The Conservatives are not yet finished, but they can no longer delay their next reinvention

Telegraph

2 days ago

Listen! Can you hear the death rattle of the world's oldest political party? Of the five most recent opinion polls, one has the Conservatives on 19 per cent, one on 17 and three on 16. It is starting to look as if the Tories might, in Dominic Cummings's curious Durham/Palo Alto dialect, 'have crossed the event horizon'.
Political expiry comes suddenly. France's Gaullists had been the leading party on the Right for half a century when they were displaced by Marine Le Pen. At the last election, they won just eight per cent of the seats. And France's voting system at least allows smaller parties some parliamentary representation. Britain's, by contrast, keeps them out.
What if the scales are tipping? What if first-past-the-post, for so long a Conservative prop, has become the party's doom? 'Vote Tory, get Labour,' say Reform supporters, gleefully turning the Conservatives' old argument against them.
How might Kemi Badenoch avoid extinction? Hoping that Nigel Farage implodes is not a strategy. The Reform leader has always been an astute tactician and, as the years have passed, he has become tougher and more disciplined. Frankly, though, even if he were caught out in some monstrous scandal, his supporters, Maga-like, would dismiss it as a Deep State smear.
In the end, the Conservatives can come back only by playing to their old strengths: sound money, balanced budgets, sustainable growth, economic aspiration. In parallel, they need to cauterise the immigration wound that caused their support to leak away in the first place. Apologising for what went before is a start, but they must also show that they have a plan to secure our frontiers – a plan that goes beyond leaving the ECHR, which both sides have turned into a shibboleth.
Labour cretinously likens pulling out to Nazism, as though not wanting prisoners to have the vote were comparable to invading Czechoslovakia. Reform, meanwhile, treats withdrawal as a magic spell that would stop the boats.
But quitting the ECHR won't remove our own Left-wing judges who, without the hassle of getting themselves elected, legislate from the bench. In these pages last month, the former Conservative and UKIP MP Douglas Carswell offered a considered plan to deal with immigration, including letting the Lord Chancellor fire activist judges. Whether the Tories opt for his scheme or a different one, they need a convincing programme, not a slogan.
You might object that programmes are the last thing they need. The public, you might maintain, is in no mood for detail. Trumpy one-liners beat costed proposals. Voters, you might tell me, want to take their politicians seriously, not literally. That is why Farage, when promising his incredible tax cuts this week, cheerfully declared that 'you can probably argue that at no point in the history of any form of government has anybody ever thought the numbers added up'.
You would have a point. We live in an angry and impatient age, when the average time spent on a TikTok video is seven seconds. A chunk of the electorate wants a party that radiates anger about wokery, immigration and failing public services rather than producing plans. Just as Trumpsters never expected Mexico to pay for the wall, and don't seem bothered that it hasn't been built, so Farage calculates that British voters prefer colourful headlines to feasible policies.
When he says, for example, that scrapping DEI programmes will save £7 billion (one of his MPs even claimed £35 billion), he does not expect to be taken literally. Most of the organisations that have looked into it, including the heroic TaxPayers' Alliance, find savings only in the tens or, at most, hundreds of millions. But Farage is not trying to balance the budget; he is trying to articulate anger about DEI.
He has the advantage of not having been in office, and so not having had the chance to break any promises. Badenoch may have spent her political career fulminating against anti-white racism, the trans madness and identity politics in general. But, however long-standing her convictions, she can always be outbid by the taunt of 'Yeah, well you had 14 years to do something about it'.
Can the Tories recover, then? If criticism of their party turns on its past behaviour rather than its present attitudes, is there anything they can do? They have reinvented themselves before. Churchill repudiated Appeasement, Thatcher buried Heathism. Boris Johnson managed to present his as a new government despite taking over between elections. But none of them had to deal with an alternative party of government on the Right.
Does Badenoch, I wonder, feel the spectral weight of her predecessors' expectations? Is she haunted by Churchill's shade, his bellicose jaw set in disapproval? Does Salisbury seem to grumble from the depths of his ghostly beard? Is Disraeli's wraith composing a damning quip?
And what of the earlier Tories, the country gentlemen who kept the party going through the long decades of its 18th-century proscription, men such as Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn (who died in the most on-brand way possible, thrown from his horse while hunting rabbits)? Do they see three-and-a-half centuries of tradition coming to an end?
Possibly. But Badenoch should not yet despair. The party of Bolingbroke and Peel has weathered worse storms. Commentators declared two-party politics dead when, after the 1962 Orpington by-election, the Liberals surged 20 points in the polls and took a string of other seats. Something similar happened in the early 1980s, when the SDP/Liberal Alliance polled above 50 per cent.
The key to electoral success is seriousness. Spending cuts might not poll well, but, at the same time, most people have a sense that countries must live within their means. That sense becomes more pronounced as the effects of excessive tax and spend become palpable.
By the next election, the weight of a bloated government will be unbearable. Growth will have dried up and unemployment will be rising. There may have been a bond strike, sparking an immediate budget crisis and occasioning emergency cuts and more tax rises.
In any event, the betting must be that the electorate will be keener by then to have adults in charge – serious types who can say no to pressure groups, take unpopular decisions and restore order to our finances.
Farage has left that space open. Promising to spend more on benefits might make electoral sense: 89 of the 98 seats where Reform came second last year are Labour held. But it does not position him as a financial saviour when the collapse comes.
The Conservatives are not there either, of course. But they could be if they start putting in the work now. Their opposition to unlimited child benefit is a welcome step away from their regrettable support for the winter fuel allowance (every party has now flunked that test). If they show in the next three years that they are prepared to put long-term prosperity over immediate convenience, they might find that they are the choice for an electorate desperate to end economic chaos and return to growth.
For that to happen, though, Badenoch needs to focus on the economy – something she has so far been reluctant to do. It is never a popular thing, in the abstract, to be the party of businessmen and bankers; but there are times when voters want hard-faced hommes d'affaires in charge.
What if Reform ends up as the dominant party, leaving the Conservatives to fall in behind their one-man band? Even then, it would not be the end of Toryism. Canada's Reform Party swallowed the Tories in 2003; but the merged party eventually ended up being called the Conservative Party of Canada, and dates its foundation, not to 2003, but to 1867.
Toryism is not so much a political programme as the expression of certain attributes and instincts: level-headedness, patriotism, tradition, self-reliance, love of order, irony, detachment. There is a reason it has been around for as long as it has; and its song is not yet sung.