Election defeats are to some degree self-inflicted, so the first place that opposition parties should look for someone to blame for their predicament is a mirror. The Conservatives have flinched from that task.
The leadership race over the summer and autumn featured only a performance of reflection on mistakes made by the last government. The looking-glass was positioned askew so no one had to see themselves as part of the problem.
Kemi Badenoch prevailed in that contest as the embodiment of a theory that Britain had not rejected Conservative ideas when it evicted a Tory government. True Conservatism was what voters craved, and they punished Rishi Sunak’s party for failing to provide it. “We talked right but governed left,” Badenoch said.
It is a peculiar analysis that designates Sunak, Liz Truss, Boris Johnson, Theresa May and David Cameron as politicians of the left. It also doesn’t explain why so many former Tory voters switched to Labour and the Liberal Democrats.
A defence of Badenoch’s position might be that she had to secure support from her own party before reaching out to the country. Goading demoralised members out of their comfort zone too soon is a way to lose internal party elections. But nothing about the Tory leader hints at a gift for dissembling craft. Blunt candour was her pitch for the job. She says what she thinks and she really does think that Britain’s problems arise from an excess of leftism that somehow flourished during 14 years of Tory rule.
To make sense of that view, you have to picture the beast that Badenoch intends to vanquish. Helpfully, she sketched the outline last week in a speech in Washington. Her argument was that the malevolent essence of communism has reinvented itself since defeat in the cold war and has “hacked” liberal democracy. The old left reflex of repressive intolerance comes camouflaged as virtue – compassion for refugees; antiracism. It captures hearts and minds in a generation that has grown up complacent about freedom, ignorant of the danger.
The infiltration is double-pronged. On the economic front comes a new kind of socialism, no longer defined by state control of the means of production but operating stealthily, as a more remote manipulation of citizens’ lives. Badenoch quoted a “fantastic” speech by Argentina’s radical libertarian president, Javier Milei, in which the new socialism is said to nest in such nefarious activities as “controlling interest rates” and “regulations to correct market failures”.
The second front is cultural – the suffocation of free speech by censorious “woke” ideology. Although this doctrine has yet to achieve anything resembling electoral success, its dissemination through the halls of academe is evidence of its potential to undo western civilisation. Woke fanatics don’t need to win power on the strength of their own arguments because they piggyback on more popular, deviously moderate leftwing promises of a state that provides decent social services.
Voters’ susceptibility to the siren lure of a well-resourced public sector is something Badenoch lamented in a speech to the Confederation of British Industry last month. It is hard to make the case for a smaller state, she said, because people “want the government to solve everything, and if you ever sound hesitant, you are made out to be a cruel, unfeeling person”.
None of this is original thinking, and historically, at this early stage in the electoral cycle, it wouldn’t matter what a new opposition leader was saying. There would be time to get the message right. But failure to have an honest reckoning with the scale of July’s defeat is already feeding impatience for a speedier recovery among Tory MPs. And two-thirds of them voted for a different leader in the last ballot of the parliamentary party.
Badenoch’s position is unusually vulnerable because she doesn’t have a secure claim to be the standard bearer of the right. Nigel Farage’s Reform UK may have only five MPs, but it is nudging at parity with Labour and the Conservatives in opinion polls.
At this stage that isn’t a meaningful indicator of what might happen in a general election that is years away. But it indicates an underlying volatility and promiscuity of voter allegiance that makes it hard to exclude any outcome. The first past the post electoral system generates stable, predictable results if there are two big parties with vote shares that stifle smaller challengers. If several parties all poll around 20-25%, the allocation of seats could go haywire.
A rational evaluation of the Tories’ electoral challenge would focus as much on seats lost to the Lib Dems as votes surrendered to Reform. Sensible Conservatives are worried that next year’s local council elections will see Ed Davey’s troops quietly dig themselves deeper into former Tory heartlands, while right-leaning newspapers and GB News perform their usual routine of Farage amplification.
Badenoch’s dilemma will become more acute and her capacity for manoeuvre even tighter. But instead of addressing structural threats to her party’s position in the real world of British electoral politics, the Conservative leader is casting herself as a visionary warrior against phantom hordes of neo-communists mustering in Whitehall and on university campuses.
Perhaps this is a gamble based on Donald Trump’s imminent return to the White House. Maybe Badenoch thinks the future of Conservatism is prefigured in the Republican party’s capture by a combination of tech-bro libertarianism, anti-woke hysteria and xenophobic nationalism. (The tariff-wielding protectionist part of Trump’s agenda tends to be downplayed by his British cheerleaders since it sits awkwardly with their professed devotion to free trade.) Maybe the Tory leader just feels the need to rival Farage as the incoming president’s unofficial British satrap.
Either way, any dalliance by Badenoch with Trump fandom will chase liberal ex-Tories deeper into the Lib Dem embrace without wooing anyone back from Reform.
The same problem arises with her compulsion to shrink the state. Plenty of voters think taxes are too high and that public money gets wasted. That doesn’t mean they will rally to an idiosyncratic Badenoch-led crusade against freedom-hating bureaucrats. She argues that government should do less, but never says which of its current functions should be scrapped. Filling in that blank is unlikely to make her more popular.
The Conservatives under Sunak spent their final years in office torn between conflicting demands of practical government and ideological mania; between the belief that taxes should always come down and voter appetite for services that work; between a liberal labour market that relies on immigration and populist pledges to repel foreigners. Sunak positioned the Tories with exquisite precision in a political no man’s land, where voters left, right and centre all had reasons to feel aggrieved.
Badenoch’s plan looks like a more intellectually contrived edifice on the same underpopulated patch of electoral real estate. Maybe this time it will work. Maybe if she builds her shrine to the true Conservatism, masses of voters will come to worship. But it isn’t clear who or where they are, and it is later than she thinks.
Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist
