This year’s Conservative party conference contains a number of examples of a party having some genuinely original thoughts, rather than just running along the same tramlines as everyone else. The Bayeux Tapestry parody that the party has produced in order to attack its opponents is striking because it is a much more creative attack job than the usual amusing mugs, beers and T-shirts that you can normally pick up at a conference. On a much more serious level, Kemi Badenoch’s The Right Way pamphlet is an attempt to show the leader’s working on the big issues facing the country, rather than simply presenting a suite of policies as a fait accompli.
It is exactly the kind of thing a party should be doing as it rebuilds from an historic election defeat at the end of a long and exhausting spell in government. The sense that everyone is doing the right thing is probably why so many people seem to think that the mood at the conference is pretty upbeat: they’ve got a leader who they are increasingly comfortable with and who is more popular than the party rather than acting as a drag on its poll rating, and Labour has just replaced its prime minister, so things aren’t looking rosy for the government.
Perhaps the shadow cabinet feels safer being in Badenoch’s shadow
The problem is that the Tories might not have the luxury of the sort of long recovery needed by a party that looked so visibly desperate to be out of power for at least the final two years before they finally left government. There is still a chance Andy Burnham might go to the country early, and then the Conservative party will not have time to do this kind of slow thinking about what it stands for. Instead, it will need to come up with retail offers for voters, have frontbenchers who seem to have energy and their own profile, and appear ready to pull together to function effectively in office in a way that it had stopped doing when still in government the last time. Those memories of the last time the Tories were in power are, of course, still recent and visceral enough to mean voters are not yet ready to trust the Conservative party.
The lack of energy and profile on Badenoch’s frontbench does remain striking. And so is the lack of energy in the wider party. Much of the focus of the reaction to The Right Way has been on the parallels with Margaret Thatcher and on what this document says about Badenoch’s view of the state, of the economy and of institutions. But it is also worth remarking on the fact that this is the only significant pamphlet that any Conservative has published since the party went into opposition.
Normally when a party is recovering its soul and identity after a defeat, there is a proper battle of ideas and pamphlets aplenty from one ginger group or another. When Labour started out in opposition under Ed Miliband, you could barely move for launches of yet another book by ambitious backbenchers about the new direction for the left. The shelves are still yawningly empty for the equivalent round of publishing from the Conservatives this time around.
Part of the blame for this must lie with Badenoch herself. Her didactic approach to party policy means that grandees and excited new MPs alike don’t seem fully comfortable in taking part in a battle of ideas, lest it be interpreted as a departure from the party line.
The two key issues currently are the ECHR and net zero, where candidates have to toe that line or face being blocked. As such, the only original thoughts appear to be coming from Badenoch herself, rather than anyone beneath her. That might work in opposition, but a prime minister simply cannot have original thoughts about every single department. They need their senior colleagues to lead on policy for themselves.
Perhaps the shadow cabinet feels safer being in Badenoch’s shadow; perhaps its members are still too exhausted from the election defeat and the burden of being in a parliamentary party now so small that everyone has to take on a lot more work. Or perhaps they genuinely don’t have any new original thoughts yet. Whatever the explanation, there’s a lot more work to be done before the Tory party can be in a justifiably upbeat mood.
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