Conservatives in a Cul-de-Sac

We have had ten years of trouble and angst in British politics—turmoil over Brexit, a parade of prime ministers, and the transition from two-party to five-party politics. So, why has this happened?

The short answer is, because the Conservative Party has collapsed.

At the 2024 general election, support for the Conservatives disintegrated. After being in government for fourteen years, they were left with only 120 MPs, an all-time low. They lost ground both to the Liberal Democrats to their left, in the leafy constituencies of the South, and they lost votes all over the country to Reform UK, the insurgent rightwing populist party.

In the wake of that defeat, they elected a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, and although voters have gradually warmed to her, two years into her leadership the party is still less popular than in 2024. At the recent Conservative conference, there was talk of a ‘Kemi-naissance’, but this was more a matter of morale than of real political progress.

There has been something of an earthquake in the British political landscape, and it seems that the Tory membership slept through it. Reform UK managed to shatter the Conservatives’ longstanding monopoly of the right of British politics, and this poses some very difficult questions for Badenoch.

For whom, if anyone, does her party speak? Does it now exclusively speak for anyone at all? And even if she can work that out, would those people be sufficient to build a national majority upon? Against such a background, her claim at the party conference that she is fighting for “the soul of the nation” seems deluded.

The Conservative Party was once willing to welcome anyone who wanted to keep the socialists out, including traditionalists, conformists, post-imperial nationalists, libertarians and free marketeers. While politicians and activists on the left were engaged in ceaseless internal feuds and demands for principled stands on everything, the Tories simply decided they wanted to win power and keep it. The party liked to call itself the most successful election-winning machine in democratic history, and the record bore out that boast.

The Conservatives had a genius for representing themselves as the reasonable, steady-handed alternative to their leftwing opponents, whom they successfully characterised over generations as ‘loony’. Their secret weapon was loyalty. Whenever elections came around, the blue ranks would unite, and success generally followed.

So what went wrong? One major issue has been serious shortcomings in the party’s leadership. Since the resignation of David Cameron after the Brexit referendum of 2016, there were four Conservative prime ministers in eight years, all of whom had significant flaws.

Theresa May was boring. She was ousted by Boris Johnson, who was exciting, a quality that won him a big electoral majority in 2019. But he was also untruthful, and was replaced by Liz Truss, who lasted 49 days and produced chaos in the bond market by immediately offering massive unfunded tax cuts. At this point the party reached out for a steadier pair of hands, and Rishi Sunak saw out the administration’s last two years.

Sunak was a moderate, but he was very bad at politics, though he redeemed himself by financial competence, which calmed the markets after the brief Truss experiment in low-tax, small-state government.

All this chopping and changing was very different in character from the Thatcher-Major years, between 1979 and 1997, during which Margaret Thatcher reinvented the Conservative tradition and won three elections for herself, in 1979, 1983 and 1987, and arguably a fourth for her successor, John Major, in 1992. She pioneered a new aspirational style of conservatism which drew in working-class voters with a promise of unlimited rewards for strivers and entrepreneurs, from small tradesmen up to super-wealthy city traders.

But the worm in the bud was the issue of Europe. Thatcher drew a line in the sand at a certain degree of integration with the European Economic Community (EEC), as it was then, and the pro-Europeans in her cabinet engineered her exit. The personal and ideological wounds this inflicted on the party never really healed, and the Tories were unable, despite repeated attempts, to find a consistent line on the UK’s relationship with the EEC, which by the mid-1990s had become the European Union (EU). The change in name was not a superficial matter: the organisation was now committed to ‘ever closer union’, and this terrified the nationalist wing of the party, which was better organised than any of its other factions.

Personal ambition then took a central role within the party’s dynamics. David Cameron, who was a centrist, managed to bring the party back to government in 2010, but behind him loomed the shadow of his Etonian contemporary, Boris Johnson, who had worked out that his best route to the premiership was by assuming the leadership of the Eurosceptic faction of the party. This was not a direct bid on Johnson’s part to oversee the exit of the UK from the EU; it was a matter of internal party positioning. He wanted to present himself as a new kind of patriotic Tory—bonhomous, entertaining, slightly eccentric and, above all, carrying an appeal that went beyond the traditional Tory fold.

Cameron then delivered Johnson his opportunity. In the run-up to the 2015 election, he promised an in-out EU referendum because of pressure from the United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) to his right. He won that election but lost the referendum the next year and resigned, leaving nobody quite knowing how Brexit could be achieved, what the terms should be, and how the rancorous political mood that accompanied the vote could be resolved. Theresa May tried to do all these things, but failed, and the party turned to Johnson.

