It has been over 35 years since I last identified with the Left of the Tory Party and indeed I believe that over 14 years, Tory administrations were culpable in their acceptance of too much received wisdom from the establishment. They increased public expenditure, accepted legal overreach, reduced ministerial accountability, excessively focused on DEI and ESG and presided over uncontrolled immigration.
At the same time, energy security and defence were neglected and there was insufficient focus on the UK’s poor productivity. Even so, it would be an act of extraordinary folly, entirely dwarfing its comprehensive catalogue of past idiocies, if the Tory party were to defenestrate Kemi Badenoch and replace her with someone further towards the populist Right.
There is only one path to salvation for the Conservatives; they need to be honest about the complexity of the problems the country faces and the unpalatable choices that need to be made. From that springboard, they should develop serious policies that actually have a chance of working – even if it cannot be expressed in neat soundbites or might put off voters. Just tell the truth; no one else is.
This article isn’t a defence of Kemi Badenoch. I voted for her as by far the least bad option, although I was put off by her intemperate and pointless attack on Rishi Sunak in shadow cabinet after the election. For all its missteps, the fag end of the last Conservative administration was far more focused on problem solving and careful decision making than any of its predecessors.
Despite my voting for her, Badenoch has so far struggled to evidence the key qualities of diligence, attention to detail and careful judgement that made her idol, Margaret Thatcher, so successful. It is not a good sign that for so long she felt it unnecessary to plan out her approach to PMQs properly, enabling a very second rate performer in Keir Starmer to get the better of her.
This piece is also not a personal attack on Robert Jenrick, though his enthusiastic supporters would do well to spend time researching his past history which may well contain a quantity of unexploded ordinance when it comes to his policy positions.
Rather, it is a plea to the Tory Party to avoid self-immolation and instead to chart a course with some possibility of a good outcome. If Badenoch proves insufficient for the task, taking the easy choice to move to the populist Right will likely be the last important decision the Conservative Party ever takes.
The certain disaster which will result from aping Reform is so obvious that I find myself wondering whether I am missing something when serious (although mainly not) commentators espouse this route. There are two unanswerable questions Why would anyone vote for a party which is simply copying another when they can vote for the original? And what would happen in all the seats, rich in demographics that thoroughly dislike Nigel Farage, in which the Tories are competitive with the Liberals? The election of someone like Jenrick is simply both a necessary and a sufficient condition for the absorption of the Tory Party into Reform.
The Tories need to define themselves in opposition to the decline in the quality of our public discourse and political decision making since the 1990s. For me as a political anorak, the 1992 Clinton presidential campaign marked the full onset of political vacuity and dishonesty in the West with its soundbites, spin-rooms, pivots and triangulation; all of which really amounted to treating voters like simpletons and never saying anything either too complex or which might upset them.
In the UK, Tony Blair embraced this approach to drive through a programme very much in tune with the zeitgeist of the era; any form of change, however rushed and ill-considered, being good because of its perceived ‘modernity’. As such, Conservative administrations after 2010 have had their room for manoeuvre limited beyond even their modest aspirations.
Although it is hard to know the reason behind every failure to address difficult issues, there are numerous examples of the consequences of never wanting to confront voters with challenging policies or ideas. George Osborne’s fiscal consolidation (far more modest than Thatcher’s) was largely achieved by reducing investment rather than current expenditure. Theresa May’s Net Zero legacy was put in place with no discussion of the sacrifices this would require. Boris Johnson’s boosterism based on ever increasing unfunded public expenditure, housebuilding targets made impossible by a failure to reform the planning system or the continuation of the unaffordable triple lock on pensions. Of course, sometimes proposals were made which, prima facie, seemed brave (like the welfare cuts proposed in the 2015 Conservative manifesto); but in reality such ideas would have been polled in advance to ensure they were popular.
Nowadays, politicians follow public opinion rather than trying to shape it. They are happier to mislead the electorate, as Labour did in 2024 over tax, than to make a difficult argument. As a consequence, they are mistrusted after the ensuing inevitable failure.
Right-wing populism is only the mirror image of the mainstream. It purports to ‘tell it as it is’ without the filter of establishment shibboleths, but actually promotes a smorgasbord of impossible policies (Royal Marines intercepting asylum seekers mid-channel and taking them back to France) and popular bad ideas such as nationalisation of certain commanding heights of industry. In reality, Nigel Farage and those currently on the Right of the Tory party make no effort to develop policies which might address the UK’s intractable and complex problems; because just like mainstream politicians, they are afraid of the consequences of honesty. They are every bit as duplicitous as mainstream politicians and every bit as doomed to failure.
Politicians know that the UK has a level of public expenditure, even before taking into account the need to spend substantially more on defence and other areas, which is unsustainable given anaemic growth levels. In addition, vested interests, such as trade unions, environmentalists and Nimby homeowners successfully lobby their MPs to prevent any form of change which might improve our prosperity. And recent events have confirmed that raising taxes to fund the spending would only cause growth to deteriorate further, creating a doom loop of declining growth and increasing taxes.
Yet still, the electorate is encouraged to think they can have it all and that there are no hard choices to be made. It is, of course, meaningless to merely say that there are hard choices to be made, as politicians often do, but then to offer none. After decades of being misled, surely there is a substantial proportion of the electorate that now wants to know the truth about what needs to be done? And if there isn’t, we are fated to follow Argentina in its long fall over the 20th century, meaning that it is the duty of any patriotic politician with integrity to make the argument rather than worry about their career.
Badenoch does give the impression that she understands some of this, although so far her execution of her role has been far from perfect. I hope that she succeeds, although I fear the odds are against this. If she fails, her replacement needs to be a serious, thoughtful politician, hopefully with a good track record – able to articulate real world complexities and argue for considered, likely highly controversial, policies which might actually work.
Writing after the 1997 election, Alan Clark referred to the intervention of the Tory Party household gods in preventing Michael Heseltine becoming leader in the aftermath of that defeat. I fear these same gods would have a far harder job in preventing the election of a shallow populist to follow Badenoch. Let’s hope they will be up to the task, or we will witness the end of the UK’s oldest political party and the inexorable decline of our country.
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