Last year’s Conservative conference, held in the aftermath of a crushing election defeat, was billed as a parade for leadership candidates to set out their recovery plans. The talent pool was shallow. The contest winner, Kemi Badenoch, said nothing to suggest she was equipped for the challenge of renewing her party as a potential force of government. So it has proved.

Mrs Badenoch goes into her first party conference as leader with the Tories in worse shape than they were in a year ago. Their opinion poll rating is consistently lower than the 23.7% they managed under Rishi Sunak in the general election. One MP has defected to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK. More will follow if they don’t see a route back to power under their current leader.

The Tory leader has made her job harder by adopting a shallow, ideologically blinkered analysis of the challenge. She started from the premise that her party had “talked right but governed left” – a perverse revision of history given that she was describing prime ministers who implemented austerity, a hard Brexit, a sequence of increasingly draconian anti-immigration laws and, in the case of Liz Truss, a wild tax-cutting mini-budget that detonated the economy. In no sensible framing of political debate does that count as a legacy of leftwing government.

Viewing the Conservative predicament through such a warped lens leads Mrs Badenoch into strategic misjudgments. Since she doesn’t hear anything in radical rightwing rhetoric around Brexit and immigration that might alienate mainstream voters, she has no understanding of why the Liberal Democrats were able to win scores of seats in what had once been her party’s affluent southern heartlands. Her belief that Britain is suffocating under the dead hand of woke bureaucracy prevents her engaging with the real causes of inadequate public service provision and the role that budget cuts played in voter discontent when her party was in charge.

Following a faulty compass in a quest for ideas that might capture public attention naturally leads to terrible policy choices. Hence, for example, this week’s announcement that a Conservative government would repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act. That is a retreat from climate leadership – abandoning Britain’s responsibility and handing the green industrial future, and its economic upside, to other countries. It also signals alignment with a fanatical rightwing agenda associated with Reform UK, and heavily influenced by Donald Trump’s Maga movement, where denial of climate science is rife. Threatening to quit the European convention on human rights is similarly reckless posturing – trading legal stability and international credibility for cheap nationalist applause.

But if Mrs Badenoch wanted to police the boundary between traditional Conservatism and fanatical rightwing demagoguery, she would have disciplined Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, who strikes anti-immigrant postures that cross the line into aggressive nationalism and who is obviously angling to replace her at the top of the party. Mr Jenrick undermines his leader’s authority with impunity because she lacks a coherent alternative programme to the craven tribute to Mr Farage that he represents. Mrs Badenoch needs a credible plan to give her party some more worthwhile purpose if she is to stand any chance of keeping her job for long, let alone leading the Tories into a general election. It is possible. Her record over the past year suggests it is unlikely.