughtful was an affectation, squandering time when real thought might have been applied to the hard questions she has avoided. She discredited the idiom of serious Conservatism by appropriating it for the shallowest agenda. She understood the need for a boundary between traditional Toryism and populist demagoguery but lacked the clarity of thought, strategic acumen and political courage to enforce one. She has accelerated the dissolution of her party’s identity by asserting it in terms that no casual voter will understand. In the post-Conservative climate of British politics, they won’t even notice.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
