Welcome to The Fight for the Right, The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the ideas, personalities and parties battling to shape the right of British politics.
• The Tories’ birthplace reveals a party fighting for its life
• Farage could walk away from Reform – this is how
Kemi Badenoch has set out to reunite the right. This may seem an odd assertion to make after her ferocious denunciation of Reform UK in her conference speech in Birmingham. But she intends to reunite the right by welcoming back Reform UK’s voters while dismissing its leaders as racists, fraudsters and takers of dodgy donations.
Her strategy is by no means new. Boris Johnson pursued it seven years ago when he led the Conservative Party to its greatest victory since 1987. He faced his own duel with Farage. In the summer of 2019, the Conservative Party was in acute danger of being wiped out by Farage’s previous outfit, the Brexit Party. After the European elections of May 2019, in which the Brexit Party triumphed and the Conservatives came fifth, Theresa May admitted the game was up and announced that she would stand down as prime minister as soon as her party could elect a new leader.
Johnson won the subsequent leadership contest, and proved he was serious about getting Brexit done by removing the whip from 21 Conservative MPs who refused to back him. Farage was forced to stand down Brexit Party candidates in Tory-held seats. Johnson had reunited the right. He did so not just by making Conservatives feel good about being Conservative, but by attracting millions of voters with his “Get Brexit Done” slogan who were not natural Conservatives, but were fed up to the back teeth with the issue of Brexit and just wanted it settled.
To understand what Badenoch is attempting, it helps to understand what has so often allowed the Tories to recover. The Conservative Party is incomprehensible to those who seek an ideology which unites it. No such ideology exists. What has held the party together for almost two centuries is a set of instincts, above all the instinct for power.
It is pragmatic in a way which to people of an ideological frame of mind appears scandalous. It can be for or against free trade, for or against EU membership, for or against increased public spending, according to the circumstances of the day. What its leaders are not allowed to do is to split the party. They have known this ever since the catastrophic split over the Corn Laws in 1846, after which they did not win another parliamentary majority for 28 years.
Badenoch stands accused by her critics of abandoning the “Red Wall” seats won by Johnson in 2019. It would be fairer to say that she has no cause like Brexit to hand which can be used to dissolve the weak remaining loyalty of traditional Labour voters and give them a reason to come over to the Conservatives. She hopes instead the moment has come when tax cuts, paid for by welfare cuts, will appeal to millions of respectable workers who used to vote Labour, but are now fed up with paying heavy taxes in order to maintain millions of their fellow citizens in idleness.
Respectability is an important element in her pitch. Badenoch denounces the leaders of Reform UK because their behaviour is not respectable. They seek to stir up ethnonationalism: she springs with anger to the defence of her mixed-race children. In the recent exchanges between Jacob Rees-Mogg and Tucker Carlson one saw the same division between respectable and disgusting views. Carlson flirted with support for Hitler: Rees-Mogg firmly and politely refused to set off down that slippery slope.
Badenoch, the fourth woman leader of the Conservatives, has embraced the Tory tradition because it accords with her own instincts. Soon after her election to Parliament in 2017, I asked her in an interview for Conservative Home who her heroes were. She answered Airey Neave, who was murdered by the IRA a few months before she was born: she said his escape from Colditz was the coolest thing any MP had ever done. Here was a wonderfully unexpected answer. She dares to be unfashionable, which is one reason why she carries conviction with those who might vote Conservative. They too are unfashionable.
During the Conservative conference, an elderly peer who was a minister during David Cameron’s prime ministership and has striven throughout his career to modernise the Conservatives, told me he sees the glimmer of a possibility that the two-party system is about to revive. Andy Burnham has already damaged Labour’s main competitor on the left, the Greens, who are busy doing even more damage to themselves. Meanwhile, Badenoch is taking on Reform, and in the latest YouGov poll has narrowly overtaken them. She has caught her rival at a time when, like Carlson, it has set off down a slippery slope, at the bottom of which it can see the infuriating figure of a new competitor for its votes, Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore.
Commentators have hastened to accuse Badenoch of announcing policies – the cut in inheritance tax, the end of the cliff-edge awaiting those whose income rises above £100,000 – which will appeal to affluent voters in the suburbs of the southeast. These pundits fail to realise how many of us aspire, however unrealistically, to accumulate a substantial inheritance for our children, and to earn above £100,000. However doubtful our own prospects, we prefer living in a society where success is encouraged rather than penalised, and where our children have the chance to get on in life.
Badenoch’s ebullience is well suited to the politics of aspiration, opportunity, hard work and enterprise. With sovereign scorn, she ridicules the assumption of the soft left that only an ever-growing welfare state, paid for out of ever heavier taxes, can take care of a nation in which more and more people are classified as victims. Like every election-winning Conservative leader, she needs to reach out far beyond the ranks of people who think of themselves as Conservative, and must vanquish her rivals to the right, who, for a time at least, seem formidable. Johnson showed in 2019 that Farage can be beaten. So can she.