The Tory Party should not be taking tips from the ‘sensible centrists’

It’s been a difficult few weeks to be a ‘sensible centrist’. Keir Starmer was once the undisputed patron saint of this infuriatingly influential tribe. But now the sugar high of July’s General Election is over, even his most ardent outriders would struggle to get excited about his grey and dismal premiership. Cuts to the winter fuel allowance and the prospect of state-sponsored death on the NHS were probably not the top priorities of those desperate to bring an end to 14 years of Tory rule.

Luckily, the Conservative leadership contest seems to have arrived just in time to provide a much-sought-after dose of Schadenfreude. The so-called sensibles, in their infinite wisdom, have spent the past 24 hours practically gloating about yesterday’s result. They are dead certain that by putting forward the ‘weird’ Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, whether by accident or design, Conservative MPs have consigned their party to electoral irrelevance. Starmer can sit pretty in No10, they trill, as the Tories lurch to the right and vacate the hallowed centre ground.

Stranger still, they insist that the ousted James Cleverly was ‘the man Labour feared most’ and the only candidate with a chance of putting the Conservatives on the path towards recovery. Tory MPs have scored ‘one of the biggest own goals in the history of British politics’, claimed Lewis Goodall, formerly of the BBC, now of LBC’s The News Agents. ‘Cleverly out. Labour gain’, quipped Alastair Campbell, Iraq War propagandist turned centrist-dad podcaster. The liberal-elite consensus is clear: it was Cleverly or bust.

I can’t be alone in struggling to see what they did in this also-ran candidate who, let’s not forget, was only ever the favourite to win for about five minutes. I suspect the sudden outbreak of Cleverly fever has nothing to do with his unmemorable stints as either home secretary or foreign secretary in Rishi Sunak’s government (if anyone can name just one notable achievement, then please write in).

What’s more, as a backer of both Boris and Brexit, Cleverly makes for an unlikely centrist pin-up. Those suddenly talking up his alleged leadership qualities seem to be going on ‘vibes’ alone. Perhaps it’s because he’s reluctant to sound off on culture-war issues. Or perhaps it was that he delivered a decent speech to the Tory conference last week. Arguably, it was a single comment from that speech, in which he urged the Tories to be more ‘normal’, that made him the centrist candidate of choice. (There is an eerie parallel with Tim Walz in the US, who was selected as the Democratic vice-presidential nominee mainly for deriding his opponents as ‘weird’, but is now coming unstuck at the first glare of scrutiny.)

Alongside the bizarre sanctification of Cleverly has been the more predictable demonisation of Badenoch and Jenrick. Goodall has labelled Jenrick – until recently, a bland Cameroon Remainer – a ‘traditional populist’ with a ‘hard-right policy agenda’. Meanwhile, he accuses Badenoch of indulging in ‘alt-right online discourse’, presumably because she knows what a woman is and she has no truck with critical race theory. ‘This is what Cleverly was driving at with the “acting normal” agenda’, Goodall argues.

The whole ‘normal’ vs ‘weird’ binary starts to sound like projection when you consider who is calling whom weird and why. Badenoch’s stance on the culture war might infuriate Guardian staff writers, but it is far closer to public opinion than the centrist-dad consensus. After all, on the gender wars, the ‘sensible’ position means accepting that women can have penises, that rapists belong in women’s prisons and that vulnerable children should be subjected to irreversible, experimental medical treatments. On race, it means promoting ‘positive’ discrimination, rejecting colourblindness and turning a blind eye to anti-Semitism.

On immigration, Jenrick’s vice-signalling is certainly grating (and is very likely insincere). But you hardly have to be a Nigel Farage fanboy to recognise the profound failings in our asylum system or how membership of the ECHR prevents us from fixing them. Just this week, we learned of an Albanian criminal who, having already been deported, re-entered Britain illegally and was then granted the right to live here indefinitely on human-rights grounds. Sensible centrists will tell you with a straight face that this is precisely what Winston Churchill had in mind when he signed us up to that convention.

All of this is why the Tory Party would do well to ignore the advice of the self-proclaimed sensible set. Despite posing as political know-it-alls, they have a tendency to back the losing side in every vote and argument. The 2024 election was their first big win in a decade, and even that was really by default – it was a mass rejection of an exhausted Tory Party, not enthusiasm for Starmer’s Labour.

Indeed, the Conservatives lost seven million votes between 2019 and 2024. According to an Electoral Calculus poll ahead of the General Election, over a third of those lost voters backed Farage’s Reform, another third stayed at home, while 20 per cent went to Labour and just four per cent turned Lib Dem. The Conservatives need a candidate who can appeal to the millions of voters it betrayed, not to the retired-politician podcast circuit.

If they’re to have any hope of recovering from 2024’s defeat, they would do well resist the urge to seek the so-called centrists’ approval.

Fraser Myers is deputy editor at spiked and host of the spiked podcast. Follow him on X: @FraserMyers.