Whoever wins the Tory election needs policies to head off Reform’s threat fast
While it isn’t over until the last vote is counted, Kemi Badenoch appears to be the favourite for Tory leader. Robert Jenrick has run a courageous campaign, calling on his party to take the fight to Nigel Farage. But it is Badenoch’s soothing vow to heal a fractious Right by guiding it through a period of deep “renewal” which is proving seductive. Her pitch has appealed to many MPs who are shell-shocked from their election rout. Activists, battered by trench war with Reform, appear equally tempted.
But Jenrick’s underdog “populist” campaign is more thoughtful and nuanced than his critics who charge him with “banging on about the ECHR” have given him credit for.
His theory is that immigration is the “gateway” flashpoint issue on which the Tories must win back trust to be credible again. The question of whether the once supposedly “wet” Jenrick has experienced a genuine epiphany, or has sought to ride the populist wave, has overshadowed his campaign. But, from my impression, he is truly a rare “crossover” politician.
While he discreetly blended in with the bankers, chewing the political fat with me in a Mayfair brasserie over the clack of Stormzy beats and Christian Louboutin heels, he is nonetheless an unapologetic outsider in liberal metropolitanland. He shuddered as he recalled his childhood in Wolverhampton, a Midlands city that did not feel “at ease with itself” amid an immigration influx in the 1980s and 1990s.
His yearning for more “empathy” in politics for the much-derided people of the “provinces” seemed as genuine as his frustration with colleagues who are loath to get involved in the “dirty end” of politics – not least, difficult discussions on immigration – lest it “make for awkward moments at dinner parties”.
While less interested in the oceanic swells and tectonic shifts of 21st-century politics than Badenoch, Jenrick appears intellectually obsessed with the question of whether it is possible to do populist Tory politics in a way that does not totally estrange younger professionals. In his words, the party must find a way to talk about thorny issues in a way that “persuades rather than provokes”.
He is fixated on the ability of the Canadian Conservatives to do exactly this – for example, calling for immigration numbers to be linked to housing targets, rather than apocalyptically bellowing about migrant “invasions”.
Though his leadership bid appears to be losing momentum, his warning that Farage risks becoming unstoppable if he gets a boost in the May 2025 elections should give Tories pause for thought. Jenrick’s claim that it will be tough to reconcile with a Conservative party that refuses to do what it takes to survive is also a reminder that, whatever the outcome in this contest, unifying the organisation will be a perilous task.
Nonetheless, the Tories seem to be gravitating towards Badenoch’s alternative interpretation of the crisis on the centre-Right. To her mind, the rise of Reform is a symptom rather than a cause of the Tory crisis.
At some point in the last generation, solid conservatism morphed into much vaguer centrism. In the words of a campaign insider: “The problem is not just Reform. Voters also ditched us for Labour and the Lib Dems. The problem is that we don’t know who we are or what we stand for. We have no alternative but to take the time to figure that out.”
Many of Badenoch’s supporters believe that the party’s challenge today is similar to that in the wake of its 1997 defeat. Its big task is to craft a single unifying idea that can repair the rifts between warring factions and inject the movement with renewed purpose.
Badenoch wants to unify the party, not so much around a utopian idea like the Big Society, but a diagnosis of the country’s predicament. In particular, her view is that Britain is divided into a pro-capitalist market class, and an anti-enterprise, regulation-obsessed bureaucratic class that has swelled amid an explosion of middle-class jobs in areas such as sustainability, human resources and compliance.
Just as Blair sought both to renew the Left and Britain under the banner of modernising change, Badenoch thinks that by shifting her party’s focus from Brussels red tape to homegrown regulatory empires, she can both unify the Tories and kindle economic renewal. Her vision is likely to include an attempt to junk excessive environmental rules as well as compliance and diversity-related legislation and streamline planning. While close supporters admit it needs polishing, they are referring to it as the “best attempt” to define the problem facing the West “since the onset of stagnation”.
Badenoch’s thinking is indeed arresting and original. But the Tory party should be under no illusions that taking the space to explore her ideas is a risk. The received wisdom that the party is reliving 1997 is a fantasy.
The crucial difference is that, back then, there was no Reform; the Eurosceptic movement was in disarray. Today, Reform is cohesive, ambitious and keen to learn from historic mistakes. It is a colossal gamble for the party to go off on a political “gap year” to rediscover itself at a time when the start-up party is plotting to replace it.
The Tories must also be realistic about the severe time pressure they will be under to cultivate new, viable policies. What voters crave are concrete solutions to ordinary problems, from the cost of living to border control, not another impassioned yet impotent diagnosis of the problem.
Even if a Badenoch war on the bureaucratic class is a stroke of genius, one wonders whether the Tories have the intellectual muscle and the nerve to pull off a reinvention. Ironically, it has been academics on the Left who have shown the greatest interest in “the bureaucratic order”. It won’t be easy for conservatives to wage war on a phenomenon few have taken the time to understand.
It also hardly seems likely that Tory wets will accept a worldview that threatens not just the perspectives, but also the livelihoods of professional elites. They are surely backing Badenoch in the hope they can mould her with time.
Some will say the race is too close to call, others that it will swing in one candidate’s favour. We can only await the result on Saturday – and the ensuing fallout.