The Tories' Terrible Truth

Apologies for trying the patience of everyone reading, but this is another post about Kemi Badenoch. Some might have called her Thursday speech a relaunch, but for the Tory leader this was a further opportunity to set out her stall. And how does she wish to be known? As a "truth teller".

This self-designated title has a long history in politics, and it's always the right who lay claim to its mantle. Nigel Farage has built a career from "telling the truth" about the European Union, immigration, and the liberal elite. To his mind and those of his followers, he's cut through the obfuscation and crap and says it how it is, regardless of who gets offended and whinges about "you can't say that!". Boris Johnson was also a skilled practitioner of this form of politics. And all extreme right parties and demagogic figures use the same ploy - Trump, the AfD, the Le Pen family, Bolsonaro, Viktor Orban. A consistent pattern of behaviour.

Badenoch's truth-telling, however, alighted upon the failings of her party. She said politicians needed to accept and acknowledge mistakes, of which the Conservatives have made a fair few. She criticised the rush to leave the EU without having a plan for afterwards in place (you might recall the Japanese state did more contingency planning for Brexit than the UK did). She said setting the net zero targets without any idea of how to achieve them was another. And her party promised to cut immigration, but the numbers kept going up was probably the most serious of all. For Badenoch, this was symptomatic of a politics of wanting to be popular, of saying things the electorate wanted to hear.

The Tory leader didn't get the memo that admitting mistakes usually requires an apology, but that was too much to ask for. Instead, Badenoch promised there won't be any empty promises from her. With her Tories, the voters are going to have to face the facts. And we know what these are going to be: she's spent 2025's first fortnight exploiting sexual abuse and making explicitly racist political points about them.

Is there a grain of truth to her explanation about why the Tories have failed? Yes. The problem her party has is its strategic addiction to the politics of negativity, of undermining the efficacy of the state if not dismantling it and offering nothing but the demonisation of minorities for its support to rail against. With Brexit exhausted as an issue, the last five years of Tory party strategy can fruitfully be interpreted as the search for new glue to stick a coalition of voters together with. Hence, for example, why Rishi Sunak was set on burning down the house to get his Rwanda deal done. The problem with this is a party cannot wind its base up indefinitely. During their 14 years in government, the Tories were able to atomise British society further, create new points of distrust and division and pull the trick of presenting themselves as the only force capable of mending the insecurities they deepened. Yet if a party promises to do something about it and then doesn't, a slab of its support will sheer away.

This is what has happened to the Tory base. Its most racist and backward sections, those most excited by the rhetoric of division, have found a new home in Reform. Unlike the Tories, Farage has not been tested by office. He's established credibility on these issues through his long campaign against the European Union and, latterly, immigration. Married to his garrulous manner, he's become the beneficiary of the Tories' beggar-thy-neighbour policy pitches since 2019 - especially so after Johnson was forced from the scene and Farage re-entered the fray last summer.

And here's where Badenoch's problems are. Chasing after the right, on paper, makes sense for the Tories. They need to put their base back together again before they can contest Labour in a general election. But in practice, because the party's stock is so low with right wing voters, it doesn't matter how far to the right they go it looks like they're trying to catch up with Reform. They're seen to be doing it because they think they have to, not because they believe. What we saw with Robert Jenrick's conversion to the extreme right during the leadership election now applies to te Conservatives as a whole. Their posturing is tarred with the brush of inauthenticity, which makes Badenoch's gamble to try and unite the right under her leadership one unlikely to pay off. Indeed, if the polls are any indication the hole the Tories are in is getting deeper.

Yet there is nowhere else for Badenoch to go. She was elected on a right wing platform, nearly all of her party are committed to the rightist strategy of renewal, but that is inadvertently feeding the Reform beast. Every pulse of the Tory id is screaming that this is definitely going to work, that this path not only makes them feel good, it will make them come good too. But it won't. This is the hard truth about Badenoch's positioning and the party's orientation, and it's one you can guarantee she'll never mention at her next relaunch.

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