I remember a time when during conference season I would be waiting for the Conservative Conference with… not excitement, that’s the completely wrong word with the wrong connotations. I would wait with anticipation – a morbid curiosity of just, exactly, what they would roll out this time.
But this year, I found that I had completely forgotten that the Tories were even a thing. This could be down to a few reasons, the first of which is a sort of protective amnesia, a kind of political PTSD that’s developed after the Johnson/Truss/Sunak era and its gleeful demolition of institutions and social norms.
The second potential reason is the inordinate amount of attention being given to a certain turquoise party and their band of bloviators. The most likely reason though – and the one that should give us all pause – is that the Conservatives are currently irrelevant.
They do deserve this irrelevance, of course – it’s exactly what should happen when a once-serious party spends a decade and a half mainlining stunts, burning credibility for kindling and calling it governance. But the conference is on, starting as of today, and the lead up has been… fascinating.
Badenoch’s politics of provocation
Kemi Badenoch has spent the past few days in the media spotlight desperately trying to conjure up at least some interest and momentum, but she has, as is always the case, done so by skipping straight past being ‘provocative’ and instead opted for being ‘gratuitously inflammatory’.
I can’t believe that this even needs to be said, but a leader who in any way or form wants to be taken seriously does not reduce a national social care crisis into a sneer about ‘who’s going to wipe bottoms for us today’. It’s such a tin-eared contempt for the incredibly important work that carers, be they migrant or British, carry out on a daily basis to keep our families safe and cared for and the social care system from completely collapsing in on itself.
This is without even going into what would be remarkable political malpractice if we had any sort of regulatory standard for our politician in a country that has hundreds of thousands of care vacancies and a population that is, inconveniently for our culture warriors, ageing rapidly.
Unsurprisingly, Badenoch’s policy platform, as it were, echoed the rhetoric – a solemn wish for an ICE-Style removals force1, and to ramp up to a deportation target that reads more like it was chosen for how it would sell in a tabloid deck than whether it would function in a courtroom.
Governance by dare
There was a promise to yank the UK straight out of the ECHR, thereby placing us in the prestigious company of Russia and Belarus, as well as a vow to scrap the Climate Change Act as if investor confidence and energy security can be bullied into compliance through a punchy press release2. It’s governance from Badenoch by dare: pick the loudest thing you can possibly say, say it even louder and desperately hope that the furore and noise you stir up covers up the absence of costings, timelines, legal viability and basic humanity3.
At the same time, orbiting the vacuum of leadership and sense that is Badenoch like a small and terribly aggrieved moon is Robert Jenrick.
He is, at present, one of the only reasons that the Tories occasionally punch into the news cycle beyond Badenoch’s miscues and what seems to be a weekly Tory defection to the turquoise party. He appears to have set himself a sort of personal challenge of out-turquoising the turquoise party, seemingly putting himself in a one-man arms race to create ever more punitive policies that can be shouted about the loudest.
It’s this weird situation where you have leadership by proxy – while Badenoch fires grapeshot haphazardly in all directions, Jenrick shoulders a bazooka and aims it at whatever precious little remains of consensus. The end result is that we now have a party brand that’s basing itself on punitive maximalism based on whatever culture-war vibe catches the eye that week.
You don’t need a political strategist to tell you that when your two most recognisable faces are locked in a perpetual sprint to prove which one of the can be crueller faster, voters hear you loud and clear – and walk the other way4.
The sneer at everyone else
It’s not just about the content though – it’s the tone, a sort of constant sneer of sour contempt at people who aren’t in the room.
Care workers? Punchline.
Civil servants? Criminals.
Judges? Obstacles.
It’s a brand of grievance politics that feels imported wholesale from US talk radio – every problem is a conspiracy, every constraint a betrayal, every loss the fault of the mythical decadent elite, none of it ever the choices made by the people with blue rosettes over their fourteen years in power.
A party without contrition
And that, above all, is the festering rot at the core of the Conservative party – to date, there has been zero contrition for the immeasurable damage that was done under the party’s own governments.
Austerity was a decade long choice that flattened resistance the moment we most needed it, the pandemic response cost hundreds of thousands of lives, and Brexit was an exercise in magical thinking that was executed by people who seemingly had an allergy to detail, accountability and risk tables.
