End of the Tory story? Why the Conservative Party is slouching towards oblivion

It really is over for the Tories, says John Rentoul, which leaves Kemi Badenoch going through the motions at the party’s annual conference in Manchester. But the demise of the party of Margaret Thatcher is part of a seismic wider realignment – in which the left, not the right, will be the political home of the better-off

It seems extraordinary that a once great party, which used to boast that it was the most successful in the history of democracy, is coming to an end, and everyone just pretends that it is business as usual.

This weekend, the Conservative Party goes through the motions of holding an annual conference. Its leader makes grand statements of important policy changes, on net zero and human rights law, as if these will move the political market.

Kemi Badenoch continues to raise significant sums of money from donors, but they are propping up a Potemkin party that will cease to exist within four years. The 119 Tory MPs keep themselves busy with shadow ministerial posts, but they all know that it is over.

Even more unrealistically, some of them are plotting to replace Badenoch with Robert Jenrick, the moment that the rules allow it after her first year expires next month.

It is hard to see what can prevent Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party from winning more seats than the Tories at the next election (Getty)

Is this what it was like for the Liberal Party 100 years ago, before Labour formed a minority government in 1924, having overtaken the Liberals in the number of seats won in the elections of 1922 and 1923? Asquith allowed Ramsay MacDonald to take office in the hope that the pressure of government would destroy the Labour Party; instead, it allowed Labour to establish itself as the main alternative to the Tories. The Liberals were decisively relegated to third-party status at the following election, in which Asquith lost his seat.

The eclipse of a major party will probably happen more quickly this time. It is hard to see what can prevent Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party from winning more seats than the Tories at the next election. The defeat of the Tories last year was not just a swing of the pendulum; it was the first step to oblivion. The betrayal of the Tory promise to reduce immigration was so flagrant that it cannot simply be erased in one parliament.

Badenoch said something about immigration today. It doesn’t matter what it was. The accompanying commentary in every listener’s mind was: “You were in government when this happened.”

In fact, that the Tories won as many as 120 seats last year was a tribute to Rishi Sunak’s efforts, much too late, to mitigate disaster.

Next time will be different. It is too early to take seriously the striking polling projections of Reform being the largest party, in some cases with a big majority. Farage has fallen out with people before and may well do so again. But what is harder to doubt is the projection that the Tories will win 45 seats.

There is little that Badenoch – or any alternative Tory leader, even one who did not serve in the last government – can do about it. She is a brave and interesting politician, who in another party or at another time might have been a great success, but she drew an even shorter straw than William Hague – another talented politician in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Some things about the next few years are predictable. More Tories will defect to Reform. As the election approaches and the probability of the eclipse approaches 100 per cent, more and more senior Tories will defect. At the grassroots, Tory subscriptions will lapse and Reform numbers will swell. The Tory base is already deeply alienated. Professor Tim Bale’s latest survey of Tory members for Queen Mary University of London finds that 92 per cent of them think “the numbers entering Britain over the last 10 years” have been “too high”.

At the same time, there are members and MPs for whom copying Farage’s policy of leaving the European Convention on Human Rights – today’s announcement – is too much. Some of them will be off to the Liberal Democrats.

That does not mean, though, that Ed Davey’s dream, shared with Zack Polanski, the new leader of the Green Party of England and Wales, will come true. Davey and Polanski envisage an even bigger upheaval, by which both the main parties are replaced – the Tories by Reform and Labour by the Lib Dems, Greens or a progressive alliance of both.

It could happen. Labour is unpopular and likely to become more so. But it has a core vote, parts of which neither Davey nor Polanski can reach. The realignment of British politics is upon us, but it is mainly a realignment of the right.

The effects of this change are evident already. It is not just a matter of the name of the main party of the right being a new one; it means a further lurch in the inversion of class politics prompted by the Brexit referendum. Reform, more than Boris Johnson’s Tory party, is a party that skews to the working class and non-graduates.

It means a politics in which the main party of the left, whether that is still Labour or the Lib Dems, is more likely to be the party of the better-off and of business than Reform on the right.

Labour’s conference last week had already turned to face the new opposition. That leaves the Tories in Manchester this week in no man’s land, awaiting Asquith’s fate.