Badenoch is trying to match Farage step for step – but it’s a dance of death for the Tories

Kemi Badenoch looks on as the shadow chancellor, Andrew Griffith, speaks at the Conservative party conference, Birmingham, 5 October 2026. Photograph: Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire.

Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her forever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates. Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask.