Conservative party

Last year’s Conservative party conference was a difficult one. Reform UK was leading the polls; the local election results had been as painful as the general election the year before; and the story at conference was not Kemi Badenoch’s successes, but speculation over Robert Jenrick’s attempts to replace her. Adversity, however, proved her friend. The past year has seen Badenoch’s leadership blossom, with confident public appearances, a by-election victory in Aberdeen and Jenrick’s fortuitous exit to Reform. This week, she stood up in Birmingham as a leader truly in command of her party – and with a plausible route back into government. There are still a great many obstacles to overcome.

In the 2024 American and British national elections, it was no mystery why the incumbents lost. Both the Democratic and Conservative parties had abandoned their core principles. Democrats veered so far left that they fell off the edge of the world. Tories squandered 14 years in power competing with the sopping opposition over who could be more wet, a strategy perfectly designed to alienate the entire electorate. Left-wing voters will not – surprise – vote ‘Conservative’. Conservative voters want – surprise – conservative representatives and instead got sheep in sheep’s clothing. Although I’m seldom keen on purity tests, Kemi Badenoch now heads a party that resembles Britain’s sewage-mucked rivers, and it could use some purifying.

Despite a career of nearly half a century in public life, Enoch Powell is generally remembered for one utterance only: the so-called ‘Rivers of Blood’ speech he made in Birmingham on 20 April 1968, in which he voiced his opposition to the race relations legislation being taken through parliament by the then Labour government. Powell was the Conservative opposition’s defence spokesman. His speech threw the leader of his party, Edward Heath, into a profound panic, and he sacked Powell immediately, initiating decades of assertions that Powell was racially prejudiced. Powell always said – entirely honestly – that he never made a speech about race: just speeches about immigration policy and his profound disagreement with how it was usually managed.

Easter is being celebrated by millions of families across our country. It’s one of those moments when we should come together, pause and remember what really matters. As a mother with a very busy job, I value this time with my children more and more each year. It is a time for faith, family and fun. Britain is a Christian country. Our values, our customs and many of our greatest institutions were shaped by Christianity. That is why, for so many people, going to church at Easter still matters. I teach my children that it is not just a ritual. It is part of who we are. That is why this is a good time to talk about churches. Churches matter. They are not just places of worship.

Freed from the burden of choosing a prospective government, by-elections are an opportunity for voters to tell the political class how they really feel. It is therefore no great surprise that the people of Gorton and Denton, until now a solid Labour heartland, have called on the uber-left Greens to give the status quo a kicking, with Reform coming in second. For the Conservatives, the more interesting story is not the Greens’ success in outer Manchester, but what the Green surge at the national level says about the voters who have been drifting into Zack Polanski’s orbit. The Greens have previously benefited from the agreeable vagueness of their brand. Green is a comforting word, smelling of cut grass and virtue.

Over the last week, I have been stalking Pierre Poilievre. The leader of the Canadian Conservative Party has been in Westminster to renew the bonds of Anglospheric amity; consequently, I had the pleasure of watching him speak on two successive evenings. The arc of history is long, but it bends towards Robert Jenrick Until a year or so ago, Poilievre was the Prince Across the Atlantic – a punchy and pugnacious Conservative would who had united his party around a popular and populist message of more housebuilding, tackling inflation and championing those working-class voters that Canada’s Liberals had taken for granted for too long. He built a hefty lead over Justin Trudeau and topped the polls among young voters.

In the summer of 1643, as the dispute between Charles I and parliament raged on, Sir William Waller wrote to his friend Ralph Hopton to lament with ‘what a perfect hatred’ he detested ‘this war without an enemy’. The hardening of hearts between the Conservatives and Reform UK resembles a similarly self-defeating civil war – a family dispute more public and bitter even than the Fall of the House of Beckham. Just over a year ago, Robert Jenrick narrowly lost the Tory leadership contest to Kemi Badenoch. For some, his defection to Nigel Farage’s party was the overdue exit of a shameless careerist who never accepted coming second.

Contemplating a new year always raises questions. Was there a Third Protocol? What was wrong with Oral-A? Can Keir Starmer survive 2026 as prime minister? It is the biggest question in politics this year and the fact that it does not have an easy answer illustrates the mess Starmer has got himself into over the past 18 months. A few days before Christmas, a senior figure in No. 10 outlined how Labour’s high command still believes the winds will change for the party in 2026: a ‘virtuous circle’ of falling interest rates and inflation, more investment, growth, and rising confidence in the government among the public and the Parliamentary Labour Party. Another Starmer loyalist noted the old adage: ‘It’s always darkest before the dawn.