As Kemi Badenoch takes control of the Conservatives and tries to somehow restore their credibility and coherence, one thought remains inescapable: that trying to make sense of the Tory party can be a fast route to a migrainous headache.
Badenoch is the sixth Conservative leader in only eight years. From the Brexit referendum onwards, her party’s default setting has been all about division, mishap and scandal. Floating above the enduring mess are two spectral gods who seem to lead their worshippers down no end of blind alleys: that grim British nativist Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher, whose free-market credo still forms the core of most Tories’ beliefs. More centrist past figures are never mentioned: one of the party’s few concrete certainties, in fact, is that its old one nation element is now all but dead and buried, killed by the forces that have pushed Conservatism squarely into the realms of the radical right.
A Toryism wary of ideology, cool in its collective temperament and wedded to established institutions – think of, say, Harold Macmillan, and his party’s domination of the 1950s – seems like something from a galaxy far, far away. The party is now full of flailing anger – focused on, among other targets, its own 14 years in office. There is a lot of support in Tory circles for Donald Trump. Even if many Conservative MPs want to concentrate on the comparatively small politics of UK living standards, jobs and tax rates, the wider Tory family – which goes beyond the party, into GB News, the Mail and Telegraph, and loud voices online – would sooner fixate on an ever-wilder array of enemies: Islam, multiculturalism, “woke” universities, the civil service, “identity politics”, the heretical National Trust.
The result is a remarkable asymmetry between the centre left and centre right. Two decades ago, David Cameron and Tony Blair fought on much the same terrain; even with two leaders as diametrically opposed as, say, Thatcher and Neil Kinnock, there was still a sense of a battle about the essential economic condition of the country. Now, reflecting our polarised age, the UK seems to be moving towards a politics that simultaneously happens on two different planets.
As chancellor Rachel Reeves’s budget showed, Labour’s governing project is basically about navigating the UK’s fiscal and economic problems, while trying to upgrade public services, with tax rises marketed to voters using the slight whiff of class struggle: traditional meat-and-potatoes social democracy done modestly and nervously. The Tories, by contrast, have flown off somewhere much more in keeping with the 21st century, a change now confirmed by the new leader of the opposition.
Who is Badenoch, and what does she want? The arrival at the top of this zealous culture warrior, Brexiter and self-styled “net zero sceptic” proves her party is a lot more restless and modern than some of its leftwing critics would like to think: given that Labour has never elected any leaders who were not white men, the fact her party’s fourth female chief, its second leader of colour and the first black Briton to take charge of a major UK party is hardly insignificant. Neither is the fact that she essentially ties together the Thatcherite and Powellite strands of contemporary Conservatism into one unified package, which might explain why she won. Robert Jenrick presented himself as a kind of middle-of-Lidl Nigel Farage, consumed by fury about immigration and multiculturalism. Badenoch, by contrast, echoed some of that stuff, but emphasised much wider horizons.
Back in September, her campaign published a rambling treatise titled Conservatism in Crisis, which was mostly ignored, until its shameful comments about autism (a diagnosis of which apparently offers “economic advantages and protections”) made it into the news. The rest of it is not exactly great literature, but it stands as a clear elaboration of her core conviction: that identity politics and a swollen and overbearing state are part of the same problem, and it falls to the Tories to slay them both, via a watershed attack on a layer of society demonised with a biting passion.
She and her supporters call the people she has a problem with “the bureaucratic class”. Though it rather pains me to point it out, they sound distinctly like Guardian readers (and journalists). The text blames them for “a constant focus on economic and social redistribution to support the ‘marginalised’, the ‘oppressed’, ‘victims’ and ‘the vulnerable’” – categories that include “the poor”, as well as “women, LGBT people, ethnic or religious minorities, the disabled or neurodiverse, and migrants”. This mindset, the text goes on, leads inexorably to “the endless policing of our economy and society”.
What she offers as a remedy brings us to the other set Badenoch text: the climactic speech she gave at the Tory conference’s leadership hustings. “We are going to rewrite the rules of the game,” she said, serving notice of “a once-in-a-generation undertaking … The sort of project not attempted since the days of [Thatcher’s guru] Keith Joseph in the 1970s.” She aims, she said, at nothing less than “a comprehensive plan to reprogram the British state. To reboot the British economy … A plan that considers every aspect of what the state does … A plan that looks at our international agreements. At the Human Rights Act. The Equality Act. At judicial review and judicial activism, at the Treasury and the Bank of England. At devolution and quangos. At the civil service and the health service.”
God only knows what that would look like as the programme of a government: a dystopian epic directed by Dominic Cummings, perhaps. For now, the main issue is how Badenoch will bring those ideas to her role as the leader of the opposition. To no one’s great surprise, she is already zeroing in on Rachel Reeves’s tax hikes and their still-unravelling consequences, not least the idea that a high-taxing state is now chronically crowding out entrepreneurialism and initiative. But this other agenda, loudly endorsed by her backers in the Tory party and beyond, will also be at the forefront of what she does.
Not unlike the US Democrats, Keir Starmer and his colleagues are betting everything on the idea that theirs is by far the bigger political planet, and ordinary meat-and-potatoes politics will prevail. But the nervousness sparked by projections of the budget’s consequences surely highlights the risks of that gamble failing. What if modest Labourism can do nothing about stagnating wages and a flatlining economy? Will such outcomes not show millions of voters that our existing model of power and politics is simply bust, and Badenoch’s claim that Starmer’s government is just “doubling down on this broken system” is true?
If that happens, with a bit of populist tweaking, her ideas might be an effective basis for a sprawling politics of grievance and resentment, channelling blame for the UK’s failures onto a grimly familiar range of targets. Amid all the pantomime of modern Toryism, here is one prospect worth taking very seriously indeed.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist