You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire.
Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her for ever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates.
Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both Profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask. Shooting the breeze at the party’s Birmingham conference, you might never guess the Tories still poll four percentage points below the last election, the worst result since the Duke of Wellington was dismissed in 1830 for rejecting electoral reform and defending every rotten borough.
Spot that Wellingtonian legacy in the interview Badenoch gave ConservativeHome. Indeed she does, but out of step with the public, not condescending to care what it might be thinking and allowing no shade of disagreement. Removing the Lords whip from Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff, was a deterrent message to anyone taking part in the “festival of ideas” here, a festival of one idea only.
Barwell opposed Badenoch’s edict barring any candidate who supports net zero carbon emissions or staying in the European convention on human rights. It has left me,” Barwell tweeted plaintively. It has left a great many others, too.
Margaret Thatcher, still holy here, never did that: she had “wets” in her first cabinet and never expelled them from the party. Her ideological obduracy over the poll tax only overcame her later on, and it did for her. But Badenoch is starting out this way.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
