Much of democratic politics is about getting people’s attention. That’s a particular problem for struggling, less-than-compelling leaders. The further your party falls in the polls, the larger the temptation to launch dramatic, supposedly transformational policies. It’s like speaking more and more loudly to someone who has stopped listening.
Thus this week’s Conservative conference in Manchester, with the party at historic lows in the polls, featured a frenzy of policy announcements, on once-successful Tory themes such as tax cuts, law and order, welfare and immigration, that were often made to half-empty rooms. Expanses of blue carpet had been installed in the huge, barn-like convention centre – as if to reassure delegates that the party still had an identity – yet much of the time they were eerily deserted. The Conservatives, famed and feared for their durability, seem to be disappearing before our eyes.
Their current crisis, probably their worst ever, is not just one of popularity; but of leadership, political positioning, ideology and credibility. Within a few minutes of arriving at the conference, I overheard two delegates, both suited Tory Boys of the kind that traditionally express total confidence, having a conversation that would become very familiar, away from the fixed grins of the main stage events.
“I don’t think the Conservatives are in a position to win,” said one delegate, self-protectively referring to his party in the third person. “They’re in a position to stay alive.” The other interjected: “If you replace her [leader Kemi Badenoch] now, you’re polling at 10%. I think she should resign in 2028. Be a sacrificial lamb.” The other nodded. “We don’t have many [leadership] choices. A lot of good people have lost their seats …”
Even more drastic solutions to the crisis are also being considered. According to a new YouGov poll, almost half the Conservatives’ shrinking membership support a merger with Reform UK – the erasure of the Tories as an independent party after almost 200 or almost 350 years, depending on how you define their hazy origins. British Conservatives can be brutally pragmatic, and the defection of their voters, members and politicians to Reform may soon reach a tipping point. “As long as there’s a rightwing party,” another delegate told me who had been a Tory for decades, “I don’t mind which one it is.”
Yet frequently in Manchester the Conservative crisis created not equanimity but feverishness. Each new policy or rhetorical trope seemed more rightwing, and often more authoritarian, than the last. Deporting migrants, deregulating business, disciplining schoolchildren, dumping net zero targets, detaining more minor criminals, dismantling the supposedly liberal judiciary: all the favourite preoccupations of modern rightwing populism and much older, free-market Conservatism were recited like articles of faith.
Fringe meetings with hard-right themes were better attended than most events in the main hall, with chairs running out and sweat shining on speakers’ foreheads in fuggy rooms. At one gathering, Chris Philp spoke so fast, almost ranting, about the “scourge of illegal migration”, and how “many of those migrants in hotels commit crimes and work illegally”, that he sounded more like a hotel protester than the shadow home secretary.
Elsewhere on the fringe, the Tory peer David Frost had an ominous explanation for why their party is radicalising. “A good chunk of the public is probably to the right of where [Nigel] Farage is.” The shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick, told a fringe event: “Public opinion is shifting very fast right now, on a whole range of issues.” In his speech from the main stage, he put it more melodramatically: “The collapse of the old order is in sight. A new one is coming!”
Offstage, his replacement of Badenoch as leader was constantly discussed. Yet the argument that more hard-right policies will revive the Tories, under him or anyone else, is undermined by the fact that Reform, and Tommy Robinson, are already catering to that market. Moreover, Badenoch has already moved the Conservatives sharply rightwards without halting their decline. After years of austerity, acute inequality and growing public anger at the privatised utilities, Reform’s promise to address these issues, however partially and cynically, makes their reactionary populism more in tune with the times than the Tory version, which is still stuck in the 1980s, dreaming of a small state and endlessly dynamic businesses. In the more depopulated zones of this year’s conference, there were sometimes as many cardboard cut-outs of Margaret Thatcher as delegates.
Badenoch’s speech on Wednesday – her second of the conference, a break with precedent that suggested a desperation to be heard – pledged “a new approach” to Britain’s problems. But it stayed in the traditional Tory comfort zone of promising to liberate individuals and businesses while reining in the state. Even the speech’s supposed big surprise, a vow to abolish stamp duty, had a retro flavour: a tax cut that would most benefit the wealthiest in the old Thatcherite heartlands of southern England. Nothing Badenoch said suggested that she or her party were doing the self-questioning and fresh thinking that their dire position ought to prompt.
If you’re not a Conservative, and have suffered from their decades of dominance, it’s tempting simply to relish their difficulties. But the attention-seeking in Manchester this week was just the most extreme and undignified version of a neediness that also afflicts other parties, in an era of tuned-out voters, low election turnouts and political fragmentation. Liberal Democrat leader Ed Davey’s cartoonish stunts and Farage’s hyperbolic press conferences, while seemingly more successful as political theatre, are also pleas to voters to notice their parties. Meanwhile Labour’s conference in Liverpool last week, which tried to use attacks on Reform to make the government’s underlying principles more compelling, has so far generated no improvement in the polls.
after newsletter promotion
If this country was relatively stable and contented, then the current disconnect between politicians and voters might not matter much. It could even be seen as a healthy scepticism: democracy preventing the buildup of deference to power.
But Britain isn’t in a benign state. And beyond liberal democracy, there are always other political options, as autocrats across the world are demonstrating. The other parties could look at the Tories’ half-empty conference hall and see their own futures. Voters could look at it and see a bigger warning.
Leave a Reply