If the purpose of a long Conservative leadership contest was to facilitate an audit of what caused July’s catastrophic general election defeat and identify a candidate who can steer the party to recovery, it has failed. The past three months of internal Tory debate have been characterised mostly by denial and retreat to dogmatic comfort zones. There is no reason to expect the final-round contest between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick to change that dynamic. Both candidates draw their support from the radical right of the party and, while there have been differences of nuance and tone in their campaigns, neither has shown any interest in making the Conservative party more responsive to mainstream British public opinion.
Of the four candidates who addressed the recent Tory conference, it was James Cleverly who best summarised the challenge when he urged his party to “be more normal”. That would require recognition of what made the party not just unpopular but viscerally repugnant to millions of voters in July. Mr Cleverly’s parliamentary colleagues declined to put him on the final shortlist. Normality, as he might have defined it, will not be on the ballot paper sent to Conservative members.
Of the two remaining candidates, Ms Badenoch has shown marginally more awareness of the limits that practical government can impose on doctrine. She was a Brexit supporter, but as trade secretary she abandoned an unworkable deadline that would have created a regulatory vacuum as reams of European regulation simply expired. She has been comparatively restrained when it comes to demands that Britain quit the European court of human rights (ECHR), swerving the proposal as an “easy answer to a complex question”.
Mr Jenrick, by contrast, was a remain supporter in 2016 who has reinvented himself as a champion of his party’s illiberal fundamentalists. He has made abandoning the ECHR a centrepiece of his campaign, casting it with preposterous urgency as an existential question for Britain – “leave or die”. For Mr Jenrick, every analysis of why the Tories were ejected from power tends to the crass and cynical calculus of border control – the problem was promising fewer migrants and admitting too many. The message, in essence, is that the Conservatives need to compete with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK on the terrain of uncompromising, xenophobic nationalism.
That isn’t Ms Badenoch’s style. Her preferred mania is divisive culture-war provocation on matters of gender, race and history, with a sideline in hostility to the media. But her core concept for the future of Conservatism is economic. Specifically, she is convinced that growth, innovation and productivity are suffocated by the rise of something called “the bureaucratic class”. This aversion to a phantom burden of social protection on business is what provoked the assertion – promptly retracted after a backlash – that maternity pay in Britain is “excessive”.
None of this is original. Conservatives have been complaining about high rates of immigration, burdensome taxes and an overmighty state for generations. Those obsessions drove the party’s agenda in government for 14 years – and still they were evicted from office. The two candidates to lead the Conservatives in opposition represent different strands of the same failed ideological complex. Neither has shown a hint of contrition for a dismal record in office and neither looks fit to bring the party back to a position where it might once again be trusted to govern the country.
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