At this point, while some Conservatives genuinely wanted to resolve the heightened atmosphere of division, a loose alliance of the Tory Eurosceptics and the UKIP people did not. They became the strongest voice in British politics during this period, and between them they engineered a big win for Johnson in the 2019 general election, after which a relatively ‘hard’ version of Brexit was delivered.

Nothing that followed helped the Tory cause.

A great many people who voted to leave the EU imagined that immigration would be restricted under the new arrangements, but the statistics told a different story. There was an enormous rise over the next few years, especially among non-white people from Africa and Asia. This has since been dubbed ‘the Boris wave’.

Worse, the ‘Tory psychodrama’ continued, and a combination of bad luck and poor management played out through the pandemic lockdown, the energy crisis brought on by the war in Ukraine, and two leadership contests, so that by the time of the 2024 general election, it was too easy for every other party to represent the Tories as incompetent, divided, soft on immigration and, above all, exhausted and out of touch. A trouncing ensued.

But beyond the personnel changes and the electoral arithmetic, something much deeper had happened, and to appreciate it we need to look at what conservatism is supposed to be.

Conservatism is a philosophy of leaving things as they are, which is a way of defending the current elite; reinforcing social stability is always in their interests. But confusion comes when an old elite is challenged by a new one, especially if social and economic changes have given the incomers not just new opportunities but also a radical mindset. We can see exactly such a transition in progress after the Thatcher years, as deregulation, privatisation and financialisation produced a new aristocracy who owed nothing to tradition or heredity, and were even keener on low-tax, small-state government than anyone who got rich in the 1980s.

The burgeoning of new technology, financial services and social media, coupled with an enormous explosion in the use of cryptocurrency, created a generation of super wealthy individuals who took a much keener interest in politics. They had a great deal more money than the people Thatcher had enriched, and they were prepared to spend it on engineering political change.

Downstream from the questions posed by the Brexit debate, the bitterness that accompanied it, and the boom in immigration, new radical parties appeared on the right, generously financed by the new digital plutocracy. By then, the Conservative Party was no longer the arena in which national political debates would play out, and it was nationalist populism, in the shape of Reform UK, that eventually reaped the political benefits.

Those benefits, so far, are five MPs elected in 2024—one of whom has since been expelled while another has left to form his own party, one MP who won a by-election in 2025, and four sitting MPs who defected from the Conservatives, bringing Reform’s strength in the House of Commons to eight. The party’s poll rating has dropped into the low twenties, whereas it was in the low thirties a year ago, but it currently also controls eleven county councils. This is, in British political terms, a staggering achievement, and nearly all of it has been at the expense of the battle-scarred Tories.

Reform is also now the richest political organisation the country has ever seen, having been gifted two separate donations of £36 million by two cryptocurrency billionaires. With cash like that, the party is expected to be very competitive at the next general election, to be held no later than 2029.

When elected Tory leader, Badenoch declared that she would take some time to clarify “core Conservative values” and then build new policies upon them. But there are no signs that this is what she is doing. She seems intent on purging the party of dissenting voices, and has imposed a purity test, a very unconservative thing, on prospective parliamentary candidates, who all have to sign up to her agenda, which includes withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), and an abandonment of previous Tory commitments in moving towards net zero. Any sense that she is trying to widen the party’s appeal is as yet lacking.

If she is going to win back any of the southern voters who deserted the Tories for the Liberal Democrats, she cannot be pushing ECHR withdrawal. If she wants to win back Reform voters, she needs to repudiate much of her party’s history over its last ten years in government, and this seems to be nearer to what she is actually doing, apologising for mistakes about immigration and not looking after ‘our’ people sufficiently.

She seems to be sitting firmly in her preferred ideological territory and assuming that everyone else will come round to her way of thinking. This is a good way of reassuring delegates in the conference hall that they are the sane ones and it is everyone else who is mad, but it would be more important for her to show that she has taken the right lessons from her most successful predecessors.

Thatcher rewrote Tory philosophy and attracted new voters to the party. Johnson brought a new, appealing concept— ‘levelling up’, and although no one seemed to understand what it meant, and he certainly didn’t deliver it, he created a new coalition, stealing large chunks of traditional Labour voters.

Badenoch has done nothing like either of these things. She has called her opponents to the right corrupt and incompetent, and her opponents to the left deceitful and ineffectual. That’s the sort of thing that the leader of a centre ground party is expected to do. She seems, in all, to think that her job is to bang on about the usual things. By going back to core conservative principles, she is just rerunning the old scripts, with a little remorse perhaps. But no new offers.

Such new ideas as are on display currently are coming from the Labour prime minister, Andy Burnham, who is different from his predecessors, and from Nigel Farage, Reform’s leader, who is saying things about immigration, tax and regulation that no one has said before in British politics.

Conventional wisdom is that the Brexit referendum was decided by the ‘left behind’. It looks very much like Kemi Badenoch may be about to join their number.