According to conventional wisdom at Westminster, Britain’s Conservative Party last night consigned itself to irrelevance with the removal of James Cleverly, the one remaining candidate with mainstream credentials, from its leadership contest.
That conventional wisdom is wrong. It is certainly true that the two remaining candidates, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, stand on the far right of the party. Both make Margaret Thatcher, a famously right-wing Conservative prime minister, look like a sopping wet liberal.
But anyone who thinks that the far-right capture of the Conservative Party means that the party is now irrelevant is deluding themselves.
The Conservatives are no longer the party of Edmund Burke and Thatcher. They’ve abandoned the tradition of moderation, tolerance and scepticism which made theirs the most successful democratic party in the world for the past 200 years.
British Conservatism has turned into a far-right movement comparable to Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, Narendra Modi’s BJP in India, Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, Benjamin Netanyahu’s Likud coalition in Israel, Geert Wilders’ Party for Freedom in the Netherlands, the neo-Nazi AFD in Germany and Donald Trump’s Republicans in the United States.
I truly wish I could share the confidence of the British political establishment that this posture consigned them to electoral irrelevance.
The facts suggest otherwise. Current trends suggest that the cynical populism which both Badenoch and Jenrick represent is not going away. Recent election results in Austria show it’s on the march.
And consider this: victory for Trump in next month’s US elections will bring Jenrick or Badenoch’s Conservatives into the western mainstream.
Six months ago, Jenrick told GB News: “If I were an American citizen I would be voting for Donald Trump.”
It was such a shocking remark. Trump is a misogynist, bigot and convicted felon, found guilty on 34 counts of falsifying business records.
Accusation of fascism have often been devalued by some leftists to condemn their opponents. But for Trump the charge is valid: he is a latter-day, small-f fascist.
But the biggest worry was Badenoch’s reaction to last summer’s race riots. At first she kept her head down: bad enough at a moment of national crisis from someone who wants to lead a great political party.
Worse was to come: a robust defence of Douglas Murray, a far-right polemicist, after a video emerged in which Murray had earlier called for what at least one respected observer interpreted as a pogrom against migrants.
This is what Murray said: “If the army will not be sent in, then the public will have to go in, and the public will have to sort this out themselves, and it’ll be very, very brutal.”
Attacking Islam
Both Badenoch and Jenrick have built their political careers, at least in part, by attacking “Islamist extremism”.
Badenoch has a record of Islamophobic comments dating back at least as far as Zac Goldsmith’s notorious 2016 campaign to be mayor of London. This is how you make waves in the contemporary Conservative Party.
One final point especially frightens me. Jenrick and Badenoch both articulate a far-right vision which has almost nothing in common with traditional Conservatism.
Yet, whichever of the two wins the leadership will inherit the name, and apparatus, of the Conservative Party. That name is especiallyvaluable because of its long association with the British tradition of liberal democracy.
Yet today’s Conservative Party is becoming the enemy of liberal democracy.
