Neither Tory Right nor Centre can revive this brain-dead slumber party
Liberalism may have lost its mind, but conservatism is officially brain-dead. This basic truth – which nobody on the Right quite dares admit – hangs horribly in the air at Tory party conference. Outside the gates the anti-Brexit protesters gypsy dance with ethereal ecstasy to Chopin’s Funeral March. Within the fortified sanctum, the scent of near-death is palpable. The party’s state of neural vegetation smells of hotel lilies and curdling beetroot blinis, untouched in the Hyatt Regency lobby. The latter, the social hub when the Tories hold conference in Brum, is usually a Pol Roger-soused moshpit of political manoeuvring; this week it feels like a wake for some sad bore whom most attendants made no secret of hating.
To be fair, the party is not quite perished, but stuck in a dystopian limbo. The Birmingham ICC – where the fringe events and hustings are taking place – has the squeaky bleakness of a departures lounge where all the planes are grounded indefinitely. Ousted MPs who can’t let go but are in need of employment flit manically from fringe panels to coffee dates with lobbyists. Dapper Young Tories in bowties and yellow socks cluster in the sponsored Heathrow lounge, waiting for Godot.
What is particularly worrying for the party is that the leadership contest is failing to inject new life into the party. Their confected radicalism is not so much stirring things up as adding ambivalent flavour to the bland affair, like synthetic sweetener in airport tea.
Particularly striking has been the strange implosion of Kemi Badenoch. The former business minister was once touted as the obvious party leader of the next generation and the “brain” of New Conservatism. It feels a lifetime ago that she exploded on the scene during the 2022 leadership contest. Like Mrs Thatcher, she seemed to radiate sharp lucidity. Like Blair, she seemed to interpret the world prophetically from high ground, capturing in her rhetoric the West’s tectonic populist shifts, the dismal drift towards an ever-greater state and the self-mutilating tendencies of liberalism.
Her colleagues, trapped in a bog of shop-talk over the best “retail offerings” for voters and the “read across” of the latest Tory “narrative” – remain incapable of understanding, much less articulating, the big picture stuff that comes naturally to Badenoch.
I personally still believe that as a serious thinker who grew up under a series of military regimes in Nigeria, Badenoch can appreciate more clearly than any other senior Tory the West’s momentous and catastrophic pivot. It has transmogrified from a dynamic “freedom civilisation” imbued with a romantic reverence for individual flourishing, personal responsibility and self-respect into a stagnant “security civilisation”. Now the state pretends it can protect citizens in a challenging and volatile world from all human uncertainty, risk and misery. It aspires to efficiently run every aspect of people’s lives.
But as her underwhelming political performance of late shows, there is a gulf between grasping the depth of the problem and winning the argument about what needs to be done.
Currently, both friends and enemies of Kemi Badenoch are whispering in their cliques about her “car-crash” claims over maternity pay – and quite rightly. That Badenoch had a point on the perversity of working people having to subsidise other people’s children is irrelevant. What matters is her struggle to upgrade herself from a mere scrapping culture warrior to an epochal leader who can win the national argument on the need for change that is anchored in conservative values.
Badenoch’s inspiration, Mrs Thatcher, had a knack for selecting emblematic and winnable battles – from the radical deregulation of the financial sector to her focused legislation to curtail union power. If she was alive today, one wonders whether she would have quizzed Badenoch on why she had chosen to pick on pregnant women as the symbol of feckless Britain, particularly amid a fertility crisis.
Not that Robert Jenrick – the new grassroots favourite – particularly inspires. There are questions about whether his born-again transformation from a cuddly Cameroonian to an anti-immigration warrior is authentic.Tory activists think he is the man to neutralise Farage because he is robust on leaving the ECHR. But staking a comeback on a policy area where you have not only serially failed but epically betrayed the public seems like an arrogant risk. The Tories will not be able to match Reform with their fantastical but popular one-in-one-out immigration vow. It surely makes more sense to prioritise the massive question of what a conservative growth plan looks like instead.
And yet the lack of inspiration, when it comes to reviving the British economy is damning. The party seems to have given up on the idea that Brexit can play a serious role in Britain’s resurgence. It seems oblivious to the rapidly closing window for the country to become an AI superpower, as American data centre giants are drawn to Scandinavia’s cheaper, more stable energy supply and superior infrastructure, and France surges in open innovation.
A few on the Right, like Mel Stride, talk eloquently about the crisis of capitalism that began with the credit crunch and has shifted the country’s economic philosophy Leftwards.
The leadership candidates speak of the need for a “modern pitch to match that of Thatcher”. But that requires a deep and disruptive rethink of her economic philosophy. This is all the more crucial given that free market economics has been toxified not only by the financial crash but the mini-budget – as Liz Truss’s controversially unrepentant defence of her record on the conference fringe hammers home.
It is no surprise then that the affable but intellectually hollow centrist James Cleverly is the most popular candidate not only among Tory MPs but the public, judging by the polls. When it comes to a choice between brain-dead radicalism and brain-dead centrism, most people in truth would choose the latter – if only to kid themselves that sticking with bland technocrats maximises national stability and the chance of a quiet life.
In its moments of humility the Tory machine likes to pronounce that it has “no divine right to exist”. The truth is much worse. At the moment, it has no infernal reason to exist at all.