THE BIG READ: The Tories cannot recover while "One Nation" grandees continue preaching the politics of yesteryear

Recent weeks have seen an astonishing array of vote-losing, non-credible and already-failed positions taken up by household name Conservatives. Badenoch must get a grip

Photo by 愚木混株 cdd20 on Unsplash

IN AN interview with the Telegraph published on February 10, Kemi Badenoch referenced the Conservative party – her Conservative party – as being “a broad church”.

Regular readers of this blog will know this is a phrase that always sets my teeth on edge. Because what senior Tories comfort themselves is an asset – the ability to accommodate widely differing strands of political thought within one party – has actually become a disabling negative.

We saw that over Brexit, where the Tories were the only party substantially split between Leavers and Remainers. This lack of a dominant and settled stance meant they royally screwed up the negotiations over our terms of departure.

We saw it over stopping the illegal Channel migrant crossings too. When Rishi Sunak pretended to be ready to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights and its supervisory court in Strasbourg, leading figures in the “One Nation” caucus of Tory MPs reminded him he didn’t have the votes in parliament to deliver such a thing. And so the boats weren’t stopped.

For millions of voters who understand that our political system is failing drastically and that a whole new framework for politics is needed, based around the primacy of the nation state, the idea of voting Conservative thus seems ridiculous – a veritable “unlucky dip”. The basic policy mix that you will get delivered depends on which faction in the parliamentary party has the upper hand at any given moment.

Yet, even by the standards of the Tories, the last few weeks has seen the sending out of an astonishing number of disastrous signals about ideological confusion, division and contradiction in Tory ranks.

Exhibit One: Shadow foreign secretary Priti Patel seeks to present the enormous and catastrophic “Boris Wave” of low-skilled, culturally non-aligned immigration as basically fine. And keeps her job.

Exhibit Two: Former Justice Secretary David Gauke (yes, I know he is not in the party again now after having briefly rejoined last summer) pens a report for Keir Starmer that could be fairly summarised (with apologises to The Simpsons) as: “Release the prisoners, Smithers.”

Exhibit Three: Former Attorney-General Dominic Grieve (I’ve no idea if he is still in the party or not) is unveiled as the head of a review into law on “Islamophobia” that has been set up by Labour deputy PM Angela Rayner.

Exhibit Four: Tory peer and London Assembly Member Shaun Bailey is unveiled as a founder member of a parliamentary Black Caucus being set up by Labour leftwinger Dawn Butler – the MP who recited that horrible poem during Black History Month in which she claimed to be one of the “chosen ones” and mocked white people for having skin that burns in the sun.

Exhibit Five: Tory former minister Greg Hands pens an article for the Conservative Home website welcoming the utterly barmy new “Carbon Budget” produced by the unelected zealots on the Climate Change Committee. As Hands helpfully reminds us in his article: “Conservatives have endorsed all the previous six carbon budgets, even legislating most of them into law.”

Exhibit Six: Former Cabinet ministers James Cleverly and Andrew Mitchell, both still Tory MPs, come out publicly and separately against the cut in foreign aid announced by Keir Starmer, generally wanging on about “soft power”. This opinion is then underlined by former defence minister Tobias Ellwood (no longer an MP).

Exhibit Seven: Another former Tory Cabinet minister, Rory Stewart, has an epic whine about Donald Trump’s cuts to the US foreign aid budget in which he reveals his own wife’s aid organisation, “Turquoise Mountain”, has had $1m of US government funding withdrawn. Turquoise Mountain is then exposed as running programmes teaching Afghans about interpreting western modern art, especially a notorious installation of a urinal as a gallery exhibit (Note to self: must remember to refer to Stewart as “Latrine Boy” from now on).

So that’s high profile Tories or former Tories hitting the headlines defending hyper mass-immigration, backing a “progressive” law and order agenda, cogitating special protections against criticism for the Islamic belief system, helping launch an ID politics black power initiative, heralding more economically-crippling Net Zero measures, condemning reductions in Britain’s own bloated aid budget and bemoaning the Trump administration slicing off funding for an aid programme so ridiculous that one could not, as Richard Littlejohn would say, have “made it up”.

I, you – we – are presumably expected to chill out about all this because we need to understand that “it’s a broad church”, this Tory thing. And no doubt, yes, there are other senior Tories who oppose all this stuff and take a view more similar to our own.

But consider Reform, the rival brand in the centre-right market place. Would any of