When you’re in, you’re in. But my God, don’t you know it when you’re out. In the week and a bit following the Tories’ electoral shellacking, the party has been reckoning with its much-diminished size and the Parliamentary behemoth it has allowed the Labour Party to become. In an election result which, extraordinarily, was the best case scenario for the Conservatives, they were left with just 121 seats while Labour picked up 211, taking them to 411.
Having narrowly dodged an extinction-scale asteroid, it’s understandable that the Conservatives seem a little shaken up. But with that being said, the events of the last week have made for a particularly chaotic display.
We’ve seen the beginnings of the Tory leadership battle, with Suella Braverman accusing Robert Jenrick, her rival on the party’s Right, of being a ‘centrist Rishi supporter’. Kemi Badenoch, currently the front-runner for the role, made headlines on Tuesday for castigating colleagues who had not grasped the ‘enormity’ of the loss and laying into Rishi Sunak for his D-Day debacle and calling an election too soon. And this is without even mentioning the controversy surrounding Bob Blackman’s election as Chairman of the 1922 Committee.
Meanwhile, Labour have been getting on with the job of government and have made some welcome strides. Planning reform, as promised, has remained front and centre of their agenda. In a speech on Monday, Chancellor Rachel Reeves laid out her plan for getting things built. She pledged to reform the National Planning Policy Framework by the end of the month, including the reintroduction of mandatory local housing targets, ending the ban on onshore wind in England and prioritising energy projects in the planning system.
But all that glitters ain’t gold. As Henry Hill pointed out in CapX this week, Ed Miliband’s apparent decision to ban all new oil and gas licences and Angela Rayner’s move to scrap a planned coal mine Cumbria show that Labour’s worst instincts could scupper their mission for growth. Similarly, Jonn Elledge has highlighted that the newly appointed Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook has a track record of Nimbyism, having attempted to block new homes on exactly the sort of land Labour now plans to build on.
Rather than pounce on these emergent weaknesses, some Tories have reverted to their baser impulses for attack lines. Arachnid enthusiast Gavin Williamson took to X following Reeves’ speech criticising her party’s plans to implement ‘centrally imposed housing targets’ and accused them of wanting to ‘concrete over the green belt’, taking away the apparently inalienable right of Britain’s busybodies to block vital infrastructure. And only yesterday, the newly elected Conservative MP Nick Timothy lambasted Labour for approving the construction of a new solar and battery farm in Suffolk.
While Miliband and Rayner’s recent decisions might represent the worst instincts of the Labour Party, outbursts like these surely exhibit the worst of the Tories’.
CapX readers will not need to be told that regressing to reactionary Nimbyism would be a disastrous strategy for opposition. Despite Kemi Badenoch’s recent analysis of Sunak’s demise, missteps like leaving the D-Day commemorations early were merely the tip of the declinist iceberg. For over a decade, on everything from migration to housing, the Conservatives allowed the politics of stagnation to take hold, often making positive noises on reform but ultimately changing very little. There were some genuine successes, but with no clear willingness to defend them, it was then unsurprising that their election campaign rested almost exclusively on desperate attempts to shore up what remained of their grey voter base.
With Labour in power and Reform agitating from the right flank, it is vital that whoever takes over as leader of the Tories reverses this grim ideological trend. While Labour may be enjoying their honeymoon phase in Westminster, it will not take long for their instinctive interventionism to take hold. When this happens, the Conservatives must show themselves to be a united front, equipped with a bold pro-market vision for Britain underpinned by a clear conservative philosophical framework. Without this, they may well find themselves facing the same existential dilemmas a week after polling day in 2029.
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