“See you at the funeral!” That’s the message zipping across Tory WhatsApp ahead of Conservative Party Conference, as MPs, councillors, advisers and members prepare to descend on Manchester. Although that’s not entirely accurate – many are choosing to give it a miss entirely, as are the businesses, lobby groups and charities for whom Tory conference is usually a cornerstone of the autumn calendar. Despite the insistence from the conference’s chairman that registrations are high, rumours persist of unsold hotel rooms prebooked by the party in the hopes of strong attendance, not to mention a dearth of corporate bookings.
One regular activist probably sitting out the conglomeration this year told me he’d make a call on Sunday morning if the “fomo” was too great to bear, but that he couldn’t really see the point. What could Kemi Badenoch say in her two conference addresses – one at the start, one to round things off – to move the dial?
This all marks a shift from last year, when a mood of manic positivity – relief, even, that the worst was over and the recovery could begin – pervaded throughout in Birmingham. What should have been a sober post-mortem on the election they had just lost spectacularly was instead a celebration of Tory fighting spirit, buoyed by the excitement of a leadership contest and Labour’s sudden poll descent. Attendees – both outside the Conservative ecosystem and from its ranks – joked that the party was stuck in the first stage of grief: denial. To continue with the morbid metaphor, one prediction in the lead-up to Sunday’s kick-off is that it will be something of a wake, a form of group therapy for party that has spent the year suffering through the difficult stages of anger and bargaining and is now mired in torpid depression.
How bad is it? A party convinced the 2024 election marked the nadir has now fallen to 16 per cent in the polls, occasionally fighting just to be in third place. New YouGov research out on Friday suggests only one in nine people think the Tories are ready for government, and only 20 per cent believe Badenoch has done a good job as leader so far.
Speaking of Badenoch, the speed with which Tories who once identified her as a rising star have turned on her is dizzying. Her claims this week to have “inherited a distressed asset” meaning her job “was to just make sure we didn’t go bust” are not totally backed up by the data. One wry right-leaning commentator reminded me that Badenoch inherited a party that was leading the polls – a fact readers may dismiss as fantasy but is actually true: at the time of her ascension as leader, the Tories were enjoying figures around the 28-30 per cent mark.
The start of November heralds the point at which she can officially be challenged. The only question is whether her critics move immediately or let her take the blame for another set of disastrous local election results in May.
What’s the point of a conference where everyone knows the leader is on borrowed time? There’s the shadow leadership contest, of course. Heir-in-waiting Robert Jenrick appears all over the conference programme, augmenting his Tuesday speech on the main stage with nearly a dozen fringe events. James Cleverly is everywhere too, as is Mel Stride and other familiar names from Conservative governments past, as well as new figures like Katie Lam tipped as ones to watch. (Notably, Boris Johnson appears to be among those giving this conference a pass.) And yet, anything but total unity at this crucial moment will poison the chalice even further for whoever ends up eventually winning it. This is one of the few opportunities when Westminster will be paying attention to the Tories. They can’t afford for that brief impression to be one of bloody infighting.
So if not the intoxicating drama of a leadership battle, what are those who are attending looking out for? “Signs of life” comes the glib answer from one, who clarifies “this far out from an election, what you need are the building blocks, a set of ideas”. Neil O’Brien, the party’s leading thinker who now holds the brief of “shadow minister for policy renewal and development” has been working “like a machine” with frontbenchers to try to figure out what the Conservative Party can actually offer in 2029. The aim is policies which are “defensible, detailed and eye-catching”.
It is the latter term that can best be applied to the two big policies Badenoch has already trailed. One of the blockbuster moments will be the result of the review conducted into whether Britain should leave the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). Unsurprisingly, the answer is going to be yes, suggesting Badenoch has finally been won over by the case Jenrick was passionately making this time last year.
And on Thursday, Badenoch declared the Conservatives would scrap the Climate Change Act, drawing the condemnation of Theresa May and other Tory big beasts of a previous era. Enacted in 2008, the landmark climate legislation was left untouched throughout 14 years of Conservative government.
It’s tempting to read these two announcements as a bid to chase Reform, which has managed to cannibalise Tory support to a degree that would have been unimaginable last year. Reform’s offer has been a fixation on immigration (illegal and legal) that has not so much moved the Overton Window as relocated it to a different universe entirely, while promising tax cuts and public spending sprees with the assurance that cutting net zero will pay for it all. Heedless (or, perhaps, deliberately dismissive) of the Liberal Democrats eager efforts to hoover up more disillusioned former Tories worried about things like populism and the environment, the strategy is to fight Reform the territory on which Nigel Farage is most comfortable.
Or perhaps that’s putting too much thought into it. One Tory described the climate announcement as “a search for relevance”, another party veteran called it “a plea for headlines, on the basis something is better than nothing”. “The question that announcement is answering is: ‘How do you remind people you exist?’” argued a former minister. The mechanics of the announcement – and how it fits in with nearly two decades of cross-party consensus on the climate crisis – are secondary to the optics. By outraging much of Westminster including her former colleagues, Badenoch is getting talked about. That, it was suggested to me, is in itself a win.
It certainly beats the last time the Tories tried to launch a bold new policy. Back in February, Badenoch announced her party would change the rules around Indefinite Leave to Remain, increasing the amount of time a foreign national would need to live in the UK to be eligible for permanent residency and disqualifying anyone with a criminal record. At the time, Tory strategists hoped this would fulfil the “detailed” criteria of the policy brief, showing they understood the perceived problem (the millions of “Boriswave” migrants who arrived under the visas granted by the Johnson government’s post-Brexit points-based system who will soon be eligible for ILR) better than Reform and positioning Badenoch to take the credit if Labour adopted the idea.
No one noticed. Seven months later, Reform announced an extreme and unworkable plan of scrapping ILR altogether, and the new Labour Home Secretary Shabana Mahmood unveiled changes to ILR that look an awful lot like Badenoch’s. A tough lesson for CCHQ – and whoever takes over from Badenoch – realising how little attention even people whose job it is to follow politics are paying them. As usual, Nigel Farage is sucking up all the political oxygen. A Tory party that doesn’t work out how to handle that will suffocate, however good its policy platform. The expected announcement on leaving the ECHR won’t be enough – especially given Reform already came out in favour in August.
To say the party is split on how to respond to the Farage threat is an understatement. One activist quipped that we probably wouldn’t be hearing 30 mentions of the Reform leader (à la Ed Davey) in Badenoch’s speeches, but there’s no escaping the reality that the Conservatives’ future existence rests on finding an answer to the existential crisis that is Farage. Wishful thinking about the possibilities if he ever stood back from politics, given Reform’s one-man-band infrastructure, isn’t a strategy. A credible economic programme to contrast with the Reform spending spree will only work if today’s Tories (currently trusted on the economy by just a quarter of voters) can distance themselves from the situation they left in July 2024: a cost-of-of living crisis, public services on the brink, the highest tax burden in history. Standing with Keir Starmer in condemnation of the threat right-wing populism represents might help neutralise the Reform challenge, one Cameron-era Tory suggested wistfully, before laughing dryly at the impossibility.
“This isn’t really a rallying cry conference,” I was told. In normal times, nor should it be. A low-key conference based around policy discussions and intellectual debates hosted by think tanks is what a party 15 months after a catastrophic election defeat needs.
But the Tories face an uphill climb towards relevance, with organisation infrastructure as creaking as the pot-holed roads and school ceilings of crumbling concrete which served as metaphors during the election for the decline of both the party and the country it had overseen for 14 years. In membership terms, one figure sums up the scale of the challenge: the 2001 leadership contest saw each of the two candidates received more votes than the total number of members who bothered to take part when deciding between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick in 2024.
A glimmer of hope from the latest YouGov polling suggests the public are generally confident the party will still be a major force in politics in ten years’ time, that they are not in extinction-level territory just yet. This period is the much-heralded “rebuilding in the wilderness”, and it takes time to get right. Bereaved parties need space to grieve and recover.
But time and space are in short supply. Counter-intuitively, if the Labour government had not seen its popularity ratings crash, there would be less pressure on the Tories to bounce back so soon. As it is, voters disheartened with Labour who have not yet forgiven the Conservatives are already casting around for alternatives. The defection question will be haunting Tory conference this year: after Danny Kruger became the first sitting Tory MP to join Reform’s ranks, declaring the Conservative party to be “over”, Manchester was always going to be consumed by fevered speculation about who will be next. Ex-MPs who lost their seats in July and current ones keen to keep theirs post-2029 are being closely watched.
But perhaps it isn’t the high-profile names from the Johnson, Truss or Sunak eras that the Conservatives should be most concerned about. A party’s ecosystem relies on more than MPs. Again, look at the membership figures. It isn’t just people like Andrea Jenkyns and Danny Kruger being tempted to a new insurgent political movement.
A month ago, I asked a former Tory SpAd who had worked closely with the government under various Conservative prime ministers if they’d be attending Reform’s conference in Birmingham. They weren’t, but not because the prospect wasn’t appealing. “It’s poor form to visit the girl you fancy whilst you’re still married to your wife.”
[Further reading: Liz Truss is still at war with the deep state]
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