The race to become leader of Britain’s Conservatives

Kemi Badenoch has a reputation for pugnacity, which is why many Tories think she should succeed Rishi Sunak as the party’s leader. But when addressing Angela Rayner, Labour’s new deputy prime minister, in the House of Commons on July 19th Ms Badenoch sounded jaded. Ms Rayner’s hope of pepping up housing construction was doomed, she said. There would be a deluge of angry emails; Labour’s new MPs would revolt.

“We have been there. We know; you don’t,” she told Labour. “I want to reassure the right honourable lady that I will be here to say, ‘I told you so’ when these targets are missed.” It was a strikingly defeatist account of the power of government—as John F. Kennedy didn’t say: “We choose not to go to the Moon, or do the other things, because they are hard.”

A sense of exhaustion runs through the Tory party, which has embarked upon the search for its sixth leader in a decade. By the deadline on July 29th Ms Badenoch and five of her fellow MPs had gathered the requisite ten nominations by their parliamentary colleagues to enter the contest to succeed Mr Sunak. They will be whittled down to four candidates by other Tory MPs, and then down to two after the Tory party conference in October. The party membership will then pick the winner, who will be announced on November 2nd.

It seems clear that candidates will pitch to the right in pursuit of members’ support. Ms Badenoch, analysing why her party secured its worst result since the birth of Britain’s modern electoral system in 1832, argues that it “talked right yet governed left”. Robert Jenrick, another contender, says that voters “did not feel that the Conservative Party was conservative enough for them.” Tom Tugendhat, ostensibly a liberal-minded Tory, has put exit from the European Convention on Human Rights on the table. James Cleverley and Priti Patel promise more sway for party members.

That tactic might win a leadership race. It is less likely to propel the Tories back to power, for three reasons. First, voters may conclude that this sounds like the same record that Mr Sunak played, at increasing volume, during the election campaign. Recall how his opening pitch in that contest was a pledge to bring back national service, a tougher line on trans rights and new restrictions on immigration.

The messengers are familiar, too. Mr Tugendhat and Ms Badenoch ran for the leadership in 2022. Mr Cleverly and Ms Patel are former home secretaries, Mr Jenrick an ex-immigration minister and Mel Stride, the final member of the sextet, a former work and pensions secretary. The last three leaders to take their parties from opposition to government—Sir Keir Starmer, David Cameron and Sir Tony Blair—only entered Parliament in the election following their party’s ousting from office.

The second problem is that the Tories lost voters in every direction. In the election on July 4th they retained just 52% of Boris Johnson’s electoral coalition of 2019, as it splintered between Labour (which won over 13% of the Tories’ 2019 voters), the Liberal Democrats (7%) and Reform UK (23%). A “unite the right” strategy, in which the Tories claw back defectors to Reform UK, is one-eyed. So far the candidates have had bizarrely little to say about the fact that the Lib Dems have punched deep into the Tories’ wealthy English heartlands. The ambition to win back Labour voters is entirely absent. The notion that the Tories’ richest pickings lie to the right is probably mistaken anyway: 26% of Reform voters say they will “never” vote Tory again, compared with 14% of Lib Dems, according to More in Common, a think-tank.

The third problem with tacking right is the risk of irrelevance. For the next five years the Labour government will set the agenda; voters will give opposition parties a second glance infrequently, and punish those that seem divorced from their concerns. In 2006 Lord Cameron told his party it had absented itself from the national conversation: “While parents worried about child care, getting the kids to school, balancing work and family life, we were banging on about Europe.” Such hardheadedness is absent now.

Successful oppositions must decide which bits of their own past to disown, and which parts of the political landscape to accept as the new consensus. Sir Tony had to embrace the market logic of Thatcherism, Lord Cameron the social liberalism of New Labour. Here the Tories face two big decisions. First is what story they tell about Britain’s economic performance. The official line from the party, for the moment, is that Mr Sunak bequeathed Labour a recovering economy of strong growth, low inflation and low unemployment, and that tax rises introduced by the new government are an ideological choice. The decision for the next leader is whether to continue that defence or to face harder truths about persistent low growth since 2008.

The second is over planning reform. Sir Keir is putting the need to build at the centre of his economic agenda. Under Mr Sunak, who will continue as leader until his successor is chosen, the Tory response so far has been to redouble the base-pleasing Nimby rhetoric of the election campaign, talking of an attempt to “concrete over the green belt”. Many think it essential that the Tories change their tune if they are to reclaim the banner of wealth creation.

Taking his first Prime Minister’s Questions on July 24th, Sir Keir mocked Sir Roger Gale, a veteran Tory, who griped about his building spree. “My advice is that when you get rejected that profoundly by the electorate, it is best not to go back to them and tell them that they were wrong. It is best to reflect, and change your approach and your party.” Sound advice. ■

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