In a warmly received conference speech, Kemi Badenoch turns her fire on Reform UK, describing it as “weird”, and ruling out an electoral pact. Not to be outdone, her former colleague Robert Jenrick derides Badenoch as a champion of the wealthy, which is quite rich for a guy who looks like he’s just accidentally ingested a bundle of £50 notes through his sphincter. Reform’s Richard Tice and Restore’s Rupert Lowe clash online over the result of a council byelection in Derbyshire, in which the Greens profited from a split rightwing vote.
Meanwhile, the Conservatives are back. The Keminaissance is true. We’ve all got a severe case of the Kemirrhoids.
And you may wonder why much of the media are talking about a Badenoch revival in a year where her party lost 563 councillors and 40% of its councils, remains about four points below its apparent nadir of 2024, and in which the leader herself appears incapable of doing a broadcast interview without looking like a restaurant diner who received exactly what she ordered and is inexplicably furious at it. The point is that the Conservatives are a serious party of government again, and the reason is that we all said so. And even if we take into account Badenoch’s curiously resilient personal polling, this does feel like a largely arbitrary volte-face.
There was a soft-focus interview in the Financial Times, a warm editorial in the Sun, and generally positive coverage of the Tory conference in the rest of the rightwing press. Tom Tugendhat, the new shadow foreign secretary and once regarded as a party moderate, had a sympathetic platform in the Observer to defend the party’s opposition to net zero and the European convention on human rights. From a safe distance, it is possible to regard these realignments in a fairly optimistic light.
The right is tearing itself to shreds, potentially allowing a leftwing alternative – or failing that, Labour – to clean up. And in the continuing scrap between Lowe and Nigel Farage, or the series of aggressive Telegraph editorials aimed at Restore Britain, it is tempting to glimpse a reassertion of basic, consensual values in which, for all our many disagreements, certain voices will always be beyond the pale. Occasionally you will even hear it said on the progressive left that a strong centre-right is a necessary, welcome bulwark against the extremist far right.
That while we can disagree strongly and vehemently with Badenoch’s party, we can also recognise the ways in which a moderate right can act as a kind of cordon sanitaire against the nativists, ethnonationalists and race theorists who may otherwise get their hands on the levers of government. All of which would probably be true, if that were actually what was happening. Let’s start with the Tories, who appear to be rapidly pivoting towards a demographic that one insider has described as “Waitrose Woman”: affluent, socially liberal, turned off by culture-war rhetoric but laser-focused on tax and the economy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
