It’s difficult to remember a time when both the Tories and Labour were simultaneously imploding. Normally one party’s difficulties are a godsend for the other.
But UK politics is fracturing and the established order with it.
“The Conservative Party is over, over as a national party, over as the principal opposition to the left,” MP Danny Kruger said earlier this month after defecting to Nigel Farage’s right-wing populist Reform UK.
The East Wiltshire politician, a lifelong Tory activist, campaigner and formerly David Cameron’s chief speech writer, was the first sitting MP in the current parliament to defect to the Reform party.
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Kruger’s party shot, delivered with a gleeful Farage looking on, was self-serving and vitriolic – politics is a blood sport – but for many it was accurate read on the current Tory malaise.
After a decade of infighting, several disastrous spells in government and a revolving door leadership (they’ve had six leaders in 10 years), the party looks worn out.
A recent YouGov poll put the party that has dominated British politics for the last 100 years in fourth place behind Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats with just 16 per cent of the popular vote, its lowest vote share with YouGov.
History buffs and psephologists have begun to speculate on whether the Tories might now be on the same trajectory as the Liberal Party was in the 1920s.
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The party of Lloyd George and Henry Asquith was riven by factional infighting and defections (several related to the Irish question) and went on to be evicted from its half of the political spectrum by a resurgent Labour Party whose vote had been amplified by the Representation of the People Act of 1918 which enfranchised the working class.
The UK’s first-past-the-post voting system has for more than a century blocked the emergence of new political forces while giving the Labour/Tory duopoly an ironclad grip on power, but a populist backlash over immigration appears to have brought the country to a tipping point.
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Out of the 1,641 seats available in the country’s recent local elections, Reform UK came away with 677, just over 41 per cent.
The average share of the vote for both Labour and the Tories across the 1,282 wards fell to a record combined low of 36.8 per cent. Before that it had never been lower than 50 per cent combined.
The Christian Democrat/Socialist binary that held sway in Europe for much of the 20th century has been smashed to pieces by two decades of mass migration and accelerating inequality, the defining socio-economic trends of the era.
The ruling parties in Italy and France were only formed in 2012 and 2016 respectively, making them parvenus in political terms, but also reflective of the current fluidity.
Tribalism has engulfed European conservatism and Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative Party appears to be next on the chopping block.
Brexit has played a major role, fracturing the party’s core demographic.
“In prioritising the more working-class voters in the north and midlands, the Tories, in essence, sacked the other half of its electoral coalition,” Financial Times political commentator Robert Shrimsley wrote recently.
“They scorned the major cities, graduates and much of the well-heeled south. But that Leave-voting demographic is more drawn to Faragist politics.”
Badenoch has failed to match Farage on immigration and fails to distinguish her party’s position on immigration from that of Reform’s.
That her party failed to keep a lid on illegal immigration when in power for the last 10 years doesn’t help.
In a bid to halt this trend, she has pivoted to focusing more on the UK’s ailing economy where Labour is seen as weak and where Reform is seen to lack credibility.
Former party bigwig James Cleverly’s return to the shadow cabinet reflects this gear change.
Badenoch attributed her party’s wipeout performance in the general election to its having “talked right, but governed left”, the sort of maxim that appeals to the party’s traditional base.
But her vision of a low-tax, less-regulated Britain is the sort of jaded Thatcherism that every Tory leader articulates.
It cuts no ice with voters inflamed by mass immigration and illegal Channel crossings as the opinion polls consistently indicate.
Badenoch‘s main party rival, Robert Jenrick, seems intent on pushing the party further right to chase Reform, a shift that will further alienate its young, professional class base. He also seems to be openly plotting against her.
Like the Liberal Party of the 1920s, both wings of the Conservative Party now seem on mutually exclusive tracks. They would probably have split by now but for the UK’s idiosyncratic electoral system.
What started as a Eurosceptic schism during the John Major era in the 1990s has grown into a compound fracture on immigration.
Former prime minister David Cameron’s attempt to seal fissure through 2016’s Brexit referendum only succeeded in blowing it wide open.
Boris Johnson and Liz Truss maxed out this dynamic and left office in a hail of recrimination from which the party has not recovered and may not recover.
Badenoch looks paralysed by her predicament.
