Last Wednesday, the announcement that Conservative MPs had decided on a conclusive leadership battle between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick was greeted in non-Tory circles by an outpouring of mirth. One Labour parliamentarian texted the Guardian’s political editor to jokily wonder whether the result needed to be declared as yet another gift. Rumours that the shock outcome was the consequence of James Cleverly’s supporters assuming he had an unassailable lead and cynically backing Robert Jenrick as his most beatable opponent were the clincher: here was yet another instalment of the Tory pantomime that has now been running for nearly a decade. “A lot of very serious analysis awaits,” said the LBC presenter James O’Brien, “but this is all objectively hilarious.”
In so far as Badenoch and Jenrick seemingly have no interest in the reasons why their party so comprehensively lost the election, all the amusement is understandable. Talk of whoever wins perhaps lasting only a couple of years only increases the sense of hilarity. But it is surely not that difficult to take a slightly different view, and look at the future of Tory politics with more than a pang of anxiety.
The new government is faced with an almost impossible set of financial and economic problems. The reputational damage caused by Freebiegate may well stick, and there is still no coherent big-picture narrative. Since the summer, Keir Starmer’s personal approval ratings have dropped by 45 percentage points; on Sunday, new polling by More In Common suggested Labour and the Tories are neck-and-neck. Meanwhile, a huge cloud of toxic rightwing politics – full of racism, conspiracy theory and hare-brained economics – hangs over much of the world, the UK included.
Make no mistake: the fact that Jenrick and Badenoch have chosen to position themselves in such close proximity to the new global right is hugely significant. One-nation Conservatism could be heading for extinction: its key standard-bearer this time, Tom Tugendhat, ran an incoherent and doomed campaign, and even if Cleverly had made it through to the final round, his insistence that his party should “be more normal” may well have been too much for the membership to bear. The last hopes of remaining moderates may therefore lie in Jenrick’s origins as the nondescript figure his colleagues nicknamed “Robert Generic”, and rumours about the prospect of him winning, then revealing himself to be a ruthless centrist, in the same way Starmer took over the Labour party. Jenrick denies those stories. And look at the man gauchely striding around with his hair shorn into a buzz-cut, insisting shadow ministers and Tory candidates would have to back his line on withdrawal from the European convention on human rights, promising to bring back Jacob Rees-Mogg, and channelling Enoch Powell: is he not far too dug in?
For now, the fact that either he or Badenoch will be the next leader highlights how much their party has lurched not just to the right, but into the realms of a kind of populist paranoia. She seemingly believes in a liberal deep state which has ensured that, whoever has been in power, “the left never left”. Her rhetoric on immigration has been full of talk about “ancestral ethnic hostilities” and some cultures being better than others. As the Byline Times journalist Josiah Mortimer recently pointed out, her big address to Conservative conference suggested not just a drive to fight the culture wars to the death, but a homegrown version of the Trumpists’ Project 2025: “a plan that looks at our international agreements … at judicial review and judicial activism. At the Treasury and the Bank of England. At devolution and quangos. At the civil service and the health service.” All this came with lines that the text version of the speech peppered with slightly alarming exclamation marks: “We will rewire, reboot, and reprogramme! Nothing is more exciting to me!”
Jenrick’s fixation on immigration – and the ECHR – blurs into views that veer alarmingly close to unashamed nativism. “The sheer scale and the lack of integration is sapping at our culture,” he says. He wants an “effective freeze in net migration”, an idea that he sells using provocations straight from the Nigel Farage manual: his suggestion that protesters shouting the Arabic exhortation “Allahu Akbar” in London should be arrested, or a response to the summer’s riots partly framed in terms of “the dismantling of our national culture”, and “non-integrating multiculturalism”.
These ideas are not the stuff of amusing irrelevance. They are the latest British manifestations of a worldview that is rampant all over Europe, and that will receive a huge boost if Donald Trump wins. Here, it is sustained and boosted by the media ecosystem commanded by the Mail, Telegraph and GB News, and Farage’s talent for so scaring the Conservatives that they simply imitate him. Whether it is the Jenrick or Badenoch version that wins out, mainstream broadcasters’ impartiality duties mean that hard-right politics will be even more normalised. And at that point, a very big question will scream out for an answer: what does a Tory party marching further and further in that direction mean for the Labour party?
It is an unfashionable argument to make in an age as polarised as ours, but the state of Conservative politics is bad news for progressives. The history of the 20th century shows that even when the left sets the agenda, support for some of its ideas from more enlightened Conservatives is an asset: the creation of a new welfare state by the Labour government of 1945-51, for example, was assisted by Tories who had realised that the social and economic order needed drastic reform, and the changes survived the next three decades thanks to Conservative backing. In our own era, the chances of any meaningful steps forward on some huge issues – social care is the best example – would be all the greater with at least some buy-in from the political right. With Badenoch in particular, that looks like an absurdly optimistic hope.
And then there is a much more pressing point: whoever wins, will Labour contest the new Tory leader’s fundamental ideas? Ministers are comfortable maligning Tories as weird and incompetent. Though the idea of Starmer automatically towering over his next opponent looks misplaced – let’s face it: not many people like him either – Badenoch’s tendency to shoot her mouth off and Jenrick’s air of opportunistic flimsiness will probably present easy targets. But Labour remains terrified of any real arguments about immigration and its related issues: it has pledged to somehow reduce overall levels, and is apparently open to the right’s pet project of processing asylum claims offshore. Moreover, in contrast to Badenoch and Jenrick’s brazen posturing about “culture” and national identity, Labour’s leader and senior figures lack the confidence and political chops to make the case for a modern, liberal, left-of-centre UK. And in its absence, they tend to get pulled in some of the same directions.
Contrary to Tory talk about the left having been surreptitiously in power for the past 14 years, especially from the Brexit referendum onwards the hard right has set the terms of whole swathes of our politics, and it may continue to do so. Imagine the Starmer government locked into declining popularity, a new Tory leader in their pomp, and Labour anxiously trying to triangulate its way out: even if they ultimately lose, Jenrick or Badenoch could wield terrifying power and influence. With that in mind, we should all stop laughing.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist
