Under ‘Brexit Badenoch’, what is the future of the Conservative Party?

The Tories crave the appearance but not the reality of change, writes Prof Tim Bale. Their current path risks alienating potential voters and party loyalists alike, while aiming for a far-right populist niche comfortably occupied by Farage and Reform UK – and Badenoch the Brexit true-believer is just another a comfort-zone Conservative

How many therapists does it take to change a lightbulb? Only one, runs the old joke, but the lightbulb really has to want to change. The same goes for political parties. For all the talk about Sir Keir Starmer somehow fooling his members into letting him reverse Labour out of the electoral dead end into which his predecessor had driven it, he couldn’t have done it unless, deep down, that’s what most of them – or at least the silent majority that chose to stick around – wanted him to do.

The Tory grassroots aren’t so very different. Back in 2005, they didn’t necessarily like being told by David Cameron that they had to stop “banging on” about Europe, low taxes and immigration and talk instead about public services and the environment. But, after three election defeats on the trot, they accepted that it was the only way out of the right-wing, populist corner into which Hague, IDS and Howard had painted the party.

The problem, of course, was that once Cameron had tricked the hapless Lib Dems into going into a coalition, he and his sidekick George Osborne turned out to be bog-standard, Brussels-bashing Thatcherites whose social liberalism definitely didn’t stop their government disparaging migrants.

The Conservative Party, it turns out, craves the appearance but not the reality of change, and then only occasionally. Indeed, at the moment, even the appearance is proving tricky since it seems to have decided – despite plenty of evidence to the contrary – that it went down to a historic defeat last year not because it presided over years of slow growth and stagnant real wages, and not because crucial public services like the NHS were visibly falling apart, but because it didn’t pursue tax and spending cuts and culture wars with anything like the fervour that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK managed.

‘For all the talk of her being a breath of fresh air, Badenoch, a Brexit true-believer who genuinely, if preposterously, seems to believe that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office, is just another comfort-zone Conservative’ (Gareth Fuller/PA Wire)

“After defeat,” writes the political commentator Matthew d’Ancona, “the hardest task for any party is also the only one that counts: which is to open its eyes.” The 2024 leadership contest was an opportunity to confront the party with some of these awkward truths. But it was an opportunity missed – either because the candidates were too ideologically blinkered or because they worried that to do so would blow any chance they might have had of winning.

Rather than enabling a post-mortem by proxy, it saw them choose instead to tell the party – and, in particular, what Paul Goodman, the Conservative peer and former ConservativeHome editor, calls the “right-wing entertainment complex” – what it wanted to hear, not what it needed to hear. Hence numerous faux-philosophical nods to the need to appeal to the supposed “common ground” rather than the centre ground of British politics, all the talk of immigration rather than the NHS, the calls to lean into a “realignment” that never was, and the focus on winning back Reform and stay-at-home voters rather than winning over their Labour and Liberal Democrat counterparts.

For all the talk of her being a breath of fresh air, then, Badenoch, a Brexit true-believer who genuinely, if preposterously, seems to believe that the party “talked right yet governed left” while in office, is essentially just another comfort-zone Conservative. As such, she risks taking the party even further down the road towards being an ersatz populist radical right party – towards a space on the political spectrum already occupied, and very effectively so, by Farage’s latest vehicle.

And even in the unlikely event that some voters eventually decide they prefer the copy to the original, the Tories’ decision to bang on about boats, boilers and bathrooms, while having no credible answer to the crisis in Britain’s public services beyond yet more spending and tax cuts, will likely alienate many others.

If the Conservative Party carries on like this, whoever leads it, any road to recovery will surely turn out to be a blind alley. The former cabinet minister Francis (now Lord) Maude was once reported to have said that the Tories have two settings: complacency and panic. To show signs of both at the very same time is really quite something.

Tim Bale teaches politics at Queen Mary University of London and is the author of ‘The Conservative Party after Brexit: Turmoil and Transformation’, the updated paperback version of which is published this week