They should pay someone to regularly scream “14 years!” during brainstorming sessions at CCHQ
Is it 2010 again? You could be forgiven for thinking so, as Badenoch delivered a speech on welfare reform at the Centre for Social Justice. Ian Duncan Smith was on stage, but he need not have left, as the leader of the Opposition proceeded to repeat IDS talking points circa 2010, lamenting the state of the public finances and the moral degradation of welfare dependency.
This was history repeating itself, first as failure, now as pique. Badenoch is not a warm and fuzzy individual at the best of times, but there was a unique degree of venom as she spat out the policy prescriptions of 14 years ago. Whatever else you can say of Duncan Smith or Cameron, they plausibly presented themselves as fundamentally nice and well meaning men, and when they spoke of cuts and welfare reform, it was easy to believe it was more in sorrow than anger.
It isn’t just that this was reheated rhetoric delivered with graceless aggression, but as with so much of current Conservatism’s approach, it represents the furious excavation of the hole they’re currently standing in. The best investment they could make would be to pay a staffer to regularly scream “14 years!” during whatever passes for brainstorming sessions at CCHQ (spray painting it on the door of the Carlton club couldn’t hurt either).
Reform may be chaotic, but it represents the pent up fury of a forgotten country
Whenever a Conservative leader rears up on their hind legs and bleats about lacklustre growth, welfare dependency, the budget, healthcare, or over-taxation, I guarantee that the entire country is shouting “14 years!” at the TV like the audience at a panto. There is no winning here. The Conservative record cannot be defended and it cannot be ignored. The only option is to make a radical break with prior leaders and prior policy, but the remaining membership and parliamentary party seem determined to drive Thatcherism off of a cliff and into electoral oblivion.
There is no point in urging the importance of private savings at a time of slow growth, low wages, rising costs and unaffordable housing. Young people are given deeply unfair choices between staying in cheap but economically moribund regions, or moving to the dynamic but crowded and expensive South East. An effective and interventionist state could boost regional investment, bring down energy costs, build housing, and give people better options than welfare or precarity. But there was no sign of this thinking from the Conservative leadership today.
It is a bad enough situation with the most likable of leaders, but Badenoch was at her most unpleasant and tone deaf. It was time for sour grapes Kemi. Quizzed about recent defections to Reform by former Tory cabinet ministers, she turned positively nasty — “if there are people who are not conservatives, people who have probably been holding us back for a long time, then they should go to other parties”. Nor was she done, as she further denounced defectors, saying “There are a lot of people who come into politics just to play the game of politics, and they will follow polls, and defect wherever they can, like they do in banana republics.”
This smacked of desperation, and failed to convince. Both David Jones and Sir Jake Berry served their party at the highest levels for over a decade, and both are significant regional leaders, Jones as a fluent Welsh speaker and former Secretary of State for Wales, and Berry as a northern MP and former Minister of State for the Northern Powerhouse and Local Growth. Whilst Badenoch accused them of opportunism, their stated reasons for defection will resonate with millions. As Berry put it, the Conservatives have “abandoned the British people … I hear from people in my community and beyond who say the same thing — ‘This isn’t the Britain I grew up in.’ And they’re right”.
Reform may be chaotic, but it represents the pent up fury of a forgotten country. Its support is mushrooming across the East coast, springing up in Wales and seeding itself across that Britain which is not London. It is above all the revenge and revolt of a culture riding up in moral indignation against an entire political class and worldview. The most devastating aspect of Kemi’s leadership, as we witnessed today, was how thoroughly she has nailed herself to the mast of this sinking ship. The only choices Conservatives now face are defection, defeat or the defenestration of Badenoch.
