So the final proof has arrived, and it’s revealing. The Tories aren’t actually dead. Labour and Reform have proved it.
Both have decided to act because their publicly stated view that the Conservative Party is dead – and therefore irrelevant – hasn’t worked out.
Last year, assuming that the Tories would not and could not fight back, both Labour and Reform separately made a devil’s pact that they never discussed but absolutely acted upon.
Labour would treat Reform as their only threat, and the ‘real opposition’ and Reform would ignore the Tories and tack left to support more public spending, because ‘having beaten the Tories into oblivion’ their real target was Labour votes especially in the Red Wall.
Conservatives shouldn’t kid themselves. It worked.
It worked while Badenoch could be painted as ‘absent’, while her early PMQs were hit and miss, while very little policy direction was forthcoming, while the anger and frustration with the last Tory government was still raw, yes, the framing worked.
It was predicated on trotting out a few arguments as much as possible:
First that, The Tories can’t and haven’t changed at all since July 2024, are exactly the same as Labour, or trying to be the same as Reform. Second that they irreversibly crashed the economy in 2022 and it stayed like that for the next two years. And thirdly why would you bother as their polling shows them slipping into comatose territory.
None of these things are actually true. Indeed they a provably untrue, however loudly they are repeated. Only clear opponents continue to state them as fact because they need them to be true.
The Tories have changed, not enough yet, but they have. Badenoch is articulating a future platform that none of her predecessors did in Government. There is a demonstrable difference between Labour and Conservatives on the economy, with the former morphing into the welfare party and the latter focussed on work, jobs, sound finances and avoiding a debt crisis. No the polling numbers aren’t great, but just last night another poll with the Tories in second appeared and another small slip in Reforms lead.
Not good enough, yet, for sure but ‘dead’? No way.
The louder Reform megaphone Zia Yusuf proclaims that ‘death’ – the more it isn’t true. Perhaps because of a simple psychology. If you repeatedly tell an opponent they are finished and should quit, it’s a pound to penny, you just galvanised them to fight back harder. It’s not just bad tactics, it’s pantomime tactics.
Tactics both Yusuf and and Farage were busy employing last night after the FT reported they are interested in a deal. A deal that would need two leaders to get over their personal dislike of each other.
In an interesting welcome to three former Tory MP’s who defected Zia Yusuf offered a comradely clarification:
“I want to be clear to our Reform grassroots: YOU will be prioritised in candidate selection for our next class of MPs. NOT failed former Tory MPs”
For their part Labour had argued the Tories were so unpopular they could be dismissed. After a summer of hotels, asylum rows, flags and lampposts – during which it’s worth remembering it was Badenoch and Jenrick who visited the Bell hotel and local residents, and a Conservative council who challenged the Government in court – Labour members urged Starmer to get stuck into Farage and tackle what they’ve foolishly branded the ‘rise of the far right’. New kid on the block Zack Polanski goes further branding them “facists and racists” on the TV. I don’t think this tactic works. It is also pantomime stuff.
You’d think Labour would’ve learned by now the ‘goodies versus baddies’ prism was ineffective, certainly with the public.
Labour’s leader spent an entire Conference speech talking about Nigel Farage. Nigel must have been delighted. Everything was about setting Labour against Reform, and Reform were more than happy with the publicity. With Labour continuing in Government like a clown car crashing in a china shop, all it did was cement Reform’s lead and see Starmer’s personal polls go through the floor.
Badenoch mentioned Farage once in her party rousing speech at Conservative Conference. She wasn’t going to give them anything. What she did instead was let her audience draw conclusions: that she has a team, not a one man band, that her policies are not for expanded welfare spending, and when she announced a new policy, it had been costed, thought through and didn’t unravel in the media the day after.
Now I don’t for a minute expect our Reform readers to accept any of this, they are still trotting out the same accusations they did a year ago, and one suspects will do into the future. They have to. And I get that.
However as I’ve pointed out before, there is a difference between saying “she’s done nothing, she hasn’t changed from the old, failed plan, she’s just the same as Labour” to saying “ok well she may be saying new stuff and yes it sounds good, but she won’t do any of it”. Not least it is a reluctant admission the Conservative party is changing.
I actually don’t know a word for multiples of omnishambles – but the ludicrous activity before Labour’s second Budget, only managed to be worse than the first by dint of the fact she lied about it, even to the Cabinet. This was down to people inside Downing Street and the Treasury trying to be too clever by half.
That was one of the things that killed Rishi Sunak’s premiership in the end.
However Reeves used her Budget speech to endlessly mention the Tories, and almost always Truss, because that’s what they have left, and they need to turn fire on a party they thought they could ignore. Nigel got one mention in the form of a badly delivered joke. Which given the Budget was a bit of an irony,
So up pops a visibly emboldened Badenoch, and savages Reeves, the Budget, and the entire Labour project as fiscally irresponsible, killers of growth, drivers of unemployment and made the most of being the real and official opposition. Reform were unusually quiet. That Kemi does opposition well scenario, doesn’t fit Labour or Reform’s plan. Labour took their eye off the Tory ball, while the missteps, mendacity, and muddle keeps flowing from this truly dreadful Government. So did Reform.
To be clear not all is rosy. Is Kemi winning? No. Is the shadow cabinet firing on all cyclinders? No. Is there a complete new policy platform laid out? No. Do the Conservatives still have a mountain to climb? Yes. Have they won over the disillusioned who abandoned them? No. Do I have issues with the logic of some of the offer at the moment? Yes.
But they are very far from dead, very far from that ‘uniparty’ shtick that is lazily applied and they, and Kemi in particular, are worrying both Labour and Reform.
I’ve spoken to people in both parties who concede the point so save the outraged denials. Besides there’s no point in denying it.
Why else would, as the Telegraph reported yesterday, Reform be embarking on a pre-Christmas campaign attacking the Tories, and Kemi in particular. As I’ve repeatedly said to Reform, ‘if we are so dead and so finished, why are you so bothered?’
The argument is based in the past. Not just the driving anger Farage has over what he sees as a betrayal in 2019 and tweeted about last night– but everything about this campaign is one argument about the past: ‘Badenoch was in the Government that the voters utterly rejected, therefore anything bad they did, or failings they had, are still her failings and she won’t do any of the things she says.’
That’s pretty much it.
When the past is the ammunition for attack, in battle over the future it’s again an odd tactic. Reform are making plenty of promises, many of which are hitting brick walls in the councils they now run. The reality of having to deliver can be brutal.
The smart thing for the Conservatives to do is stick to painting the picture of the future, oppose the Government and let Reform do whatever they want. Remind themselves of the LP Hartley quote: “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”. Badenoch doesn’t need to include Farage in her Conservative vision for the years ahead, the electorate will decide eventually, and certainly not yet, whether he has the lead role, a leading role or no role at all.
It’s quite possible Reform win, and win big – or just, don’t.
But the past, whether at school, or in America, or about Putin, can be like Truss, and the mini budget, the ammunition pool of the left. We don’t need it. We need to slowly win the argument and raise the profile of those new arguments. Show not tell.
Articulate that you would neither do what Labour are doing, nor promise what you can’t deliver – any more than those promising it can – and go ‘back to the future.’ The Tory party of the past has values, and lessons we can and should build into its future, but the offer of 2024 should stay firmly back there, and be increasingly unrecognisable in the offer for 2029.
