The next Tory leader cannot afford to alienate the moderate majority
Kemi Badenoch and Rob Jenrick are good people. They were both effective ministers, they’ve led good campaigns and they know their minds. Both of them have the force of character to challenge Sir Keir Starmer and hold the Government to account over the next few years. They would also both be capable Prime Ministers if the electoral fortunes of the Conservative Party were to revive in record time.
Yet there is also no mistaking that both Kemi and Rob have been fighting over the same political turf having made the judgement that it is erasing Reform from the political landscape that accelerates that revival. By losing James Cleverly from the race, we’ve lost an opposing view from the debate which saw a need to de-toxify the brand, broaden the appeal, and to be somewhere that Reform, Labour and Liberal Democrat voters could all return.
I arrived in Parliament in 2015 as part of a majority won largely by David Cameron targeting the then Lib Dem held seats across the South West of England. Those seats almost all stayed blue until the cataclysmic result in July but the voters that delivered them were all but forgotten as maintaining the “Red Wall” had seemed to be all that mattered since the landslide of 2019.
Make no mistake, Heidi Allen and Lee Anderson don’t belong in the same party. There’s being a broad church and then there’s just being bent out of shape by irreconcilable views. That can’t be allowed to happen again.
The key question this leadership election needs to answer, therefore, is whether a new Conservative offer could once again appeal in both Taunton and Teeside. Answering that question needs a genuine debate over the breadth of our offer and just how elastic we can be before becoming incoherent.
The Lib Dems recovered from their 2015 drubbing by ruthlessly targeting Tory seats where they claimed we’d been taking them for granted but they’ve done so with just a 12 per cent vote share. Reform made their gains by playing on a sense of undelivered promises from 2019 and the failure to tackle migration but, again, whilst still only winning less than 15 per cent of the vote.
On that showing and accepting that plenty of Lib Dem and Reform voters have never and will never vote Conservative, neither of them present an existential threat to our party and there is an ocean of political space between them for us to confidently occupy. I’m also convinced that’s where the British public are and, given how sotto voce Labour were in the election over their socialist plans, it seems the Left know that too!
Not all of the Conservative membership are sympathetic to Reform but just haven’t bothered to cancel their direct debit yet. Many of us occupy a very different political space. Fiscally conservative, unapologetically meritocratic, concerned about some of the excesses of woke culture, recognising the urgent need to get a grip of net migration, but allergic to the rhetoric of Farage and alert to the reality that populism rarely converts into practical policy making.
So I hope that over the next few weeks both Kemi and Rob will see that my wing of the party has no champion left in the race. and that in reaching out to us they’re rehearsing the pitch they’ll need to make in four years’ time as we seek to recover seats from the Lib Dems and Labour as well as from Reform.
If they don’t, they might dent Farage – but there’ll be five more long years in opposition whilst their successor re-builds the breadth of support needed to return us to Government.