I hate to be a party pooper, but I confess talk of a Keminaissance leaves me, if not quite cold, then at the very least somewhat sceptical. So, at a recent gathering of polling and election experts, I took the opportunity to check that I was not an outlier — somehow missing something that everyone else but me could see.
Reassuringly for me — but not for the Conservative Party — it turned out I was far from alone. Indeed, I could not find a single person who thought the Tories were that much further along the road to recovery that they were when they got their butts well and truly kicked two years ago — the reasons for which (should anyone in the blue corner be some kind of glutton for punishment) are comprehensively covered in (and here I should declare an interest) The British General Election of 2024.
Yes, most of those I talked to admitted: Badenoch has got better at PMQs. And, yes, she is capable of providing some usefully clippable content for her social media team to pump out on X and similar such platforms. But, they stressed, we are yet to see if she will get the measure of Burnham in the same way she gradually got the measure of his uptight predecessor. And if, as they used to say, ‘Britain isn’t Twitter,’ it sure as hell is not the far-right sinkhole that X has become thanks to its egregious edgelord Elon Musk.
As a recent, characteristically forensic analysis by YouGov’s Dylan Difford makes clear, while Badenoch’s personal poll ratings have indeed improved, especially amongst right-leaning voters, said improvement can be overstated. More importantly, it seems to have done little or nothing for a party that, when all is said and done, voters have not yet forgiven it for the mess they believe it made of government.
Of course, some optimists will inevitably argue that a combination of Labour incompetence and the plodding passage of time will eventually see the electorate forgive and forget. And now they can point to the fact that, Reform UK — just the latest in a long line of Nigel Farage’s various vehicles — appears to have suffered, if not a blow-out, then at least a slow puncture.
But that kind of optimism ignores some fundamental weaknesses in the party’s position — weaknesses that become evident when we run through what I often think of as the four i’s: ideas, interests, institutions and individuals.
Taking those in reverse order, we have already dealt with the most obvious individual, the party leader, essentially concluding that, while she is nowhere near as terrible as some first thought, she is not particularly special. And, like any leader whose parliamentary party is a shrunken husk of what it once was, she is fishing for Shadow Cabinet colleagues in a talent pool that is — no pun intended — by definition shallow. There are few big beasts on the opposition benches, and not many small ones either.
Moreover, requiring anyone who wants to advance their parliamentary career to sign up to a version of Conservatism that insists on the renunciation of past support for Remain, the European Convention on Human Rights and Net Zero does not seem likely to increase the supply any time soon.
The institutional side of the party is not, to be fair, looking quite as ropey as it had. Given the fact that CEO (Lord) Mark McInnes used to work with Ruth Davidson — now on the naughty step for getting involved with the supposedly dripping wet, Gaukian ginger group, Prosper UK — it seems fair to conclude that he was hired for his managerial competence rather than his manifest ideological purity. As a result, and helped by the fact that donations have begun to flow again — albeit in fairly modest fashion compared to the gazillions recently gifted to Reform — CCHQ has not been hollowed out to the extent that we have seen when the Tories have lost office in times past. And, if Party Chairman, the impressively down-to-earth and normal-sounding Kevin Hollinrake, is to be believed, candidate selection, although sadly subject to purity tests already referred to, appears to be proceeding at a fairly decent lick.
The ‘interests’ dimension, however, is more problematic. Suffice to say, a party that all too often seems obsessed with protecting and promoting the rights and privileges of homeowners, motorists, famers, pensioners, the financial sector, the privately educated and the fossil fuel industry might struggle to convince the country as a whole that it is on their side.
Finally, ‘ideas’ – and this is where the party seems utterly unable to get out of the groove in which it seems to have been well and truly stuck for decades now. Putting it bluntly, it is one thing to treat a former leader who won election after election back in the 1970s and 1980s as some kind of icon. It is quite another to allow a frankly myopic and absurdly ahistorical version of the vision and the policies she pursued to become an idée fixe that prevents the party adapting to meet the economic and fiscal challenges of what, too many Tories seem to need reminding, is the second quarter of the twenty-first century.
Just as damaging is the party’s and Badenoch’s increasing tendency towards being ‘extremely online’ and even more Anglospheric than ever. This, and the desperate desire to stem the party’s losses to Reform, has led the party to paint itself into an ‘anti-woke’ corner that, to the majority of Brits who do not spend much time online, just looks a bit weird and obsessive: a bit like that uncle that nobody takes too seriously at family gatherings, especially after he has had a bit to drink.
Prediction, of course, is a mug’s game. And political oil tankers can be turned around more rapidly than we sometimes imagine. Few, for instance, gave Churchill much of a chance in 1945, or Heath in 1966, or Cameron in 2005 or, indeed, Starmer in 2020. And the UK electorate is far more volatile than it used to be. But unless the party can signal, let alone implement, significantly more change across each and every one of the four dimensions discussed above than it has managed so far, talk of a renaissance — Kemi-themed or otherwise — seems a tad premature.
Originally published at https://centrewrite.brightblue.org.uk/the-keminaissance-is-a-myth-the-tories-are-still-like-a-weird-uncle/
