Robert Jenrick said in his speech setting out why he was defecting to Nigel Farage’s Reform UK that the shadow cabinet had had a discussion recently about whether Britain was “broken”.
For Mr Jenrick, that Britain is wrecked is self-evident and unquestionable. He feigned surprise that “almost all” of Kemi Badenoch’s shadow cabinet said “it’s not broken” and that “we were told that’s the party line”.
He slid a stiletto into the backs of his recent colleagues: “A few had a third view: ‘It is broken but we can’t say so because the Conservative Party broke it.’”
The debate is at the same time superficial and fundamental. All opposition parties think that the country is in a bad way: that is the point of a party out of power – to point out what the government is doing wrong and to offer to make the country better.
And there is always a tension for a party recently in government, because it has to take some responsibility for the state of the country it bequeathed to its opponents.
But there is a deeper division that is as much psychological as political, between pessimists and optimists. There are those for whom life is a journey to hell in a handcart. For them progress means worse, politicians are always venal and incompetent and the only time they think they were happy was in a golden age some time ago.
This gloomy and paranoid worldview feeds anti-establishment parties in particular. Despite Nigel Farage’s cheerful personal demeanour, his parties have always traded on an embittered negativism that is ready to believe the worst about the country.
The healthier and more accurate view is set out by Ms Badenoch in an article on Saturday: “Yes, Britain’s problems are real, and in some cases getting worse. But Britain is not broken. We are a great country with deep reserves of strength, talent and resilience.”
She sets out a constructive and hopeful critique of the Labour government, and points out the essential emptiness of Reform’s approach: “Being angry is easy. Anyone can point out what is wrong. Fixing it requires discipline, competence and hard thinking.”
It would seem that Mr Jenrick’s departure has brought a welcome clarity to opposition politics. Under Ms Badenoch’s leadership, the Conservative Party will resist the temptation to talk the country down. “We are not a repository for frustration,” she writes. “We are a serious, optimistic, outward-looking party that believes Britain’s best days are ahead, not behind us.”
They all say that, of course, but she sounds as if she means it, while Mr Farage and Mr Jenrick seem more at home in splenetic denunciation of the awfulness of modern Britain – so much so that there is no room to set out what the solutions to the problems of modern Britain should lie.
The difference is most acute over the state of London. A mythical vision of the capital as a hellhole of crime and disorder has been fed by Mr Farage’s ally Donald Trump and his former ally Elon Musk, both of whom seem animated by prejudice against immigration.
The truth, as most people who live in London know, is that the city has its problems, but is safer than it used to be and far safer than any sizeable city in the United States. In many ways, London is the best world city, which is why so many people want to live there.
Equally, Britain has its problems, and no one would want to diminish the frustrations and suffering of too many of its people, but it is still a great country. Ms Badenoch and Sir Keir Starmer are united in hoping to make it greater still.
Mr Farage and Mr Jenrick, on the other hand, are united in complaining about it, which, instead of spurring their fellow citizens to make it better, tends only to induce fatalism and despair.
