The Conservative Party is at a perilous juncture in its long history. After a disastrous set of elections on Thursday, it faces the real and present danger of being eclipsed as one of the two leading parties in an electoral system that can accommodate only two big parties.
Kemi Badenoch, who has been leader for six months, watched helplessly as Nigel Farage ate her party for breakfast.
The official opposition was nowhere to be seen at the Runcorn and Helsby by-election. That in itself is not unusual. By-elections are often a chance for a “plague on both your houses” protest, and the Liberal Democrats have traditionally exploited that sentiment. This time it was Reform that delivered the rebuff not just to the government but to both establishment parties.
More worrying for Ms Badenoch was Reform’s success in local council elections. She and her party spokespeople can explain all they like that these seats were last fought at the Tory high water mark of the vaccine rollout in 2021, but the wholesale transfer of two-thirds of Tory seats to Reform suggests that the parties of the right have passed a crossover point.
According to the BBC’s estimate of what would have happened if the whole country had voted on Thursday, Reform’s share of the vote at 30 per cent was twice that of the Tories on 15 per cent.
If that kind of differential persists, it is not fanciful to think that the Tories could find themselves overtaken at the next general election, just as the Liberals were replaced by the Labour Party in the 1920s.
Some Tories think that they know how to avert this threat. We report that plotting is already underway to replace Ms Badenoch as leader. Senior Tories tell our political editor that they are appealing to Robert Jenrick, whom Ms Badenoch defeated in last year’s leadership election, to challenge her.
They should know better.
The Conservative Party’s problems are deep. They are not caused by the leader. On the contrary, she shows signs of understanding the seriousness of the party’s situation and of trying to do some of the right things to fix it.
One of the party’s problems is that it appears to be addicted to changing leaders. Another is that it only recently decided that Liz Truss would be a good leader and prime minister.
Mr Jenrick is an energetic campaigner, but he is not the answer to the party’s problems. Whatever Ms Badenoch’s weaknesses, he would only substitute new ones of his own – an opportunist and synthetic approach to politics chief among them.
Instead, the party needs to calm down and think through carefully how it can survive the unavoidable period of quarantine that it must endure before it can be taken seriously again.
It must hope that the passage of time will erase the memory of its chaos and incompetence in government, while it fights off the challenge from Mr Farage and sets out a plan for a better future for the country.
That is an extremely difficult task, and it is said with much justification that being leader of the opposition is the hardest job in British politics. We do not pretend to have the answers, except to suggest that the party is nothing if it fails to draw on the tradition of One Nation, pragmatic Conservatism, and if it fails to occupy the centre ground.
But we know that trying to change leader now, after she has been in place for less than a year, would be a mistake and would only suggest that the party believes that it deserves to be replaced.
