Derailed Conservatives are trying to get back on track

Delegates attend the Conservative party conference in Birmingham, England, on Monday. The party returned to opposition in July after 14 years in power. Getty

For a taster of what losing power represents in the UK, the rail journey from London is a good measure.

Crowds assembled at train stations last week to go to Liverpool for the governing Labour party’s conference were reminiscent of spectators queuing up at turnstiles to attend a Premier League game. On the other hand, as I made my way to the station to get on a train to Birmingham for the Conservative party convention, I was the third passenger through with no sign of a stampede behind me.

In part this is because after 14 years in power, the Tory party is exhausted and has lost its way. There is also a huge dollop of truth in the observation that its ongoing leadership battle is providing few signs that it will be able to handle a conversation with the country any time soon.

Conservative leadership candidate Kemi Badenoch is offering a root-and-branch clear-out of the party’s direction. AFP

The elephant in the room in Birmingham is that if the Conservatives make a bad choice, they may not even hold on to the role of main challenger to Labour when the next general election approaches in five years’ time. The most despairing Tory fears that the hard-right Reform UK party could seize on the volatile electorate to displace many more Conservatives next time.

No party would be happier about this than Labour. It won the best part of 400 out of the 650 seats after bagging just one third of the total votes. With almost a quarter of the vote share, the Tories were punished and ended up with just 119 seats.

This fragile ledge is not a comfortable place for an electoral beast that regards itself as the party of government. Add in the unknowable and intangible pressure to come from Reform UK and it is no surprise the party is shaken to its core.

It has a wide choice of roads to recovery on offer from the four candidates vying to become the new leader. Rishi Sunak, who is in his mid-forties and was prime minister until July, isn’t even making a proper speech. Instead, he is allowing space for the beauty parade to succeed him.

An attendee with a 'Vote Kemi' bag at the Conservatives' conference on Monday. Members know the party's next leader is unlikely to lead them back to Downing Street. Bloomberg

Members will be acutely aware that the man or woman chosen when the vote comes will not, in all likelihood, lead them back to Downing Street. The last three leaders to go from opposition back into power – Tony Blair, David Cameron and Keir Starmer – were not even MPs when their parties first lost power. A churn was under way in both parties until the right policies and personalities could be assembled.

This does not mean a total clear-out and reinvention are what the electorate wants. For example, in the government that took power in July, Ed Miliband and Douglas Alexander were given important ministerial posts they had held before 2010. But it does seem to mean that voters require some kind of purging process that ends up with a completely different image and agenda for running the country.

Tom Tugendhat, one of the four candidates vying to take the reins of the party, has made the point that he did not occupy any of the high-profile ministerial berths that at least two of the other candidates in the race have enjoyed. Yet he is the conventional candidate with the centrist prospectus.

James Cleverly is certainly the most experienced candidate, having held the big-beast jobs of home secretary and foreign secretary in the last government. Mr Cleverly’s main offer is to be a unifying leader who appeals to all wings of the degraded party.

The most despairing Tory fears that the hard-right Reform UK party could seize on the volatile electorate to displace many more Conservatives next time

Kemi Badenoch, also a former cabinet minister, was trade secretary in the previous government. She is the most challenging of candidates because she offers a root-and-branch clear-out of the party’s direction as a political force. Not one to tread lightly, she says she is the one that the party has been waiting for to take it to a new future.

The frontrunner, according to the press, is hardliner-in-chief Robert Jenrick, who is from the same tier as Mr Tugendhat. Mr Jenrick was migration minister while Mr Tugendhat was security minister. Both those jobs are still fundamental to their campaigns. Mr Jenrick quit well in advance of the election, something that gave him a launchpad to appeal to the grassroots.

The radical anti-migration policies he offers would certainly help shoot the fox that Nigel Farage’s Reform UK represents in British politics. By quitting the European Convention on Human Rights, Mr Jenrick would represent a radical alternative to Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who is a human rights lawyer.

It is Ms Badenoch’s campaign that offers the closest insight to the real pressure on the Conservatives over the coming years. This will not be on the developments in the Middle East as war stalks a number of countries (although Ms Badenoch will have plenty to say on this). When she talks of Elon Musk as a champion of free speech, she takes on the role of the true radical at the heart of the political system.

On Sunday, she spoke of how the entitlement to maternity pay had “gone too far” in the UK. It was striking that such a statement would come from a woman who has a young family and is known for taking time out of her working diary to be away with her children. While she partly retracted the pay comments, she doubled down on her position that government shouldn’t be interfering in people’s lives.

Undoubtedly her comments could help gather support from small businesses. But the true impact of her candidacy could be deeper, with Ms Badenoch also reflecting some of the far-right arguments that circulate most notably on Mr Musk’s X platform.

If the Conservatives want to step on the path that political impresarios from former US president Donald Trump to Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban and many others in between have mounted, Birmingham is the place where Ms Badenoch must make her mark.