Monday, 21 July 2025

Circling the Drain

It's difficult to appreciate how, just three years ago, the Conservative Party was the pivot around which British politics turned. These days, it's an uninteresting side show followed by a diminishing band of aficionados and weird people. Kemi Badenoch has proved herself incapable of kicking the football, let alone powering one into the back of Labour's open goals, and everywhere the party is floundering, completely disoriented by getting dumped out of office and watching Reform become the primary opposition to Keir Starmer's government.

As we head into the summer recess, a couple of things remind us of their decrepitude. The Graun's man in Wales, Will Hayward writes about the party's looming extinction. 10% of their vote passed away between 2019 and 2024 with a further 40% due to grow angel wings before 2029, as per everywhere else in Britain young people are not replacing the base like-for-like. Going in for the Nigel Farage cosplay is not helping them, nor are efforts at trying to create new points of resentment over Welsh Labour's basic income pilots. No one is interested, and that means next year they could be wiped completely from the Senedd.

But all is not lost. There was a spasm of excitement on Thursday about a speech Danny Kruger delivered to a deserted House of Commons. He argued for a restoration of Christianity in politics. In an intervention the polyester populist Robert Jenrick described as "magnificent", Kruger expressed concern that Christianity had been ejected from our shared cultural space by two other religions. One was Islam, and the other ... was "woke". He said,
It is a combination of ancient paganism, Christian heresies, and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken and deeply dangerous ideology of power that is hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties: families, communities, and nations ... [it] must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine ... It must be banished from public life — from schools and universities, and from businesses and public services."
Yes, Kruger wants to mobilise Christian values against a sensibility that finds exploitation, prejudice, and poverty abhorrent, and in its weakest version asks that we treat each other with respect. A Tory effort in this direction is likely to have as much effect turning around their party's fortunes as Badenoch's performances at Prime Minister's Questions.

What it does underline is the predicament the Tories are in. Everyone knows about their crisis of political reproduction and how their ageing voter base condemns them to dwindling relevance. This point is no longer a fringe belief confined to this corner of the internet, but is the political common sense in Westminster and mainstream political comment. Except, evidence suggests, the Tories and their press. Without any understanding of their predicament, and hemmed in by a strategy that cannot concede anything that could raise political expectations, their reflex is to double down on their core premises to try and consolidate themselves following a shattering defeat. It's what they did between 1997 and 2005, which gave them a foundation for the faux liberal Toryism that came next. And arguably, Boris Johnson followed a similar strategy when he became leader. Hard on Brexit, tough on immigration, showed his opponents the door and the British public lapped it up.

Except this time, it is not working. Doing Farage impersonations is pointless while the real deal is cruising the country, gliding from one soft ball interview to another. It's also a waste of time when the things the Tories are concentrating on, immigration, war on woke, are issues that, from the standpoint of the people they're addressing, they've demonstrably failed on. As Starmer nver misses a chance to remind the hapless Badenoch, the Tories put rocket boosters under net immigration. They're just not credible, which is something neither she nor the heir presumptive can do a thing about. Except publicly, desperately endorsing more and more extreme politics, which Farage is savvy enough to keep his distance from. And without the levers of power, the Tories cannot demonstrate how much they mean it this time.

Here we are then. The activities of the Tories are no longer the doings of an organisation in charge of its destiny. They are reflexes, a scramble of unthought reactions as this once mighty party circles the drain.

Image Credit

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Oh, there's worse coming shortly. Should J.K.Rowling's push to drive a money bulldozer through all public interest safeguards and crush the rights of trans folk come to fruition - and apparently it's about to escalate - Badenoch is poised eagerly to gloat about how she made it possible via her personal efforts to pave the way for the Cass Report, back when she was in office.

Phil said...

This is all well and good; looking at the state of the party of Churchill and Thatcher, you'd have to have a heart of stone not to laugh. But how does the AVPS demographic-drainpipe theory of the inexorable decline of Toryism address the fact that the overall Right vote is holding steady in the high 40%s?

Anonymous said...

About 30-40% of people are monsters, and those people will vote Right as long as they have someone sufficiently monstrous to vote for over there, or as long as they're driven to the polls by indignation at the sight of someone sufficiently non-monstrous being visible elsewhere on the political spectrum.

Today they're spoiled for choice. Old Tory voters shuffling off to say hi to Thatcher are being replaced by former non-voters crawling out of the woodwork, attracted by the smell of Nigel Farage.

Sean Dearg said...

The writing has been on the wall for a while now. Look at the list of people that have been selected as leader. The recent trend suggests a struggle to find anyone capable and acceptable to both the elderly core and the Tory press, never mind electable by the general public. Johnson had the last three, not the first. May the first, barely the second and third, and not really the fourth. Truss - clearly loved by the base, and some of the more out-there press, but a more capable person could be plucked from a crowd at a village idiot convention.

As for Rishi, he was not really wanted by the core, or the press, but after Truss even they could see that a suggestion of competence was needed. But that's all it was, a suggestion.

Now they have probably the most useless individual ever to lead a major party. And that includes Truss! But her likely replacement is the barely believable, tell-me-what-you-want-to-hear-and-I'll-shout-it, corrupt lardy Bobby J. He would probably be an improvement on Badenoch, but there is something rotten and implausible about him, and for such a lardass he seems, somehow, a lighweight, so he is likely to end up a laughing stock, or being forced out after a scandal, like BJ.