Noisy anti-Brexit protester Steve Bray is the bane of British politicians, endlessly taunting them at their events with loud music. His absence from this week’s Tory conference in Manchester says much about that party’s struggle to stay relevant.
Bray just wasn’t bothered to turn up.
“Sorry, but I have more important engagements like washing the car, catching up with emails [and] weeding the garden,” he said. “Who the f**k are the Tories?”
Who are they, indeed? That was the question Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch desperately tried to answer this week, as a poll for YouGov and Sky showed half her party’s members don’t want her to lead them into the next election.
RM Block
The party has recently languished at just 16 per cent in opinion polls versus Reform UK’s 30-plus per cent. Polling expert John Curtice told a shell-shocked room of Tories at a Demos think-tank event in the Midland hotel on Sunday evening they faced an existential crisis.
He said research data suggested the party, one of the oldest organised political forces in the world, ran the risk of losing its role as a conventional party of government in the UK. “I think it’s that serious,” said Curtice, a University of Strathclyde politics professor.
He may as well have been the Grim Reaper as he laid out slide after devastating slide illustrating how Nigel Farage’s Reform had destroyed the voter coalition built by former Tory leader Boris Johnson. What little air was left in the over-full room was sucked out.
What’s worse, Curtice said, research showed the party was still blamed by most voters for the state of Britain, especially its flaccid economy and its tortuous struggles to get a grip on migration.
That was “remarkable” for an opposition party 15 months after an election, he said.
[ Is Britain’s ailing Conservative Party finally over? ]
Delegates to the heavily guarded Tory jamboree at the city-centre Manchester Convention Complex were greeted by a big sign slung high over the door bearing a two-part slogan: “Stronger economy, stronger borders.”
To date, Curtice argued, the Tories had mostly sought to base their putative fightback on borders, adopting an increasingly hardline stance on migration such as Badenoch’s announcement she would pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), which is often the legal basis for stymying refugee deportations.
He argued immigration may prove too tough for the party to crack and it could “never out-Reform Reform”. Curtice suggested to the Tory faithful – what little faith they had left – that it might be better advised basing a fightback on the economy because it might be easier.
Whether to focus more on culture or pockets: that was the political choice for the Tories.
Two frontbenchers and rumoured would-be replacements circling Badenoch – shadow chancellor Mel Stride and shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick – laid out competing visions of this quandary in separate appearances on Monday.
The Tory conference was not quite funereal, but it was a little flat. They tried. There were the obligatory nostalgic nods towards their hero Margaret Thatcher, such as mannequins dressed in the actual outfits she wore at famous events, such as the white number she was wrapped in when she rode on top of an army tank in Germany in 1986.
They also built a tongue-in-cheek Labour “Circus of Despair”. It included a whack-a-taxpayer game based on whack-a-mole, and one inspired by a circus high striker where you use a hammer to bang a lever up to strike a bell at the top of a tower.
The Tory version was “How High Can She Go?” based on chancellor Rachel Reeves’s borrowing.
But try as they might, the Tories could not muster anything like the sort of giddy atmosphere seen at, for example, the Liberal Democrats conference last month.
Stride underlined his credentials on Monday as a leader of the “fight on the economy” wing. He gave a speech promising the economic stability of fiscal rectitude through £47 billion (€54 billion) of spending cuts, sweetened by £5,000 rebates for young homebuyers.
But Britain must “live within our means,” he said.
Yet, somewhat embarrassingly, Stride began his speech to a half-empty room. Fiscal rectitude may be a traditional Tory value, but it didn’t put bums on seats.
Jenrick, meanwhile, had no such problems a few hours later in another room upstairs where he laid out his vision for a Britain with ironclad borders. The queues to get in started almost an hour before the event started.
He didn’t disappoint, throwing plenty of red meat, such as his dismissal of some Gaza protests as “a f**king disgrace”. He also damned Badenoch, whom he is seen as wanting to usurp, with faint praise for finally agreeing to withdraw from the ECHR a year after he first suggested it.
Badenoch, meanwhile, had insisted to a champagne-swilling room of MPs the previous night at the backbench 1922 Committee’s joint party with online publication Conservative Home that she would lead the party into the next election.
“People keep writing the Tories off and I keep telling them they are wrong,” she said.
The room roared and backslapped its approval.
If she cannot deliver, others are ready to take her place. The party’s future may depend on it.