The Johnson period was a rolling series of reputational disasters capped by law-breaking and lying to parliament, while Truss detonated the bond-market and tanked the UK’s reputation one handedly, and Sunak served as nothing more than a screen-saver that for just under two years was simply there keeping the computer from going to sleep.
All of this, and more, is in the living memory of the electorate, and until the Tories can say plainly ‘we fucked up, people got very badly hurt and we are sorry, let us atone by changing course by ceasing this dick-measuring contest of cruelty’, it will never be allowed anywhere close to the grown up table.
The Conservative party failed this country. Countless times. The worst thing about the situation it finds itself in, though? In its current guise, it’s failing the country in an entirely different way.
Why we still need the Tories
Because there’s an awkward truth for those of us who aren’t going to vote Conservative – we need them to be better.
A country as politically complicated as the UK doesn’t function with a clown-car opposition – we need a serious, centre-right Conservative party that can hold a Labour government to account without choking our political conversations with imported culture-war toxins. We need an alternative for centre-right voters who will never put a red ballot in the box, but who are repelled by the punitive and borderline nihilistic fetishisms on display by Badenoch and her team.
More than this, there needs to be an alternative to the turquoise guys – the failure on behalf of the Conservative party is an incredible gift to the far-right populists that are looking to overwhelm this country with their toxic rhetoric and own unworkable plans.
We need a functioning Conservative party, because without it, the political balance of our systems will remain completely out of whack – but that means that we need leadership, and specifically, we need leadership that can do three things:
- Be honest with the public about what went wrong – own the damage caused by austerity, own the dishonesty around all things Brexit and ask for permission to change
- Reconstruct a policy core around conservative values and goods the country may actually want – sound money, clean growth that doesn’t insult physics, serious policing that, above all, respects the law, migration control that is lawful and targeted instead of headline-hungry and respect for the institutions that you’ll need to have on side if you want to govern
- Stop outsourcing your strategy to whichever pundit shouted loudest last – there is a massive gap between technocratic mush and talk radio nihilism, and the Tories should be inhabiting exactly that space
Not Badenoch’s project
And being very frank, Kemi Badenoch is not the person that should be this project’s architect. Her every instinct is oppositional rather than constructive and she seems to be living under the impression that leadership is nothing more than a series of viral clips rather than telling your own audience uncomfortable truths.
Her temperament – peevish, punitive and perpetually affronted – does not in any way or form steady markets, soothe wary voters or attract the talent that her party so desperately needs. It just curdles, and the longer the Conservative party mistakes her abrasiveness for authority and authenticity5, the deeper the hole is going to be that they’ll need to get themselves out of.
There is a version of the Tories that might just be useful again – a contrite, pro-institution, fiscally serious, small-r reform-minded rather than demolition minded, committed to the rule of law not just when it’s convenient and grown up enough to say ‘let’s pass on that’ to the excitement and thrill of the headline chase when the country needs the humility of a footnote.
We are, as it stands, nowhere near that party.
Apologise, learn, change
If the Conservatives want to matter to this country again, they will have to do the hardest thing in politics – apologise, learn and change.
Until such a time as they have done those three things, we’re unfortunately stuck watching a once serious party scrape the barrel and calling it steel, and the longer this goes on, the greater the risk to the quality of our politics, our policies and our public life.
We need them better. We need them serious.
The country can’t afford the forgettable mess that they’ve become.
- It’s such a Tory move to look at Trump’s deportation force – denounced for abuse, neglect, and the racial profiling of anyone not the right shade of pink or beige – and say, “Oh, yes, that’ll do us nicely.” ↩︎
- I would say “you couldn’t make it up,” but they’ve been doing precisely that since about 2016. ↩︎
- At this rate, the next Tory manifesto will just be a laminated copy of a GB News comments section. ↩︎
- Somewhere, a focus group told them cruelty polls well. That focus group should be on a watchlist. ↩︎
- Imagine mistaking “being disliked by everyone” for authenticity. Oh wait – don’t imagine, just open BBC Parliament. ↩︎
This article is republished with kind permission of The Bear. Read the original on his Substack here.
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