As Kemi Badenoch takes control of the Conservatives and tries to somehow restore their credibility and coherence, one thought remains inescapable: that trying to make sense of the Tory party can be a fast route to a migrainous headache.
Badenoch is the sixth Conservative leader in only eight years. From the Brexit referendum onwards, her party’s default setting has been all about division, mishap and scandal. Floating above the enduring mess are two spectral gods who seem to lead their worshippers down no end of blind alleys: that grim British nativist Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher, whose free-market credo still forms the core of most Tories’ beliefs. More centrist past figures are never mentioned: one of the party’s few concrete certainties, in fact, is that its old one nation element is now all but dead and buried, killed by the forces that have pushed Conservatism squarely into the realms of the radical right.
