Badenoch must leave the way open to a reunification deal with Farage

During her ebullient performance yesterday morning on Desert Island Discs, Kemi Badenoch took the chance to warn against multiculturalism, and the identity politics which it fosters:

“You ask people to retreat into groups, into tribes, rather than find the thing that they have in common. Identity politics is a recipe for conflict.”

She went on to speak of the need to bring groups together, and the importance of preserving a British identity. This is absolutely right. It would be disastrous if Britain were to become Balkanised into competing factions, each of which believes itself to be so righteous it is justified in despising and exterminating the others.

Glimpses of this sectarian mentality can be found throughout our history, but the Conservative Party is one of the institutions which has thrived by refusing to set tests of the purity of its members’ beliefs.

The party has avoided the error of claiming to possess an infallible cure for the nation’s ills. It prefers intelligent adaptation to circumstance, the doing of the best one can in a fallen world, the choosing of what seems at the time like the lesser of two evils.

It is allergic to all forms of utopianism: it shrinks with horror from the vainglorious claim that mankind can be perfected.

As Sir Ian Gilmour remarked in The Body Politic, published in 1969, “The Tory party has emotions but no doctrine.” He went on to observe that the nearest thing it has to a doctrine is is an anti-doctrine: the belief “that all political theories are at best inadequate, at worst false”.

The Conservative Party in its modern form is above all the creation of Sir Robert Peel in the 1830s, when he published that dull and prudent statement of intent, the Tamworth Manifesto, which showed that the Tories understood modern realities and now accepted the Great Reform Bill of 1832, which they had bitterly resisted.

But before long the Conservative Party split over the Repeal of the Corn Laws. Peel and most of his ministerial colleagues, who at that point included the astonishingly gifted William Gladstone, had come to the view that repeal was the right policy, and in 1846 they got it through with the help of the Opposition.

Peel and his colleagues had failed to carry with them the great inarticulate mass of Tory backbenchers, most of whom were landowners and regarded the abolition of the Corn Laws as a monstrous betrayal of the programme on which in 1841 they had been elected.

These Tory backwoodsmen lacked the ability to make their case, so turned to Benjamin Disraeli to make it for them. His assaults on Peel were so brilliant and so wounding that he destroyed Peel’s career.

He also very nearly destroyed the Conservative Party, which was unable to win another majority until 1874, 28 years after the split over the Corn Laws.

From this near-death experience, successive Conservative leaders learned the lesson that they must at all costs avoid splitting the party and repeating the disaster of 1846.

In November 2024 Badenoch became leader of a Conservative Party which was already split. It is sometimes forgotten that in his youth, Nigel Farage was a member of the Conservative Party.

He leads the lost Tory tribe. All six of his parliamentary colleagues were until recently Conservatives.

This is a disastrous situation. Conservatives are fighting Conservatives. The party has split, and unless and until it reunites, the two halves of it will diminish and destroy each other’s chances.

There is an acute danger that Conservatives will indulge in sectarian infighting. Instead of saying to themselves, as would normally be the case, “we agree on most things with our fellow Tories, so will swallow our irritation at the few things on which we disagree”, each of the two parties has an incentive to publicise how disreputable its rival is.

Visions of a perfect Tory Party are in danger of preventing acceptance of a Tory Party which is as good as it can be in the circumstances, and which will in the coming years be amenable to a degree of pragmatic improvement.

There are implications here for Badenoch’s leadership. As a matter of tactics, it was correct to say “good riddance” to Robert Jenrick.

But as a matter of strategy, the door must be left open for reunification. Before the next general election, it ought to be possible to say: “We find we agree on most things, including the need to defeat Labour, the Lib Dems and the Greens, so we are going to fight this campaign as one.”

I do not pretend to know how this admission will occur, and can see it is unlikely to happen before 2029. Farage is a brilliant insurgent, who in the run-up to the general election of December 2019 was outwitted by two even more gifted rebels, Boris Johnson and Dominic Cummings.

If I were Farage, who in 2019 suffered the indignity of being forced to withdraw all his candidates in Tory-held seats, I would yearn now to take revenge, and to prove I can reach the top on my own.

But it seems unlikely he can do so, even with the brilliant but divisive advice he will receive behind the scenes from Cummings.

It is difficult to demonstrate, as an insurgent, that one is prime minister in waiting, without losing the millions of protest voters who warmed to you because of your ability to infuriate the Establishment. Johnson only became tolerable as PM when the Conservative Party, having mishandled the Brexit negotiations, faced extinction.

Both Badenoch and Farage will wish to maximise their negotiating power by doing as well as they can in the next few years, but neither of them can expect to triumph without first bringing about the Tory reunification which will at latest occur, one trusts, under one or other of their successors.