Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch understand best what Right-leaning Tory voters want (Image: PA)
When the Tories lost the 1997 general election it took them 13 years to get back into power, and only then via a coalition with the Lib Dems. The party did not win another parliamentary majority of their own until 2015, and that was wafer-thin. A proper Tory working majority was not achieved until 2019, some 22 years after the thrashing administered by Tony Blair.
Given that the Conservatives achieved a worse result this July in terms of seats – 121 MPs compared with 165 back in 1997 – the temptation to write them off for at least the next decade is strong. Yet as Tory MPs prepare to whittle four remaining leadership contenders down to two this week, it’s suddenly possible to conceive of the party roaring back to popularity much faster.
If the new leader gets things right, then in just a year from now the Conservatives could have a substantial and sustainable poll lead over Labour.
The main reason for this can be encapsulated in the observation that is not Tony Blair. Where Blair’s victory was based on a 43 per cent vote share, Starmer’s loveless landslide was won on 10 points – and four million votes – fewer.
And even since the election, he has governed appallingly, drastically undershooting the modest expectations the country had of him: axing the winter fuel allowance, scrapping the Rwanda deportation plan, giving away British overseas territory, indulging in epic freeloading, barmy energy policies, letting criminals out of jail early and talking the economy into a downturn.
This Thursday will mark his first 100 days in power, but he’s already there for the taking. Of the remaining Tory leadership contenders, the centrist has won headlines for his comment that the party must “be more normal”.
But this approach, based on the Left-wing notion that who don’t go along with our progressive establishment consensus are “weird”, is wrong.
What the actually need to be is more conservative. They lost a fifth of their 2019 vote to ’s Reform UK party and another fifth to abstention.
According to the polling data, by far the biggest reason for this was their failure in office to reduce immigration.
Other major gripes of voters who deserted them included soft justice, political correctness running riot in Whitehall and excessive taxation, as well as worries about the state of the NHS post-.
In other words, they lost mainly because they stopped delivering conservative outcomes and instead went chasing approval from those who would never vote for them.
Two contenders, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, appear to understand this.
In Jenrick’s case, he intends to build a Tory revival around radical pledges to restore trust in the party on immigration and will fight to take Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights and its supervisory court as part of a policy of ensuring the swift deportation of every illegal foreign arrival.
Mrs Badenoch, meanwhile, can point to a stellar record of fighting for conservative values throughout the last parliament, not least in opposing those who would divide us on grounds of race and women’s rights.
Britain is crying out for some gutsy home truths. We know too many people are taking a free ride on our welfare state; that ghettoes of anti-Britishness have sprung up in our cities; that police need to stop and search more, not less; that the tax burden needs cutting, not further increasing; that the public sector needs an efficiency drive rather than just having more funds thrown at it.
If the do not become convincing exponents for such “Right-wing” policies, they can forget about winning back that fifth of their old support from Reform UK – and the fifth that stayed at home will swing increasingly behind Farage. By this time next year, after more Labour disasters, the will either have harnessed the momentum for conservatism sweeping the rest of the Western world – especially on migration matters – or Farage will have done so.
It’s already clear the “soft-Left” politics of the establishment have failed. The country knows it needs a leader to take it by the scruff of the neck – to back strivers over skivers, the devoted over the deviant.
This week Tory MPs must ensure the party’s grassroots are presented with such a choice.
If they get it right, their party can make history again. If they get it wrong, it will become just a footnote in history.