There is a recent election result that tells a story of Conservative decline along with a series of decisions that confirm that, when it comes to both strategy and judgment, Badenoch is lacking.
Start with the Get Manchester Mayoral contest from a week ago. For many, the standout fact of the byelection to replace Andy Burnham as mayor of Greater Manchester was that Reform came a very poor second, taking just 21% of the vote to Labour’s 47%. A crushing defeat for Nigel Farage’s party, which a matter of weeks earlier had talked up its chances of winning the mayoralty.
But run your finger further down the vote tally until it finally reaches the Conservative candidate on a mere 7.7%. In all the previous mayoral contests in Greater Manchester, the Tories were in second place. This time they were fifth behind Restore Britain a party of the hard right. A Tory result that bad among such a large electorate of 3 million people suggests not merely that Badenoch is making slow progress, but that she is moving her party backwards.
Her strategic response to this competition on the right has been to move towards her rivals, hoping to blunt the appeal of the nationalist populist parties by matching their offer . The latest step came late on Thursday with, as the Telegraph billed it, a Tory “promise to end council housing for foreigners”. Badenoch’s pledge is to evict almost 230,000 non-EU foreign national households from their homes.
Never mind that many of those turfed out will include people who have been living, working and paying taxes in Britain for years. Once evicted, those families, including their children, will be rendered homeless, leaving local councils with the choice of either abandoning them to the streets or providing much costlier emergency accommodation. Consider the timing.
Badenoch decided the right moment to demand foreigners be kicked out of their homes was as the Norfolk town of Thetford entered its third night of violence and disorder, triggered by a mob surrounding the accommodation of suspected asylum seekers, some in the crowd trying to force their way in, as others threw rocks and chanted: “We want them out.” Into this tinderbox of a situation walked the Conservative party leader, clutching a petrol can.
Just a day or two earlier, she had been defending the selection as a Somerset council candidate of Joshua Bonehill-Paine, a man who has served long jail sentences for, among other things, a sustained campaign of antisemitic harassment and abuse of the Jewish former MP Luciana Berger, a campaign that saw Berger branded an “evil money-grabber”, her face superimposed on the body of a rat and photographs of her doctored into multiple, sexualised images. He has offered no apology to Berger. Badenoch herself conceded that Bonehill-Paine would not have cleared the threshold to become an MP but serving as a councillor was different, she explained, as he would be responsible for nothing more than “parking and bins” – thereby, and at a stroke, insulting the many thousands of Conservatives who devote themselves to public service in their local communities. She then appoints him to a national party advisor role.
Badenoch surely must realise she can’t outperform Reform- so what should she do instead to stop her party’s decline
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