How the Tory party can survive

But the most useful thing Badenoch could do is go through an “understand phase”. Literally start with a blank sheet of paper and ask the question: why has the historic party of the British bourgeoisie started losing to a bunch of pro-Putin con men?

I am a lifetime Labour supporter, but I also want the Tories to save themselves, because that will in turn stabilise our democracy. So here’s what I would put on that sheet of paper.

Fundamentally, the model of capitalism the UK adopted after 1991 is in terminal crisis. The free market blew up in 2008; economies were kept alive by accumulating a mountain of debt, which has now – amid geopolitical turmoil – become hyper expensive to service. Growth is low, productivity is low, inflation is high.

That, in turn, has generated the breakup of the rules based global order – an order which British Conservatism helped to create. Our key ally, the USA, has been captured by a corrupt, isolationist, far-right clique that wants to dump the cost of America’s revival on the rest of the world.

And Reform is the product of that crisis. In fact, Reform’s project is to bring that crisis into the heart of our society, turning communities against each other while pursuing suicidal fiscal policies. 

The politics of the possible can no longer deliver results for ordinary people, so they are turning to those who promise the impossible. 

There is a hard core of Reform voters – the same 800,000 who once voted for the BNP – who would cheer if the Royal Navy started machine-gunning refugees in the Channel. But the basic grievance of those people who are turning to the party is that nothing works.

The job of the Tory leader is – surely – to point out the basically foreign, foolish and fantasmagorical nature of Farage’s politics.

After all, Farage’s programme at the last election would have involved borrowing an extra £130bn a year – a prospect that would crash UK financial markets the moment they began to price in Reform winning in 2029.  

Yet Badenoch cannot bring herself to do this. First, because her likely nemesis Robert Jenrick wants to turn the Conservatives into a MAGA-lite party. Secondly, because for her, Conservatism is basically a form of Calvinist morality, not a political philosophy.

Badenoch’s imagination is haunted by the evil and the good. The evil include woke teachers, trans rights activists, refugees, Muslims protesting over Gaza, Net Zero campaigners and trade unions of every stripe. 

The good are the disciplinarian heads of free schools, the plucky parents bankrupting themselves to pay VAT on fees at Eton, the farmers defending their right to avoid inheritance tax. And at their head stands Kemi herself, brandishing fictitious proletarian credentials from her summer job at McDonalds.

But the moral code is useless without a political strategy.

The big questions – where should Britain fit into a global game of great power politics? How can the state shape the economy to rekindle growth? – are glaringly absent from her preoccupations. So is policy. Instead of big ticket solutions she has chosen to live in the world of small-minded moral judgements.

One can sympathise: her predecessors basically destroyed the coherence of British conservatism, dragging it from liberal Europeanism to hard Brexit, flirting with Trumpism, only to allow a million economic migrants to enter in a single year and then trash Britain’s fiscal stability.

But if there is to be a credible conservatism, rebuilt in the face of right-wing populism, it has to start from the British national interest.

And the British national interest demands what Labour is offering: state intervention, serious diplomacy, a tough-minded re-engagement with Europe, a bonfire of the regulations that impede growth and serious reform of Whitehall.

Maybe the Tories see their future as providing the proverbial lipstick on the pig of a Farage-led far right government, in hock to Trump’s America and at war with large parts of the British people.

If they do, they will plump for Jenrick in short order. But if they want to save Conservatism they should give Badenoch one more chance to understand what social democrats have learned the hard way: when you’re fighting racists, the worst thing to do is offer a low-cal version of their politics. Voters always prefer the full-fat version.

I am told she’s being given intensive comms training, aimed at softening her image. But it’s not the image that needs softening. It’s the moralism, which prevents her thinking and acting like a politician. 

With many of the politicians who could have mitigated the Tory crisis thrown out of parliament last July, it is not inevitable that the party saves itself. Today could be the start of a crash-and-burn process that sees Reform replace the Tories by 2029. 

Then, the British people will have a straight choice. Labour or Farage. Democracy or chicanery. Tolerance or racism. Fiscal realism or fiscal mythologism. I would relish that fight – because, once won, it would destroy and atomise the far right for a generation. 

If Badenoch wants to survive, as leader of a party with a realistic chance of forming a government, she must show she understands the function of the word “centre” in the political label “centre-right”.