Politics never ends. Today the selection begins of the leader of the opposition and thus possibly the next British prime minister. The pollsters’ current favourite is Kemi Badenoch. She is intelligent and clearly popular with her party’s grassroots. But the supposedly rightwing stall set out in her manifesto, published in the Times, raises more doubts than it offers answers.
If the Tories’ secret weapon is supposedly loyalty, Badenoch shows no trace. The true reason for her party’s recent defeat is clear and not discreditable. It is that 14 years was long enough and voters wanted a change. Yet Badenoch prefers to rubbish her colleagues as “deserving to lose”, for twisting and turning, “unsure of who we were”. The party should renew itself, she says, by returning to its core values, apparently a belief in capitalism and the nation state, whatever that means.
Certainly a great misinterpretation of the recent election was that it represented a shift of British public opinion to the left. It did not. Keir Starmer’s Labour party actually won 3m fewer votes overall than his predecessor, Jeremy Corbyn, did in 2017. If anything, the election represented a drift to the right, with the Lib Dems, Tories and Reform UK splintering the anti-Labour vote. It was our first-past-the-post system that gave Starmer a thumping majority. He was the luckiest man in election history.
That isn’t to say a lurch rightwards is necessary – it simply means there is still a place for traditional conservatism. But Badenoch appears to be echoing the popular move to the right seen in recent elections across Europe. Yet her platitudinous presentation makes no attempt to say what this is supposed to involve. Refreshing capitalism is welcome, but does it mean more privatisation of utilities, welfare or prisons? The worst offence against British capitalism in the past decade has been the wrecking of open borders and free trade represented by Brexit, ardently supported by Badenoch.
As for the nation state, the only policy area mentioned is immigration. Badenoch asserts that “we can’t control immigration until we reconfirm our belief in the nation state”. She does not explain why. The chief cause of the surge in cross-Channel immigration has been a failure to unite with any EU initiative on the issue. Europe’s view was that Britain could go hang. Nation statism was the enemy of control.
Now to take the Tory party to the right in order to head off Reform would be a fool’s errand. How far its mercurial leader, Nigel Farage, can cohere his alternative conservatism will be intriguing to see in the months ahead. But the evidence of the past is that rightwing factions only cause short-term damage to Conservatives.
The real task now for the Tories is to restore their popularity among middle-class voters, including deserters to the Lib Dems, not least in the south of England. This will depend in large part on creating an image of reliability and competence as Starmer heads into the ever-choppy waters of public sector reform. The obvious candidate for that task is Badenoch’s chief rival, the experienced anti-Brexiter Tom Tugendhat.
The Tory party made a serious error in rushing forward to a leadership contest without waiting to consult on and reform the process. This still leaves the final decision on who should be leader and thus potential prime minister to constituency party members, an electorate wildly unrepresentative of Tory and floating voters alike. It is what gave the country Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. The choice should have been returned, as previously, to MPs. Meanwhile, for the party and the country, this is another election that matters.
Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
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