Enter the Conservative conference in Manchester – a city where the party holds no MPs – and the scene is less reminiscent of a traditional political gathering than a museum. Three of Margaret Thatcher’s outfits, to coincide with the centenary of her birth, are encased in glass boxes. On one stall, presumably through some Ouija-like device, members are invited to “ask the Iron Lady” to opine on current political matters (“Baroness Thatcher, what would you make of Labour’s endless tax rises?”). In the manner of a lost tribe wandering in a political desert, the Tories have resorted to ancestor worship.
The Conservative Party has known droughts before but never a crisis such as this one. It averages just 16 per cent in the polls, 14 points behind Reform and only a point ahead of the Liberal Democrats. A mere 11 per cent of voters believe the Tories are ready to return to government. “Stronger economy, stronger borders,” proclaims the conference slogan. Not under you, ripostes the electorate.
The warning signs were clear from Kemi Badenoch’s first interview as Conservative leader last November. Back then, her refusal to distance herself from either Boris Johnson or Liz Truss stunned No 10 aides. This alone would not have put the Tories in a commanding position but it was a basic prerequisite for winning another hearing from the electorate. Labour believes, as one strategist put it, that there is “not much fight left” in the old enemy. Can Badenoch prove otherwise?
Having repeatedly vowed not to “rush out” policies, the Tory leader now gives every appearance of doing so. A pledge to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act, which dismayed Conservative grandees, has been joined by one to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights. Candidates who oppose this policy – in common with a majority of UK voters – will be barred from standing for the party at the next election. Here is how a broad church becomes a sect.
The Lib Dems, who gained 60 Tory seats at the last election, winning constituencies once held by Johnson, David Cameron and Michael Gove, can’t quite believe their luck. “Ed’s message in his speech to One Nation Tories was ‘come and join us’. Kemi’s message so far at her conference seems to be the very opposite,” remarked one source.
Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, has declared that “fiscal discipline lies at the heart of today’s Conservative Party”. But his headline pledge to ensure that “only British citizens can access welfare” shows every sign of indiscipline. This will not, it transpires, apply to EU citizens with settled status, undercutting Stride’s promise to save £23bn. “Who exactly is he taking benefits from?” asked a Labour source. “Those with indefinite leave to remain, including nurses and care workers who have lived and paid taxes here for decades? Hong Kongers? Ukrainians?”
There are two scenarios that give the Conservatives hope. The first is a major fiscal crisis under Labour which they believe could see the country summon the Tories as a sort of domestic International Monetary Fund to impose emergency spending cuts. The second is the implosion of Reform, still regarded as a “one-man band” under Nigel Farage (67 per cent of Tory defectors to Reform say they are prepared to consider returning in the future). Donations, intriguingly, endure: a party likened by its own leader to a “distressed asset” raised £2.9m in the most recent quarter for which figures are available, putting it ahead of both Labour and Reform.
But the danger is clear: if not death, then irrelevance. Like the Republicans in France, who found themselves assailed from the right by Marine Le Pen and from the centre by Emmanuel Macron, the Tories are trapped in a pincer movement between Reform and the Lib Dems. On the basis of the above they have little way out.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch pitches the Tories as the Lib Dems of the right]
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