The chair of the London Assembly, Andrew Boff, resigned this week from the Conservative party after 53 years of membership. He quit after being blocked from entering the race to be Tory candidate for London mayor because he supports the European convention on human rights (ECHR), putting him at odds with Kemi Badenoch’s hardline position.
Messages of support for one of the capital’s longest-serving Conservative politicians quickly poured in from fellow Tories. Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s Downing Street chief of staff, has backed Boff, warning Badenoch that others would follow him over the ECHR edict. But the rest sent messages privately, not daring to reveal themselves under a leadership that doesn’t tolerate dissent. In an interview last year, Badenoch decreed that rebels “should not and cannot stand as a Conservative candidate” if they do not agree with leaving the ECHR. She also bars anyone supporting net zero.
When Boff applied, for the seventh time, to be considered as Conservative candidate for London mayor, he didn’t really expect to be selected – but nor did he expect to be summoned to be told he was barred from entering the race. In a statement he pointed to the fact that Winston Churchill helped found the ECHR after the second world war, arguing “it was never a leftwing project” but a “safeguard against arbitrary government”. What’s more, he points out to me, the “convention doesn’t even mention asylum seekers”, Badenoch’s main justification for leaving the treaty.
The time may come, he warned, when extremists win an election on an even smaller vote share than Labour’s 34% in 2024 – and overturn all human rights legislation without the protections the ECHR affords. “That’s what authoritarian governments do,” Boff said. But he insisted that the committee, which vets Conservative candidates, didn’t listen. “They just repeated the same tropes, that activist judges are using the ECHR against parliament.”
Now he is free of the party straitjacket, Boff is planning to stand for London mayor as an independent, allowing him to say what he thinks about Badenoch.
He complains to me that the energy and resources that should promote the party “all go to promoting Kemi, Kemi, Kemi”. Thinking well of her in 2015, he says he had encouraged her to stand for the London assembly, where she served until 2017 before being elected to parliament. He says he found her “lazy and combative”.
Few will be surprised by Boff’s departure. But many will be wondering what took him so long. He was ejected from the Tory conference in 2023 for quietly heckling the then home secretary Suella Braverman’s speech, accusing her of homophobia and transphobia. “It is a signal to people who don’t like people who are LGBT+,” Boff, who is gay, said at the time as he condemned her speech as “trash”. Boff said that Braverman “was basically vilifying gay people and trans people by this attack on LGBT ideology”.
He was not alone in voicing criticism over the party’s direction. The former Tory MP Robert Buckland, fellow one-nationer and director of the Tory Reform Group, hurried out to defend Boff after his ejection from the conference, saying heckling was “part of the democratic debate” and that his treatment by security staff was “heavy-handed”.
Buckland was among the many one-nationers who lost their seat at the 2024 general election. But that traditional strand of Conservatism has not vanished – nor have those who used to vote for the Tories but now turn to the Liberal Democrats or simply boycott the ballot box.
Boff’s views represent a growing centre-right moderate strand that has been expelled or silenced under Badenoch’s leadership. Facing this hostile climate, one nation Tories have gone to ground in parliament; but outside the Commons, Prosper UK, a centrist Tory grouping led by the former mayor of the West Midlands, Andy Street, and the former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson quietly gains strength.
Its mission statement is to win back moderate voters who snubbed the Conservatives at the last general election, and this message seems to have struck a chord, with the group attracting nearly 30,000 supporters since its launch in January.
It is worth examining Boff’s views, as many Conservatives who have signed up to Prosper UK are likely to share them. He calls himself a Thatcherite, strongly opposing Labour’s renationalisation plans, backing low taxes and a small state. He voted for Brexit, believing the words of the likes of Daniel Hannan, who claimed “absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market”. But instead the Tories delivered a hard Brexit after what he calls an “atrocious” campaign.
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Times have changed; as the political analyst Peter Kellner pointed out this week, Britain’s pro-Brexit majority has literally died out. Any so-called betrayal of the referendum is only betraying the dreadful legacy of the departed.
If the Conservative party has any future as a government, it won’t be under its present leader. A small bounce for improved performance in parliament will never overcome Badenoch’s growing distance from voters, including those who should be natural Tories.
Boff may be a throwback to an irretrievable, more moderate Conservative brand, like that of the Macmillan era – a voice from the good old days when traditional party allegiances were clearly defined. Or possibly he and Prosper UK are the vanguard of a reconstituted centre-right able to attract new voters as well as those who have deserted the Tories.
That won’t be easy: already there are gloating Spectator-aligned Tories who say that the party is better off without the likes of Boff, or any real concession to centrism. But we should have a care. The success of a respectable right matters to all in the left bloc of progressive parties, too. A centre right is needed to fight off the dark forces of the hard right and worse, here and across Europe. That Overton window framing politics needs a firm shunt towards a more rational debate on our future in Europe – and on saving the planet.
