Mixing her metaphors with a brazen self-belief that few in her party possess these days, Kemi Badenoch – in her maiden speech to her first conference as Tory leader – was about as bullish as she could be: “We have a mountain to climb, but we have a song in our hearts, and we are up for the fight.”
In truth, it is all she could do, short of getting up on the platform and telling them all that they may as well all pack up and go home. Or join Reform UK. She cannot be expected to admit that they are about as far away from regaining power as they have ever been, that the public won’t be interested in listening to them for a very long time, that Nigel Farage is running away with the game, and, historically unpopular as Sir Keir Starmer and his party have become, they actually still lead the Tories.
There are plenty of other people who’ll happily declare the Tories are finished, or, as Dominic Cummings, the destroyer of worlds, puts it, that they’ve “crossed the event horizon”. Ms Badenoch may well have been the only person in the conference hall in Manchester to believe what she was saying and that victory is possible. In that context, her terrifying self-belief may alienate her colleagues and turn-off the general public, but it has its uses if it keeps the Conservatives in business and, eventually, supplants Reform. Her opponents’ support is, ironically, like Labour’s before the last general election, wide but brittle. Mr Farage is not invincible.
There is a certain pretence, a bit of a confidence trick, in being an opposition party; therefore, Ms Badenoch has to tell her followers, and the country, that they can win the next election and how it might be done, improbable as it may feel now.
In principle, she is doing some things right. The conference slogan “Stronger economy, stronger borders” identifies two key battlegrounds – albeit inevitably also stirring unfortunate memories of Liz Truss’s mismanagement of the economy and Rishi Sunak’s failure to “stop the boats”, both chapters a little skipped over in her speech. To an impatient party dismayed at the electoral progress Reform has made since the general election – mostly at their expense – Ms Badenoch has also unveiled some new policies. These, she has tried to argue, show the benefits of her “practical” approach. Unlike the “posturing” of Reform, or indeed her own party in the past, she will make sure, she says, that announcements will be made only after the work has been done. Even if, she implies, this has meant that Reform has captured hundreds of her party’s seats in local government and taken over 10 formerly Tory-controlled county councils, plus some notable defections. It is a pity, then, that the “homework” she has produced to explain her new policies has proved, mostly, so scant.
The flagship policy, much anticipated, is that the UK should leave the European Convention on Human Rights. Ms Badenoch offers a 188-page document full of closely argued legal assessment provided by Lord Wolfson, to whom she understandably subcontracted the technical heavy lifting, to justify her new policy. Yet, in reality, it does not. It is only a silk-lined cloak for a piece of political expediency. She tasked the learned lord with five questions, such as how a “sovereign parliament”, such as Britain’s, is prevented from, in highly pejorative terms, stopping veterans being harassed, or deporting foreign criminals. The Wolfson report outlines exceptionally clearly these brakes on what is untrammelled, politically motivated executive power. However, the whole point of the ECHR is to impose an external control on the abuse of executive power in a faltering or weak democratic system where a parliamentary majority can be misused to victimise minorities, abolish long-standing domestic rights, abolish a free press, compromise free elections, and erode operational policing and an independent judiciary, civil service or military command. Thus, extinguishing democracy itself.
The ECHR is there as a self-denying ordinance, and to provide for an external, independent appeal court for people and individuals to plead their case if domestic governments, laws and courts fail to protect inconvenient human rights. That is, for example, what befell Italy when Mussolini took over, and why Weimar Germany expired, and the Nuremberg Laws of 1935 were “democratically” enforced by a “sovereign parliament”. Indeed, the collapse of highly civilised societies into barbarism is what Winston Churchill was thinking of when he promoted the Council of Europe and the ECHR after the last world war. It is the worst kind of vanity to pretend that the UK is so perfect in its great traditions that it is forever immune from any internal failures requiring external correctives.
What Ms Badenoch asked Lord Wolfson were the wrong questions, even if, in strict legal terms, he answered them “correctly”. And, for the record, he did not say the Belfast Good Friday Agreement would not be affected, but rather that “the political arguments at play are complex, and are beyond the scope of this legal advice”. Much the same could be said for the rest of his purely legalistic ruminations. He certainly did not advise, as Ms Badenoch seems to imply, how an elective dictatorship that swept every institution away in the manner of the Trump presidency could be legally justified. A minister exercising “common sense” in an arbitrary manner by jailing an obnoxious protester should be stopped from breaking the law, even if the press and the polls approve.
As for Ms Badenoch’s other big idea on immigration, the “Removals Force”, it is even less evidence-based or thought through, let alone humane. Who will work for such an agency? To whom is it accountable? How will such a force proceed as it tries to deport 150,000 people a year, who’ve never been found guilty in a court of law of any crime, and are merely waiting to have their asylum claim assessed? What due process will be followed to justify their forced expulsion? What if their countries of origin refuse to take them? How is any action to be legally sound if there is no hearing or tribunal – no recourse to law after a civil servant has made a judgment? Will habeas corpus be suspended? Will, indeed, human rights be openly abused and allowed to be abused under new domestic laws that cannot be challenged in an independent court of law? This is unprecedented and previously unconstitutional. And, by the way, on climate change and abolishing the net zero target, where is the Badenoch plan to lower emissions of greenhouse gases? Absent. The dog ate her homework.
Ms Badenoch is right to want to renew her party, to control the country’s borders, and present a new economic policy, as Sir Mel Stride, one of her more grounded colleagues, is trying to do. She has to try and gain an audience and grab the headlines, despite her protestations to the contrary. She has to take on Nigel Farage as a clear and present threat to the very stability of society, not just her party – and needs to make clear there will be no deals with him, before or after an election. Every democrat should wish her well in providing effective opposition – but not if, as seems to be the case, her whole political strategy is based on trying to out-Farage Farage and ape Donald Trump’s dismantling of the American constitution.
The Conservative Party has sometimes suffered an excess of zeal when in government in the past, and has had to be variously restrained by the courts, the press and parliament, but never before has it been so hostile to the universal human rights that are the very essence of freedom. It is becoming a party that advocates an elective dictatorship, which is hardly a Tory tradition. Who will stop a future prime minister, as Boris Johnson tried, unlawfully proroguing – ie suspending – parliament if the Supreme Court is unable to do so?
Ms Badenoch will certainly lose the next election if she markets the Tories merely as a less racist, more rational and well-prepared version of a Farage administration, but sharing the same authoritarian instincts and the kind of policies that would tear Britain apart. She has still not found the right path back to power.
