There was a time, about fifteen years ago, when it was trendy to bemoan the “Punch & Judy” style of politics between the Labour and Conservative leaders of the day. Of course, time was once that Punch & Judy attracted big crowds, back when audiences’ tastes were simpler and there were fewer alternatives. And it was an empty criticism anyway; set against one another, the likes of David Cameron and the great clunking fist of Gordon Brown could do no other.
The Leader of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition is an odd institution. The idea of “loyal opposition” itself would have seemed a paradox in terms under most of the systems of government devised by mankind. But without one, the Westminster system does not truly function.
In true Punch & Judy style, there are well-understood set pieces of political theatre that are expected of the opposition leader. For example, it is understood that they must always be seen to be eager for a fresh general election, even when pollsters agree that would be madness. They must exclaim that the prime minister “hasn’t got a plan”, and try to goad the head of government into settling old scores, which always serves to make the incumbent sound weak and petty. These are the time-worn patterns of formulaic opposition; it is almost ceremonial in nature; more to please the court eunuchs of Westminster than to hold the government to account in any meaningful way.
Formulaic opposition is predicated on constitutional stability; the idea that governments may come and go in an orderly manner. Opposition supposedly occurs along the lines of philosophical differences in approach, primarily to political economy, or to ideas about foreign policy. The concept of loyal opposition is one that assumes that fundamental ideas about what the state is for have been answered. The term “uniparty” is used by political malcontents to describe the way that two-party systems give the impression of the alternation of power, whilst simply cycling between different members of the same elite. But the truth is that, however trivial the substance of their disagreements may appear to the public, there is a genuine, tribal rivalry between the participants on either side of the revolving door.
The Conservatives’ only hope now is in raising their sights and dropping the usual tit-for-tat of formulaic opposition
One of the most well-established elements of formulaic opposition is to compare the government of the day disfavourably with its predecessor. That the previous government was formed of the current opposition, and that the opposition should therefore contrast it favourably against the incumbent government, is one of the core assumptions of the Westminster system. And looking back on the period between roughly 1986-2008 (or 1950 until the mid-seventies) when British politics ticked over with little in the way of ideological controversy, having an opposition in place to click its tongue if the government let inflation or unemployment get too high was probably politically beneficial, to some extent. It was more to do with luck and timing than anything, but when a government runs out of luck, the public usually figured it was time to bin them anyway.
But we now find ourselves in very different times. The nation faces at least three existential threats simultaneously; in justice, demographics and the economy. A set of quasi-constitutional laws, mainly laid down in the New Labour era, effectively prohibits the government from addressing these crises. And around the edifice of state and within all branches of government, there is a managerial class who are wedded to the defence of those quasi-constitutional laws as a matter of principle, above and beyond anything else. Fixing this poses a challenge unlike anything seen in British politics in centuries.
There are moments when the Rt Hon. Kemi Badenoch MP seems to show flickers of understanding all of this, and appreciating the weight of the responsibility now resting on her shoulders given her unique constitutional role. But for the most part, the Conservatives, and their leader in particular, remain set in the mould of formulaic opposition. As the one half of the uniparty, they heckle from the sides as is expected of them, and otherwise wait patiently for their turn to come around again.
But barring some surprising change of fortunes, that turn is not going to come. Perhaps the Tories will reinvent themselves, but it will take a complete change of institutional personality and quite possibly the party’s very name, as happened to their ancestors in Peel’s day, and to their Canadian cousins more recently (aptly, at the hands of a party named “Reform”). For the time being, the Conservatives are stuck on the wrong side of a revolving door that has stopped, while the building itself begins collapsing around them.
The most obvious risk of “opposition as usual” for the Conservatives is that it obliges them to defend the record of what were in reality four separate Conservative-led governments simultaneously, when between them they presided over most of the country’s current problems becoming steadily worse. The original sin of the Cameron-May-Johnson-Sunak governments was their passive acceptance of the constitutional vandalism of the Blair era, allowing what should have been brief anomalies to crystallise into a non-partisan constitutional order. This means that it is now very hard for today’s Tories to deliver serious criticism of where the country is going wrong without making that entire period in government look a very drawn-out waste of time.
