It’s interesting that former Cabinet Minister Simon Clarke has become one of Kemi Badenoch’s number one cheerleaders, for it was Simon Clarke who notoriously made a Titanic metaphor when Rishi Sunak was Prime Minister. Simon drew a parallel about looking ahead to the doomed July 2024 General Election as akin to seeing the iceberg ahead whilst on the Titanic. Bearing in mind how catastrophic the July 2024 ended up being, this metaphor was pertinent.
However, without doubt, the present situation the Conservative Party finds itself is actually far worse than the one months before the last General Election. We’re well beyond the point of viewing an iceberg on the horizon; we’ve hit the iceberg head-on and are in danger of sinking without trace into the depths of the North Atlantic.
Simon is a thoughtful man and clearly sees something in Kemi that gives him cause for hope. I wish for the life of me I could see what he sees.
Since my time as an MP I haven’t spent much time in Parliament or the Westminster bubble. I spend the majority of my time around non-political people and over the past year I haven’t been following every ebb and flow. I do however continue to keep in touch with a number of former colleagues who remain close friends and I remain a member of a number of What’s App groups relating to my former role.
Regarding the future of the Conservative Party, my own personal view, and I say this having thought about the issue and the Party’s present predicament intensely, is that the Conservative Party is most likely knackered in the short to medium term and may not survive in its current form.
Of course there is a long way to go until the next General Election and many things could happen. There is a long time for Reform UK to have to maintain its momentum and of course questions continue to remain about Nigel Farage’s ability to build a team and stop falling out with senior allies. However, even having said this, I continue to believe that unless something drastic happens, the Conservative Party could well be heading towards an extinction-level event at the next General Election.
It’s mission critical for the Conservatives to have replaced Kemi Badenoch by the end of the year
I did not support Kemi Badenoch to become leader but I must confess I thought she might be quite good. When she was in Cabinet I liked her style and I thought she was a conviction conservative who would hopefully mark a break from the sterility of Rishi Sunak’s tenure. How very wrong I was. Though an ineffective leader at least Rishi was energetic and generally a nice bloke. Kemi by comparison is exceptionally lazy and arrogant. Sadly in a struggle between her laziness and arrogance, I suspect her arrogance will win out and she will seek to fight her inevitable defenestration. The last Conservative Party leadership election was one of the most important in its history, if not the most important, yet sadly the Party served up a dud.
The strategy that Kemi has followed has been very wrong in two principal respects. Firstly, her slowness in developing policy and defining her views and where she wants to take the Party. As has been commented on before, she is behaving like she has all the time in the world. That she can just sit back, do very little, watch Labour mess up and then in three of four years time she and the Conservative Party will be there to pick of the pieces.
Clearly with a political rock star on the right in Nigel Farage competing for votes and a 24 hours news cycle that deplores a vacuum, this strategy was folly of the highest order and the Conservative Party is now paying the price.
If someone like Robert Jenrick had won, with more dynamic leadership and clear positions on the defining issues impacting our country, then more than likely a bit of a lid could have been kept on the rise of Reform UK. Not a complete lid, the local election results were always going to be challenging, but I do not think the Conservative Party would be in the process of being replaced on the right by Reform UK like it currently is. The problem for the Conservative Party is the horse has already bolted now regarding Reform UK’s dominance on the right and it will be incredibly hard to put the genie back in the bottle.
The second big strategic error that Kemi has made is to pull her punches when it comes to dealing with the left of the Party, all in the name of Parliamentary Party unity. Kemi claims she has unified the Parliamentary Party and ended the divisions that previously existed. Wonderful, but the problem with that is the cost of such “unity” is that no one actually knows what we stand for as a Party and hardly anyone wants to vote for us. Also, whatever unity there was in the Parliamentary Party is starting to fracture, and such fracturing will accelerate over the coming months. There is one thing that MPs care more about than anything else and that is saving their bacon.
Will Kemi ever take the steps she needs for the Party to regain credibility on immigration? Absolutely not. The present cohort of Conservative MPs would never stomach the kind of radical measures necessary to secure our borders, and Kemi has made clear that she prioritises unity amongst the Parliamentary above delivering for our voters and reconnecting with lost voters who were appalled by our record on immigration.
Kemi made yet another speech at a Westminster-based think tank earlier this month when yet again she said little of substance. She seemed to say she was sub-contracting the decision on whether or not to leave the ECHR to a bunch of lawyers and that we’d have to wait until the next Party Conference before she lets us know the outcome, but that we’d probably need to leave. I hope to God we never find out, and she never makes it to Conference as leader.
When asked about Reform UK who now regularly have a double-digit lead over the Conservative Party in the polls and who swept the board in the recent local elections, Kemi was entirely dismissive of their threat. She branded them a “fan club” and that they’re a result of a “protest vote”, she said they’re not a political Party. Well news for Kemi, she doesn’t get to decide that. The reality is that millions of good British people have abandoned the Conservative Party because of the continuing failure of the Party’s leadership to speak to the concerns of millions of conservative voters up and down the country. What they want is for the Party leadership to take Reform UK and the Reform threat seriously. Not to dismiss it in the arrogant way that Kemi did earlier this month.
So what can be done to save the Conservative Party?
