Trying to predict the main challenges facing the Conservative Party in 2025 feels like a mug’s game. Not only are there so many to choose from even among those we can reasonably predict, but there is also the very real chance that some external event – such as an oil price shock, say – completely upends the political scene between now and 2026.
But if I had to pick a big one, into which we can hopefully weave a lot of those threads, it’s this: the Tories must spend this year starting to think about and articulate, if only at a very broad level, their diagnosis for why they failed in government before and what they would do differently if the public entrusts office to them again.
In other words, they must resist what will surely be the almighty temptation to sit back and let Labour fail, sticking to airy but ultimately vacuous recitations of their various ‘principles’ and putting off all the difficult introspection in the name of maintaining a fragile ‘unity’.
This will be very difficult. As I’ve written before, Kemi Badenoch owes her leadership to the support of people for whom her principal virtue was not being Robert Jenrick. None of the grandees praising her decision to stick to the realm of broad principles have offered their own detailed analyses of the abject record of 14 years of Conservative rule on immigration, law and order, or the economy.
Articulating broad principles, without applying them to detailed policy analysis, is just a trite retreat to the party’s comfort zone; the previous government had no difficulty talking about low taxes and personal responsibility even as it froze income tax thresholds and banned cigarettes.
Meanwhile the attempt to go the other way, and frame the problem as a purely technical question of ‘competence’, is just question-begging, especially in light of that gulf between word and deed. Was it incompetent to let immigration skyrocket – or merely to promise not to? If it was incompetent to let real wages and GDP per capita stagnate for a decade and a half, why did that happen?
There is no way to answer the competence question without a substantive political analysis. But Badenoch made her refusal to offer such an analysis central to her pitch.
In theory, that means she has a very wide personal mandate. In practice, it means that she didn’t secure a mandate for any substantial or controversial shift in position she may wish to make; her supporters have not dipped their hands in the blood, and her opponents don’t have to offer loser’s consent to a programme they didn’t actually lose to.
To date, Badenoch’s supporters have been able to argue that it is simply too early to write her off, and that’s fair enough. But that argument has an expiration date, and not just because MPs and activists will be understandably restive if we’re still having this same conversation in January 2026.
Unfortunately for the Tory leader, she has perhaps less room than any of her predecessors in recent memory to lie low and take her time. Reform UK may not yet have a remotely credible programme for office but it is a serious challenger for airtime; if there is a vacuum on the right of British politics, Nigel Farage will fill it.
That means the Conservatives are going to have to say something, and this is where the second danger arises. Because the longer Badenoch takes to set out her framework, the greater the odds of shadow ministers – and indeed, the leader herself – saying things that don’t end up aligning with it. Or, even worse, the eventual framework being a collection of whatever positions the party was bounced into during another year or two of trying to stop Reform stealing all the headlines.
Not only does this risk restricting Badenoch’s (already very limited) freedom of manoeuvre, but also coming back to bite the Conservatives should they ever return to office, just as Labour’s glib promises to the WASPI women have backfired now they’re in power and made the correct decision.
Finally, Tory strategists must realise that a painful and comprehensive reckoning with previous failures is the only way to win a hearing for any new approach.
One of Badenoch’s biggest challenges is simply taking over immediately after the Party lost office. Any time she or shadow ministers say they would do this or wouldn’t do that, Labour can fairly ask why they didn’t fix the problem under discussion when in government – especially given that most of the opposition front bench served in that government.
She needs an answer – an answer that George Osborne, William Hague and the other grandees who rowed in behind her leadership will not like. (To say nothing of Michael Gove, as and when the Tories come up with a housing programme that consists of more than counter-productive populist nonsense.)
This, then, is the big-picture challenge facing Badenoch and the Conservative Party in 2025. Of course, meeting it does depend upon not blowing up in the meantime through picking stupid fights, and riding out the likely freakout after the local elections.
But while that day-to-day stuff is necessary to success, it is not sufficient. The agonised thrashing of the current Government is a warning of what happens if, in this unforgiving age, you share Sir Humphrey’s definition of politics as ‘surviving until Friday afternoon’.
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