If last year’s general election marked the death of the Conservative party, this week’s conference in Manchester is the wake. Based on the policies unveiled in recent days, one can only assume there’s an open bar.

Watching Kemi Badenoch kick things off on Sunday by setting out plans to leave the European convention on human rights (EHCR), it was hard to know what to focus on: the unhinged idea or remembering who exactly Badenoch was. Kimmy, is it? I’m trying to place her. Since being elected last November, the former engineer has turned being the leader of the opposition into a part-time job to the extent that you half expected conference to start with a missing person’s appeal.

Still, she’s here now! And she’s making up for lost time. Badenoch’s pledge to get rid of the landmark Climate Change Act was dismissed as “catastrophic” by former prime minister Theresa May, business groups, scientists and the Church of England before delegates had even made it up the M40. Not that we should be worried. You can trust Badenoch’s scientific credentials. She thinks she was offered a place to study for a (pre) medical degree.

And she’s not stopping at the climate. Badenoch wants you to know she’s up for a bonfire of treaties to curb immigration and protect Britain from “the radical Islamist ideology” and “values hostile to our own”. The Human Rights Act! Legal aid for migrants! Basic decency! Everything must go!

Meanwhile, the shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, set out plans to cut social security spending by £23bn by limiting benefits to people with UK citizenship, removing it even from those who have been in the country for decades and have indefinite leave to remain. Asked by the BBC how such people could survive financially, Stride said: “If they’ve come from other parts of the world, they would have an option to return to those other parts.”

It all rather has the air of your ex-boyfriend screaming incoherently on the driveway, begging for another chance. Suddenly, it’s very clear why you blocked his number.

Badenoch will break convention on Wednesday by making a second leader’s speech at conference, not dissimilar to a supermarket 2 for 1 deal to offload out-of-date meat. With their number of MPs slashed from 365 to 121, two-thirds of local council seats wiped out, and Reform dominating in the polls, Tory conference 2025 is not so much a quest for relevance but a cry for help. Few cries were more repulsive than the promise to create a £1.6bn “removals force” based on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (Ice) currently dragging naked children from their beds in the US.

Britain’s so-called natural party of government and one of the most successful electoral forces in history has been reduced to cosplaying as Donald Trump, pitching a briefcase of divisive and inhumane policies in order to get some attention from the electorate. At the time of writing, part-time employee Badenoch has not got round to explaining what would happen to the 150,000 people she wants to deport. As she told the BBC: “I’m tired of us asking all of these irrelevant questions about where should they go?”

At least one person at conference seems to be enjoying themselves. Though he denies it, self-avowed non-xenophobe Robert Jenrick is said to be using the time out of office to soft launch his leadership campaign, with allies reportedly collecting letters of no confidence ready for when the party rules say Badenoch can be challenged next month. Or as one shadow minister put it ahead of conference: “I’m going there to be loyal. Can I say that about my colleagues? No, but then some of them are twats.”

Quite. It tells you something about where the Conservative party now resides that Jenrick’s early leadership rival could be Katie Lam – a woman who has only been an MP for 15 months and mainly talks about migrants and sexual assault. “We already have British sex criminals,” Lam recently tweeted. “We don’t need any more!” Hard to disagree with the logic there.

Any progressive would be well within their rights to feel rather smug watching all this. From Brexit to austerity, Windrush to Covid VIP lanes, the Tory vandals of Britain are getting further and further away from the levers of power and no one could deserve obscurity more. And yet it is hard to be celebratory. The electoral decline of the Conservative party being followed by the rise of Reform feels akin to an exterminator finally getting rid of the rats from your basement only to say he’s found a termite infestation rotting the walls. Out with one, in with another.

The death of the Tories – if such a thing has not been greatly exaggerated – has not meant the death of its economic and social project. British politics has continued to drag rightwards long after Liz Truss was ousted in a sports hall at 6am, pulled by the tide of global rightwing populism and a conservative press to new darker waters. Indeed, ideas about immigration that would have been seen as fringe even a few years ago are now being applauded from the main stage at the Conservative party conference.

“We have listened, we have learned and we have changed,” Badenoch told delegates on Sunday. But the Tories have only listened to Nigel Farage, they have learned nothing, and if they have changed, it is in the same way a crab spider morphs its colour to catch prey. The real question is, what will happen if the party gets a leader with some work ethic and skill? The progressive fight is not over – it’s just begun.

skip past newsletter promotion

after newsletter promotion

• Frances Ryan is a Guardian columnist

• Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.