Not a single person I’ve spoken to over the past month who is close to the action (certainly since the locals) think that there is any chance of Kemi leading the Conservative Party into the next General Election. Things will continue to deteriorate for the Party under her leadership and her defenestration is inevitable. The question then becomes when is the best time for her to go? Now is the answer. If one is of the view but she isn’t up to it and she can’t turn it around it’s best to act now.
Some have suggested waiting for the next set of local elections next May, but this would be very wrong. The elections next May are of greater significance than the ones that have just taken place and the results are likely to be even worse. What would be the consequence of such foolish thinking?
Firstly, another swathe of Conservative councillors, MSPs, Welsh Assembly members will be lost. The appalling Scottish Parliament by-election earlier this month gave us a bit of a foretaste of quite how devastating these loses are likely to be.
Under Kemi’s wayward leadership, vast numbers of sitting Conservative councillors are likely to jump ship to Reform UK before the next round of voters cast their judgement next May.
Secondly, for the second year in a row, voters get used to Reform UK being the dominant force on the right of British politics. Another year of Reform UK burying the Conservative Party at the ballot box. The consequences of this for the Conservative Party are perilous.
Therefore, there is a necessity for swift action. Certainly, it’s mission critical for the Conservative Party to have replaced Kemi Badenoch as their leader by the end of the year at the latest.
It’s true that Conservative Party membership has changed and continues to change since the rise of Reform UK. Many members who were on the right of the Party have long gone. Some have gone direct to Reform UK and others have just ceased to be members. They therefore will not be around to vote for the next leader of the Conservative Party.
James Cleverly damaged his leadership prospects with his ill-judged speech at the Conservative Environment Conference earlier this month but in some respects a victory for Cleverly or someone from the left of the Party would be a clean result. It would make things very clear to the remaining MPs and members on the right of the Party. At this stage I predict you’d start getting a number of defections to Reform UK at a Parliamentary level and that local government defections would further accelerate. In some respects, there might be a logic to leaving the Conservative Party to the left of the Party; by this stage the Party will have essentially become a corpse.
However, I do not think this will happen. I predict that Robert Jenrick would win the leadership contest. A bit like when Boris took over the leadership in 2019, I think enough MPs and members who are more centrist would realise the writing is on the wall and if we want to save the Conservative Party we will have to take a tilt to the right and go with someone like Rob. So even despite the changes amongst the membership, I still think he would win. It’s far from guaranteed that such an outcome would save the Party, but it would give it its best chance.
If Robert Jenrick were to become leader in short order the Conservative Party would benefit from more dynamic leadership and a Shadow Cabinet that is encouraged to transition from lobotomy to actively getting off their backsides and promoting a truly conservative vision for our country. It would also be made much clearer to our lost voters what the Party actually stands for. There would be proper contrition for the devastating loss of trust that came about as a result of our failures on immigration and clear, explicit commitments for what we plan to do in order to address the situation. For example, Robert Jenrick already decided long ago that our country needs to leave the ECHR, he doesn’t need a commission of lawyers to tell him that.
This isn’t about producing a catalogue of detailed policies across all areas. It’s about making it unambiguously clear to the public the direction in which the Conservative Party is heading and the values it stands for. That is leadership, the leadership that we have sadly been lacking under Kemi Badenoch and Rishi Sunak.
There’re 20 or so MPs currently in the Conservative Party who cannot be Conservative candidates at the next General Election. They’re not conservatives and they have been a roadblock to the Conservative Party representing the bulk of conservative voters up and down the country for too long. Not only should the new leader not seek to a avoid a spat with them, they should actively look to trigger one. Whether it’s on the ECHR, other robust stances on immigration, integration or law and order, the aim should be to drive them out of the Party. You cannot compromise with them and split the difference on vital policy issues. The current leader and the former leader have tried this and look where it has got us. If the new leader very clearly stood up to the left of the Party, it would not be lost on many of our lost voters. Many of them would sit up and take notice, and finally think the Conservative Party is serious about change. Boris Johnson’s decision to take the whip off Conservative remainer MPs who were blocking Brexit is a successful template, and it certainly had a massive positive impact when it came to convincing voters who had gone over to the Brexit Party that we were serious about delivering Brexit.
This is all pretty drastic, but frankly if now isn’t the time for drastic action, when is? Doing the above gives the Conservative Party a fighting chance of not just surviving but over time thriving. Everything in politics is a choice; to do nothing is a choice. The most risky choice from what I can see is sticking with an inadequate leader who is quite clearly leading us down an electoral cul-de-sac.
I’m clear-eyed that whoever had taken over the leadership of the Conservative Party after the last General Election would have faced significant challenges. Though I couldn’t have been more damning about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership in this piece, I do not blame her for all our travails. She has though in my view made things worse and our prospects have sunk further under her leadership. We’re simply not in a position where we can afford poor leadership anymore.
If Conservative MPs want to save themselves, they better act fast. Alternatively, if they want to stay in politics, depending where they sit on the political spectrum, they should start cosying up to either Nigel Farage or Ed Davey.
Some Conservative MPs clearly get it. My concern though is that not enough will and by the time they do it may be too late.
In terms of myself, at my age, in many respects I’m pleased to have been able to escape the endless frustrations of being a Conservative MP. I’m very happy being able to spend more time with my dogs and to turn more of my attention to all the hobbies that I neglected during the time I was an MP. I do however continue to care passionately about my country and I realise how important it’s for the public at the next election to have the chance to vote for a Party on the right that truly embodies conservative sentiments and has the competence to deliver change.
