What a Conservative Party conference opening day lacked in zing – as a subdued audience trickled into a convention centre that felt like an oversize suit wrapped around a dwindling party – it made up for with a rollercoaster of announcements on what now constitutes its core beliefs.
“The facts of life are Conservative,” Kemi Badenoch put it yesterday, echoing Margaret Thatcher. But the tone was a volatile blend of old Tory tunes, sudden lurches and new commitments – a nod in the direction of Reform UK.
Labour declared Reform the prime enemy last week at its conference in Liverpool, only to announce many immigration and asylum curbs it would not long ago have denounced as a distasteful brew from the right-wing Farage kitchen.
The Tory neck-craning in Nigel Farage’s direction is even more marked.
Badenoch took the stage in a pristine white combination and sounded steadier than she must surely feel, with polls showing Conservatives in the low to mid-teens and a “200-year-old party” fretting openly about whether it survives the next election.
She told me a few days ago that she knew that was tending to a “distressed asset” with “quarterly returns” tanking and unsettled shareholders. The remedy she will present this week will attempt to appeal to Conservative-minded voters now marching across all demographics to the beat of the Farage band.
She will do so by offering a kind of Tory Pepsi to Nigel’s Coca-Cola: undistinguishable in the core taste, but with a strong brand distinction. So if Farage speaks of mass removals of incomers with no right to remain, Badenoch’s core argument was that Tories could manage it better.
The trouble is that to all but the blind-taste aficionados, these offerings feel very similar: Conservatives would now scrap the Climate Change Act and its binding carbon emissions target – having told a business gathering only a short while ago that she simply wanted to move the target further out to help kickstart growth.
Everything that was semi-skimmed Reform about Conservatism is now the full-fat offering. Another volte-face was that Badenoch now supports quitting the European Convention on Human Rights, a step she had long said she was unwilling to take because she was unsure it was an effective response to immigration and asylum abuse. Now, with the veneer of a report by a Conservative peer and barrister to explain the reverse, she too wants out.
But one other major invisible hand in ghostly evidence here at Manchester was Donald Trump, as the party embraced an US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) equivalent in a prospective “Removals Force” tasked with deporting 150,000 people a year to end irregular migration into the UK. If the name sounds a bit like a relocation company, the details are red-blooded in sweeping powers to use facial recognition to spot illegal immigrants and powers for the police to conduct immigration checks on everyone they stop or arrest.
square KITTY DONALDSON Kemi Badenoch is treating leadership like a maths exam. It could work
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Similarities with ICE agencies are evident. They also throw up many practical questions Badenoch and her team won’t want to answer in short order. This was about positioning – not policy.
London’s Met Police is embroiled in a massive controversy after secret filming at Charing Cross station unveiled horrific attitudes of racism and misogyny.
Police reform – once a subject taken seriously by Conservatives as the “law and order” party – has stalled. Adding the task of targeting immigrants for removal to the roster of police priorities risks as many of the erratic effects as the Trumpian equivalent.
Putting aside the rights and wrongs of this, it is a promise that would be hard to fulfil – without a Donald Trump-inspired leader. But Badenoch is not that – she is a flinty right-of-centre Tory, being dragged rightwards to stay in contention, taking steps in Reform’s direction while arguing that Conservatives would do better at delivering similar outcomes. Being better at delivering Faragism without Nigel Farage is a fragile line to tread with credibility – because the political space the Tories seek to occupy without a formal association or pact with Farage is too narrow to sound distinctive.
As delegates left the hall for a recovery drink in the Midland Hotel, scene of so many triumphant Tory conference after-parties, Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart” was on the sound system. More likely, it already has. The job of this conference is simply to get through the break-up.
Anne McElvoy is executive editor at Politico and host of the podcast Politics at Sam and Anne’s
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