‘The Conservative Party has to tear itself down and rebuild’

The selection of Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick as the final two contenders for Tory leader has been met with howls of derision from the liberal media elite. Both candidates have been characterised as merely right-wing head-bangers, incapable of appealing to the wider electorate. According to conventional wisdom, having vacated the centre ground, the Conservatives have now doomed themselves to a decade or more in the wilderness.

Tim Stanley – historian and Telegraph columnist – disagrees. It will take a rejection of so-called centrism, he argues, to win back the Conservatives’ lost voters. Last week, he returned to The Brendan O’Neill Show to discuss what’s at stake in the leadership race. What follows is an edited extract from their conversation. You can listen to the whole thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: Could Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick really revive the Tories’ fortunes?

Tim Stanley: Whatever their personal qualities, this is the best outcome the Conservatives could have hoped for. As usual, the media coverage of this and the reaction has been way off and reflects the bias within the media from the left. Their view is that politics is on a left-right spectrum and it’s always won by whoever is in the centre. So on the basis that you’ve ended up with two ‘right-wingers’, as they would cast it, the race is imbalanced. It means a centrist can’t win, so it must be a disaster. There’s no shortage of left-wing Conservatives who can be wheeled out to say: ‘My party has lost, I can’t believe they’ve done this.’ This is nonsense.

You have to bear two things in mind. One is that the Conservative Party has realised that its biggest job is to win back Reform voters. That’s not enough to get it back into No10, but it can’t get back into power unless it binds the centre-right back together. So it’s gone for two candidates who are pitching themselves – Badenoch with culture-war politics and Jenrick with the immigration issue – to Reform voters.

The second thing to bear in mind is this represents a generational change in Conservatism. Thatcherism is dead. This is the intellectual rise of the politics of Jordan Peterson. If anyone in the world right now is the Karl Marx for those two, it would be someone like Peterson. If you actually listen to what they say, they are not on your classic left-right binary. Instead, they are talking about issues like immigration, culture, the structure of the state. This means that, whoever gets elected, it’s going to be a radically different Conservatism to the one of Margaret Thatcher, David Cameron or Rishi Sunak. In short, the Conservative Party has to tear itself down and rebuild. The two candidates who are best positioned to do that are Badenoch and Jenrick.

O’Neill: What do you say to those who criticise Jenrick for seemingly having flip-flopped quite a bit?

Stanley: Politics is very cruel. The phrase ‘Robert Generic’ has stuck, because it’s a catchy phrase. The problem is, if you’re accused of being performative, everything you do is going to be regarded as a performance. If you go jogging in a ‘Hamas are terrorists’ hoodie, that’s performance. If you may or may not have taken some kind of weight-loss drug, you’re going to be judged as someone who’s obsessed with your appearance.

If Jenrick has been on a journey, it is a substantive journey with a narrative to it. He entered the Home Office and realised not only was it broken, but also that the Tories were saying things that, because it was broken, they knew they couldn’t deliver. That was fundamentally dishonest. Jenrick has come around to the view that, whatever your politics might be, the real issue in this country is that there are forces that are arranged against you doing anything.

This is what I always say to left-wing people. You laugh at Liz Truss and her one month in office, but that’s exactly what would’ve happened to Jeremy Corbyn within five minutes of entering Downing Street. John McDonnell would have proposed a budget that was based on high spending and on borrowing, and the Bank of England and Joe Biden and the backbenchers would have got rid of him. I think Jenrick has a narrative there, which, to me, rings true. He’s discovered the administrative state stops everything from happening.

The other thing to note about Jenrick is that, whatever you think of him, what’s interesting is the people supporting him. Everyone who I have met in seminars and at conferences to discuss the future of the right backed him and backed him early on. People like Tory MP Danny Kruger, who wrote a very interesting book about the new right. Or a little more behind the stage, people like John Hayes, who is not a very well-known MP outside of parliament, but within parliament, he is regarded as an influential figure. I was impressed by the people supporting Jenrick.

O’Neill: What’s your take on Badenoch?

Stanley: An important thing to bear in mind with Badenoch is that she’s British Nigerian. This is important for the Conservatives for two reasons. One, because they feel that her identity helps them to reach parts of the electorate they couldn’t normally reach. She cuts through because she’s not from the Conservative mould. Given that Labour is all about the politics of identity, it’s very difficult to accuse the Conservatives of being racist or sexist when you’re run by a black woman. There’s a very crude electoral calculation there.

The second thing is, being British Nigerian, she also brings a perspective to the debate that the rest of us don’t have. She’s someone who grew up in a corrupt, socialist country. She can see what Britain’s getting right, what it’s getting wrong and what it’s at risk of losing. This brings us into a civilisational form of conservatism that ties so many issues together, including immigration, Israel, the future of free markets.

Badenoch has seen what happens when you give up on the foundational building blocks of a society – when you allow everything to fall apart, when you undermine trust and authority, when your politics just becomes silly and corrupt, and when you forget important values like free speech and democracy. She is able to say she lived through it. She both knows what’s not working in Britain and what policy should be directed towards building it back up.

Tim Stanley was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: