The Conservatives have survived the last four months as the only opposition party with a credible claim to be able to lead an alternative government. These facts may prove to be far more significant than anything Kemi Badenoch now does as leader of the opposition.
It is worth dwelling on the non-demise of the Tories as a major party because two alternative scenarios could plausibly have come to pass, each of them leaving the party facing the threat of further relegation or even extinction. Indeed, the real story of 2024 may be how little British politics changed despite the Labour election landslide.
Scenario one: Tory evisceration. The Tories under Rishi Sunak polled just 24 per cent of the vote in July, barely half of the 44 per cent won by Boris Johnson in 2019. This was an almost unprecedented collapse, but not enough to destroy their position as one of the two major parties, as happened to the Liberals in the 1920s. Crucially, refracted through the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, their 24 per cent left the Tories with 121 seats in the House of Commons, which, while a historic low, was enough to eclipse the other opposition parties. It is also enough to enable Badenoch and her shadow cabinet to function as an alternative government in the House of Commons and in the media.
Had the Tories polled just a few percentage points lower, they might have gone well under 100 seats and won barely as many votes as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which in the event polled just 14 per cent. A slightly worse result for the Tories could have seen them with the same number of seats as the Lib Dems, who won 72—and would have won more with a lower Tory vote because their vote is so concentrated in the non-metropolitan south of England. In either event, the Tories could have been pitched into an existential struggle with Reform and the Lib Dems, which now appears unlikely, although not inconceivable.
Scenario two: Tory split. Even with 121 MPs, the Tories could have divided in the immediate aftermath of the election, had there been disaffected leaders from the left or right of the party who thought the game was up and decided to throw in their lot with Reform UK, the Lib Dems or even Labour. A crucial part of the decline of the Liberals in the 1920s was the defection of senior figures both to Labour (like Haldane) and to the Tories (like Churchill).
Had the Tories done worse in the election, or Labour been more popular since the vote, then a party split would have been more likely. The fate of Tory MPs who peeled off to the Lib Dems over Brexit, none of whom flourished, may also have been a warning lesson, while Farage to the right operates as an exclusive one-man demagogue, discouraging elite defections. It was striking that the Tory leadership election saw little ideological debate, and no pressure towards a split. Badenoch said almost nothing definite at all, and her election hasn’t so far led to a single defection.
Badenoch’s slogan was “Renewal 2030”. But how much does the party need to change to win? It clearly needs to become a professional fighting machine once again, and there are already signs of this happening in local council byelections since July. Ideologically, it may be tempting to simply position the party at a lower tax point than Labour, promising “reform” to justify the difference without much detail and hoping for the best.
If the public perceive that the government’s reform agenda is not bringing about long-neglected change then the concept of renewal under Conservatives, who are at ease with the status quo they created, becomes a marketable alternative.
