The Conservative Party survived the general election of 2024 — just. The unthinkable rout foreseen by the dismalest polls did not come to pass. Ed Davey asks two questions at PMQs, not six. Rishi Sunak defied suggestions he could lose his seat; in fact, Richmond and Northallerton today stands as the safest Tory constituency in the country. The reports of Conservatism’s death had been slightly exaggerated.
When all the votes were counted, the party maintained a significant enough foothold in parliament that some form of revival — even in the near term — seemed like a possibility. Lingering threats loomed — not least of all Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, but the 1993 Canadian example had been mercilessly avoided. In some quarters of the Conservative Party, the 121 MP result was received with a strained sense of relief. On the scale of extinction-level event to sweeping landslide, the reckoning justified less extreme electoral metaphors.
For a defeated incumbent (of which the Conservatives are the 21st century’s second), the new status of His Majesty’s Most Loyal Opposition party confers some succour. The odd urgent question, reasonable representation on House of Commons select committees, those six questions at PMQs — all serve as routes to relevancy, even when vying with a “super-majority” government. Such institutional recourse will almost necessarily lighten morale. At the very least, the Conservative Party gets to go through the motions of mattering; purpose is rediscovered in the graft of opposition.
But Westminster deceives. Our parliament’s composition and political reality have long since diverged — if they were ever aligned at all. The Conservative Party’s relative prominence in parliament may sustain it in the short term. But its SW1 activities conceal far more than they reveal.
PMQs frames the Conservative Party’s week. But Kemi Badenoch’s grillings are yet to exact any significant political advantage. It speaks to a prevalent theme. Conservative spokespeople arrive in the commons chamber armed with grievances to level, and leave having strengthened the government. Reform UK, a relative parliamentary minnow, has made strides in spite — or perhaps because of — its present-but-not-always-involved positioning. Farage’s rare interventions attract significantly more interest and coverage than those of Conservative frontbenchers — even Badenoch. He has spent this parliament fronting events across the country, including in the Conservative leader’s seat of North West Essex.
Reform UK is far busier than its adversary on the right. It has more to say, and it is better at saying it. Contrast Farage’s proactivity with that of Badenoch. What trail has she pursued that has not already been blazed by Reform, US vice president JD Vance or Elon Musk? Where is the political innovation that has come to Conservatism’s rescue in past existential moments?
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Zombieism
Economists have a label for companies that, while technically still operational, have long since ceased to be productive or innovative. The so-called “Zombie company” survives not through its own vitality, but by feeding off the lifelines thrown to it by external forces — cheap credit, government bailouts or the reluctance of creditors to pull the plug. Owing its continued existence to a favourable financial environment or government intervention, it staggers aimlessly as a fundamentally hollow entity — devoid of purpose or direction.
Perhaps this is a useful concept to understand the Conservatives at present.
Kemi Badenoch’s party exists in a state of suspended animation. Its parliamentary activity inspires a semblance of life. It remains recognisable in form as a right-of-centre party. It does recognisable things — set-piece speeches, for instance. It says recognisable stuff — on taxes, the size of the state, etc. But in so doing it relies on instinct and impulse; ideological tropes and historic resentments. The more it attempts to animate itself, the less alive it appears. There is a distinct inability to articulate any coherent governing philosophy.
Like a zombie then, the Conservative Party persists — but not because it is thriving. Just because it can. If nothing else, its historical lineage compels it. A distant collective memory of what it once meant to be alive sends it staggering onward.
Every objective measure points to a remarkable Conservative decline in recent years — and potentially terminal trends. The party’s membership has dropped from 172,437 in 2022 to 131,680 at the time of the 2024 Conservative Party leadership election. Reform’s membership, has since surpassed 200,000 members.
Meanwhile, the Conservative Party is sleepwalking towards demographic doom. Analysis of the 2024 general election by polling company Focaldata found that the age at which the Conservatives become the most popular party is 64 — compared to 42 in 2019.
More strikingly, it is estimated that one in every ten voters who supported the Conservatives at the 2019 election died in the last parliament (1.3 million people). By the time of the next election in 2029, about 1.2 million people who voted Conservative last July will have passed — according to analysis by The Times newspaper. That is approximately 17 per cent of the Conservatives’ vote. By comparison, only 500,000 Labour voters — or 5.3 per cent — are expected to die in the same period. If these votes are translated into seats, the Conservatives would lose 34, while Labour would gain 29.
These points express the existential importance of the Conservative Party broadening its appeal — and fast.
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Boarding the ARC
The rationale behind Badenoch’s recent tour of podcast studios and conservative institutes has been to convey a sense of urgency. Instinctively, there should be something uniquely compelling about the prospect of a former cabinet minister — and potential future prime minister — reckoning with the questions she insists define our age. But the strategy is self-cannibalising.
Addressing the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship’s (ARC) annual conference this week, Badenoch claimed “our country and all of western civilisation will be lost” if efforts to renew the Conservative Party fail. She decried “pronouns”, Diversity Equity and Inclusion (DEI) practises and “climate activism” as specific progressive “poisons”.
Inspired by the example of Donald Trump, she iterated a new gambit for explaining away the Conservative Party’s recent record in government. “Sometimes you need that first stint in government to spot the problems”, she insisted. “But it’s the second time around when you really know how to fix them”.
The Conservative Party’s fourteen year-long reconnaissance mission successfully exposed the depths of Whitehall depravity, Badenoch’s claim runs. But it was a false dawn before true Toryism is finally tried. The spin is bold to say the least.
The quip nonetheless points to a grave error the Conservative leadership is already in the process of committing. With no major policy announcements on the horizon, we are told, Badenoch will spend the foreseeable future considering the Conservative Party’s failures in government — either in an explicit or implicit sense. Her solutions will be purely philosophical.
In any case, what policy platform could possibly right the civilisational wrongs Badenoch identified in her speech? The inevitable value-action gap, assuming Badenoch is granted the time to outline policy, will be chasmic. And still, the Tory leader is yet to address the most common criticism of recent Conservative governance: that of incompetence. Even if voters agree with Badenoch’s arguments and policies — they may cast themselves as culture warriors in the Tory leader’s image — that does not imply faith in the party’s ability to deliver.
Badenoch’s pronouncements simply beg more questions than answers. The substance isn’t there.
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Reinvention
The approach reflects an attempted reformation. Unburdened by the day-to-day concerns of government, the Conservative Party is advancing its arguments with no obvious concern for political or ideological temperance. Badenoch’s ARC speech marked a self-indulgent ideological pursuit — inscrutable to those unfamiliar with the Online Right’s talking points.
Sometimes reinvention is a sign of decay, not renewal. Badenoch is pursuing the political space available to her to advance abstract arguments. It is not at all clear to whom Conservatism’s latest incarnation — as a Trump-praising, populistic force — appeals first and foremost.
We are again obliged to consider the ostensible strategy. Badenoch is seeking to police the boundary between Reform UK and her party — which proved so slippery in the last parliament, especially on Sunak’s watch. But the evidence of recent polls suggests she has opened the floodgates. Tory voters still traverse the divide. And those who have already crossed the threshold — the electoral Rubicon — are proving stubborn when urged to consider the countervailing journey.
Badenoch’s interest in the issues motivating Tory-Reform switchers is undoubtedly sincere. But this fact makes her failure to stem the flow to Farage even more serious. That is before one considers the political trade-offs and the paths not pursued.
Since emerging as Conservative leader, Badenoch has delivered two long speeches on cultural questions to right-wing institutes/think tanks. She is still yet to dedicate an address to concerns over the economy or public services. Badenoch refuses to stray beyond her philosophical comfort zone, and towards solutions that require detailed — not abstract — definition.
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Tory atrophy
It is the illogic of the “zombie”, as a literary category and trope, that provides the source of its power. Its liminality, its unsustainable nature — as a creature on the threshold of life and death — unsettles.
The Conservative Party’s existence is compelling in a similarly obscene sense. It has been discredited but not yet displaced. It exists to perform its parliamentary duties, as it has always done. But there is no mission animating its activity.
The story is larger than that of any one leader, of course. Strategic failure has aligned with demographic questions, a Faragist insurgency and financial developments to effect an accelerating doom spiral.
Badenoch, nonetheless, must imbue her party with a unique purpose if it is to compete in a crowded political environment. Her mode of muscular conservatism has proved anything put. The response to Reform’s sustained rise has been limp at best.
Tory “renewal”, at this juncture, looks like a distant aspiration.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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