Scapegoating Badenoch

No one reading this will be shedding tears over the Tories' poor election performance, nor Kemi Badenoch's forlorn efforts at putting on a brave face. It was inevitable questions would be asked about her leadership, and on Monday the Westminster rumour mill went into overdrive. According to The Indy, unnamed (of course) MPs are doing the rounds organising huddles about how to get shot of their leader. "We cannot continue as we are and she is just not up to the task", moaned one of them.

Their beef is about Reform. There are complaints that Badenoch hasn't taken the threat from the extreme right seriously, ignoring efforts at setting up an anti-Farage attack unit and resistant to developing a strategy for dealing with them. Her lieutenants are clueless, and according to one of our anonymous interlocutors, she lacks charisma. The pollsters estimate she has a year to turn the ship around, but for impatient Tories yesterday isn't soon enough.

Never has a parliamentary party been more out of its depth in comparison to the impasse facing it. The Tories are confronted with what might be their final, terminal crisis and after years of denial, the rise of Reform has shocked some into panicked action. But what to do? In October, the parliamentary party decided that they wanted an out-and-out right winger and that's what they got. Badenoch has not set out any detailed plans, but she's on board with the natalist, nativist obsessions of the online right. The Tory membership liked the cut of her anti-immigrant and anti-trans jib which, you might think, would leave the Tories well positioned to stymie the desertions to their right. The always-awful Robert Jenrick is no different, even if his right-wingery comes from cynicism rather than conviction. And yet the disintegration continues apace.

What the boot Badenoch brigade have got to explain to their withering membership and declining support is how removing her would make the job of seeing off Reform any easier. The only political advantages Jenrick has over Badenoch, apart from being of a gender and skin tone more congenial to the dyed-in-wool racist core of Farage's coalition, is he might be better at Prime Minister's Questions. But that will not shift the dial. Time and again, surveys of Reform supporters show a deep antipathy toward the Tories and what, for them, was a failure to keep their promises on immigration and asylum. The problem they now have, out of office, is an inability to demonstrate their seriousness and efficacy on this and much else. Faced with a much more formidable communicator in the Reform leader, it's hard to see either the character-free voids that are Badenoch and Jenrick successfully wrestling the limelight away from Farage.

Where does this leave the Tories? It's long been my contention that the Tories can escape their doom loop by building a new coalition of voters, but that this is not an easy project because it means dumping the hard right rhetoric and with it the near entirety of their parliamentary party and a chunk of their existing base. As they can never win a bidding war with Farage, unless Boris Johnson was somehow tempted back, a more moderate conservatism that actually conserves instead of destroys is key to clawing back their heartlands lost to the Liberal Democrats, and challenging Labour to rewin the seats they lost by thin margins. This is the prospectus offered by no would-be successor to Badenoch, and even the so-called "centrists" like James Cleverly are chained to the same politics - as his run at the leadership and vocal support for the Rwanda scheme amply demonstrated. The Tories then are seemingly in an impossible position. Unable to diagnose the problem of their declining voter coalition and by blaming Badenoch, as per the politics they know very well they're dodging the complexity and going for the scapegoat.

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