It's the Kemi delusion: the more the Tories run towards Reform, the more their voters will run to the Lib Dems

The Guardian

23-02-2025

What times these are. As Donald Trump's sellout of Ukraine gains pace, there are reports that Keir Starmer will flatter the president by inviting him to address parliament. Meanwhile, Trump's British admirers continue to offer flimsy excuses and undimmed admiration. Before Trump paid tribute to Nigel Farage – a 'great guy' – in his address to the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gathering in Washington, the MP for Clacton used his time at the same event to 'hail' Trump's 'progress' with Vladimir Putin, and salute him as 'simply the bravest man that I know'. By way of bathos, the dependably ridiculous Liz Truss had by then told a much smaller crowd that the country she ran for a month and a half is 'failing', and needs its own Trumpian insurgency.
At the top of the party Truss so briefly led, Kemi Badenoch cannot resolve a familiar contradiction – between a dazzled liking of Trump's ideology, and the political inconvenience of what it means in practice. Late last week, she parroted the obligatory half-arsed rebuttal of Trump's attack on the Ukrainian president. 'President Zelenskyy is not a dictator,' she said, as if that were a revelation. But any observer of her recent engagements will know where her heart really lies.
Badenoch epitomises the absurdity gripping a huge chunk of the British right, as it issues warnings about the collapse of western civilisation while cosying up to people hellbent on pulling the roof in on just about every basic tenet of liberal democracy, along with what remains of the transatlantic basis of international security. She and her allies' understanding of such basic contradictions is about as thorough as her weekly preparation for prime minister's questions, but that hardly diminishes her belief in a cultish, paranoid set of beliefs. So out it all comes, on a weekly basis.
Last week, she found time in her diary for a turn at the annual conference of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), an international initiative co-founded by that great modern sage Jordan Peterson. 'Take a look at President Trump,' she told her audience. 'He's shown that sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems. But it's the second time around when you really know how to fix them. And it starts by telling the truth.'
Her chosen verities were the same as ever: an insistence that an 'intellectual elite' is in control of everything, along with warnings about 'the poisoning of minds that is happening in higher education', and 'leftwing progressivism, whether it's pronouns or DEI or climate activism'. At the same event, she was asked about Elon Musk and his so-called department of government efficiency. 'I don't even think Doge is radical enough,' she said.
Who is this stuff for? If her aim is to stop the Reform UK insurgency, she is speaking in far too abstract and pointy-headed a vocabulary, a problem made worse by the lack of frontline Tory politicians who can compete with Farage's regular-bloke affectations. But there is another consideration missing: the plain fact that being gleefully resident in a hard-right echo-chamber is guaranteed to further alienate millions of voters that the Tories have lost.
As I read reports of Badenoch's speech, I found myself thinking of Woking, the quiet corner of the Surrey commuter belt that is the epitome of a sea change that Badenoch – along with most of her party – has chosen to ignore. Last summer, the Liberal Democrats took the constituency from the Conservatives on a 19% swing. Some of that shift was down to the spectacular bankruptcy of the borough council thanks to reckless decisions taken by a Tory administration. But the result was in keeping with a huge pile of Lib Dem gains that rippled through the home counties and beyond, yet received a lot less attention than the five seats won by Reform.
They still read like a litany of Tory woe: Guildford, Surrey Heath, Bicester and Woodstock, Horsham, Cotswolds South, Carshalton and Wallington, Tunbridge Wells – scores of Lib Dem gains, which came after a Tory collapse in local government.
It was not hard to work out why. In many of them, a majority of voters had backed Remain in the 2016 referendum. The subsequent Tory embrace of hard Brexit left them reeling, and Boris Johnson's amoral style of leadership only furthered their quiet despair. But there is something much deeper afoot in these places.
These parts of England are assuredly modern, and often more ethnically diverse than they used to be. They are often not quite as affluent as their reputation suggests, but still full of people who are mindful of the health of the economy. Those voters would be in the market for a centre-right party that emphasised the wonders of property ownership and low taxes, and pledged to back the interests of business. What they find repellent, in my experience, is the Tory turn into fanaticism, and the sense that Farage – and now Trump – are pulling the strings. Needless to say, they do not get on their commuter trains every morning and chat animatedly about such hard-right talking-points as 'cultural Marxism', being trapped in 15-minute cities, and the need to have more kids so as to preserve Judeo-Christian culture. In my experience, almost nobody in Britain does.
As Badenoch blithely follows the bright light of hard-right politics, what is her offer to these voters? I know this much with certainty: that they do not look at the chaos and disorder gripping the US and Trump's torching of international norms as something to emulate, but instead feel a mounting anxiety. In the past, part of the genius of British Conservatism lay in the way it responded to times of such turbulence by offering the balm of tradition, and the idea that old institutions and conventions would endure. Now, Badenoch and her ilk seem to want to joyously throw us into the fire.
Her choice of engagements is a small part of the same wretched picture. Last week, she did an interview with Peterson in which she talked about the party that has gobbled up so many old Tory heartlands, and is now making a point of constantly attacking Trump. The Lib Dems, she said, have 'silly and foolish' ideas. But other things she blurted out were much more revealing. 'They don't have much of an ideology other than being nice,' she went on, as if niceness was always to be avoided. 'A typical Liberal Democrat will be somebody who is good at fixing their church roof. And, you know, the people in the community like them. They are like, 'Fix the church roof, you should be a member of parliament.''
Didn't those people used to be Conservatives? If they have walked away, Badenoch's accelerating turn into secondhand Trumpism is not going to pull them back. Large parts of what used to be called middle England, in fact, now surely look at the party that once confidently spoke for them and recoil: this is the Tory crisis that yet another leader shows no signs of understanding.
John Harris is a Guardian columnist