This leaves the shadow cabinet left with attacks on the government’s day-to-day stewardship of the economy. And whilst things do seem to be getting even worse under Labour, it’s not as if the Conservatives have much of a solid record to stand on there either.
At some point in the 1990s, it became normal for representatives of both the Labour and the Conservative parties to taunt each other performatively in the way that supporters of rival football clubs do. Like football supporters, both sides in this charade knew that they were all subject to the same never-ending cycle of ups and downs, and that anything they said about the other side was equally applicable to them when their relative positions were reversed. Among diehard sports fans, dogmatic and unrelenting support for their chosen side is seen as a quality in itself; blind faith even in the direst of spells is a test of character and loyalty. It’s not clear that the public ever appreciated the same quality in politicians, but coming from the Tories in 2025, it is really quite obnoxious.
Labour have slowly begun redirecting such taunts toward Reform. While this must be quietly satisfying for them, it is unlikely that they will land any blows on the upstarts in the eyes of the kind of voter that matters. Labour’s partisans are going to have an exceptionally hard time giving up on the anachronistic, cringeworthy class politics that they’ve adopted as their default tone against the Tories, which just sounds comical against Reform. But where routine political attacks on Reform might be laughable coming from Labour, they are likely to cause serious resentment and anger coming from the Conservatives; especially among those who lent Boris their vote in 2019 and are now pinning their hopes on Farage.
The Conservatives’ only hope now is in raising their sights; dropping the usual tit-for-tat of formulaic opposition, and addressing Britain’s problems in the generational and epoch-defining terms that they demand. If the Labour government is going to overlook the Conservatives and address their attacks on Farage and Reform, then the Tories should repay the favour and take aim at the legacy of Tony Blair. This may mean that figures such David Cameron, Theresa May and Boris Johnson end up as collateral damage, but that is a sacrifice we must all be prepared to endure.
In any case, the current government’s ideological rigidity and its puddle-deep political strategy will see it firmly hemmed in; their day-to-day failures are obvious enough to voters without the Conservatives popping up to remind everyone that the last government wasn’t vastly better.
This will require the Tories to examine seriously why they so consistently failed in office, and why they were unable to roll back the New Labour Constitution earlier on before it did too much damage. This is not the same as merely eating crow; it needs an honest, structural assessment that leads to real world changes in how the party is run. Partially, it was a generational issue in that their governments were dominated by figures from a specific age cohort, who were marinated in the vibes of the mid-1990s, and who were so psychologically damaged by the William Hague / Iain Duncan-Smith era that they couldn’t bring themselves to think about opposing anything Blair did. But more directly, it was to do with a party apparatus that was primed to oppose anything distinctively conservative, and which selected candidates on the basis of their social liberalism.
Reckoning with this will bring Kemi Badenoch into an almighty confrontation with the party establishment and its unsustainably large pantheon of elder statesmen. It will also require reconsidering some frankly unbelievable staffing decisions she made regarding her front bench. But it would be in such a confrontation that she — or whoever replaces her as leader — would show voters that the party no longer slunk away from controversy. It would start to shed and repel the photogenic yet vacuous acolytes that it gathered during the Cameron and Boris eras, whose social lives and liaisons made serious reforms unthinkable.
But more than that, they need to speak above the static hum of formulaic opposition, and drop the cynical, dreary exchange of either party’s dismal records in government. The curtain is about to fall on the Labour-Conservative show, and at least one half of the cast has already turned their attention toward the crocodile that has emerged to eat all the sausages. Voters are now ready for a change of era, not merely a change of government. Currently, the Tories are seen perhaps even more than Labour as part of the era they wish to have done with — their account of themselves needs to reflect that.
