You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire.
Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her for ever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates. Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both Profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask.
Shooting the breeze at the party’s Birmingham conference, you might never guess the Tories still poll four percentage points below the last election, the worst result since the Duke of Wellington was dismissed in 1830 for rejecting electoral reform and defending every rotten borough.
Spot that Wellingtonian legacy in the interview Badenoch gave ConservativeHome. “I march to the beat of my own drum,” she says. Indeed she does, but out of step with the public, not condescending to care what it might be thinking and allowing no shade of disagreement. Removing the Lords whip from Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff, was a deterrent message to anyone taking part in the “festival of ideas” here, a festival of one idea only. Barwell opposed Badenoch’s edict barring any candidate who supports net zero carbon emissions or staying in the European convention on human rights. “I haven’t left the Conservative party. It has left me,” Barwell tweeted plaintively. It has left a great many others, too.
Margaret Thatcher, still holy here, never did that: she had “wets” in her first cabinet and never expelled them from the party. Her ideological obduracy over the poll tax only overcame her later on, and it did for her. But Badenoch is starting out this way. The adulation showered on her by Tories and their press must come from some alternative wonderland where they are not polling in third place at 19%, while their leader, though improved, scores net -15 – compared with Andy Burnham on +7. In polling, more call her “nasty” or “rude” than “strong” or ‘intelligent”.
What demographic is she for? Giving free childcare to parents earning over £100,000 will strike most as a grotesque gesture. Only 4% make £100,000 or more: they don’t think themselves wealthy, but the other 96% of people do. The £700m cost of that policy should go to the dwindling number of deprived two-year-olds getting early years support, according to the Institute for Fiscal Studies. Already, the children of the best-off are eight times more likely to benefit from funded childcare hours than the most disadvantaged, says the New Economics Foundation. Children arriving at school unready are tomorrow’s Neets (16- to 24-year-olds not in education, employment or training). This should have the education secretary, Lucy Powell, rampaging: it’s not about parents, it’s about children’s futures. Badenoch’s pledge to cut some benefits to “subsistence” level deliberately implies the 4 million children below the poverty line are living the life of Riley.
Her responses to Burnham are also out of touch with the times – and even with the Times. While 70% want closer relations with the EU, her party shockingly pledges to rip up any agreement Burnham makes, sabotaging any trade pact on agri-foods or freedom for the young to travel across Europe. Negotiations are at risk of failure if the EU fears Europhobes might ever regain power and reverse it all.
Austerity is still raw in public minds, with overflowing prisons, blocked courts, NHS waiting lists and a million Neets, alongside the housing crisis. What a time for Badenoch to propose £47bn in cuts, with her shadow chancellor now planning even more “in every part of government”.
Instead of beckoning back those moderate-minded home counties, she competes punch for punch with Nigel Farage. Last week, she stripped down the aid budget to £1bn to equal Farage’s policy. Look at their arms race to demolish the civil service: Badenoch started last year by pledging to cut 132,000 civil service jobs, return it to pre-Brexit levels (before all the mundane EU agencies we quit – medicines, chemical safety etc – had to be replicated). Farage was due to cut a mere 68,500 until Danny Kruger upped the ante last month to 250,000 in his “Storm and Sunshine” policy. The latest? The Tories just pledged to kill off the Environment Agency, Natural England and the Climate Change Committee. What do the home counties think of that?
This contest for lowest taxes, smallest state, toughest stance on migrants, harshest welfare cuts and deepest loathing of young people will spiral downwards towards something new and dangerous. Modern British politics has never before had rightwing parties competing as equals. But locked in this dance of death, the politics of bile carries them further from most voters. Tories are dying out: 63 is now the median age of Badenoch’s voters, while Labour’s is 46.
If nothing improves by next conference, the mirage of Badenoch’s rock-solid support will melt away. But what would replace her? Waiting in the wings there is a model of what a Conservative revival might look like – Prosper UK, launched in January.
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It tiptoes, praising Badenoch loudly, yet it is running seven events at this conference. That included a small Sunday night rally for electoral reform. It was addressed by former West Midlands mayor Andy Street, now co-chair of Prosper UK with Ruth Davidson It is backed by a formidable array of what was once the One Nation group, now defunct in parliament – or dormant under Badenoch’s rightwards march. No MPs back Prosper UK in public, but the group claims a third of them do secretly, along with 30,000 declared supporters. David Gauke, vice chair, has crept back into the party – he thinks by accident when the membership computer processing his re-application didn’t register he’d been ejected in 2019. In returning, he joined a battalion of remainer luminaries of the centre-right who’d had the whip suspended at the same time, including Kenneth Clarke and Dominic Grieve.
Gauke travels the country speaking to Conservative associations and others. Prosper UK is pro-EU, pro-migration for skilled workers and foreign students, pro-net zero and against the pension triple lock – and Gauke says that “Conservatives should be truth tellers on all these”. But though socially liberal, he’s dry as a bone on fiscal discipline, campaigning for low business taxes, a smaller state and enticing back non-doms – all Hayek, no Keynes. “No one speaks for some 7 million people centre or centre-right,” he says.
Indeed, the country needs a plausibly electable Tory party to put up a fight against Faragism, not a carbon copy of it. If Badenoch is not for turning, to survive it will need to turn her out.
