Kemi Badenoch gives up on Tories’ red wall dream

A bout halfway through Kemi Badenoch’s speech to Conservative Party conference, she drew an analogy that escaped the close and mostly flattering analysis to which the rest was lovingly subjected. The Tories, she argued, were just like Marks & Spencer. “M&S is a brand that has been around for 100 years,” Badenoch said. “Not so long ago, critics said they were a bit stuffy and stuck in the past. Some were questioning whether the brand would survive … Now, M&S is back in fashion.” She wasn’t wrong. How did they do it? “Great looks at affordable prices. They have adapted their style for today’s market and people are flooding back, including me, as you’ve probably noticed this week.” And there was the lesson for the Conservative Party: “Just like M&S, we must learn from our mistakes, win back trust and make people feel good about our party again.” People were looking through the Tory shopfront, she said, liking what they saw. “But let’s be honest, not enough of them are buying yet.” Most commented 1 Deadly strike on Ukraine homes ‘was birthday gift for Putin’ Russia-Ukraine war 75 comments It is a near-perfect allusion, though not for the reason Badenoch gave . Let’s consider the streets where nobody is looking longingly through an M&S window, because there’s no M&S. Steve Wright, the late doyen of BBC radio, used to define a big town as one that had its own station. Today we might define a thriving town centre by the presence of a high street M&S. In the past decade they have left the town centres of Barnsley, Blackburn, Bolton, Boston, Chesterfield, Clacton, Darlington, Ilford, Kettering, Neath, St Helens, Stockon-on-Tees, Sunderland, Walsall and Weston-super-Mare. That is not a complete list. But, to quote Badenoch: “Do you see where I’m going with this, conference?” Top stories 1 New Trump Jr’s ex-fiancée ‘asked donor to pay 0k credit card bill’ US politics 2 New Trump’s war with Iran doubles the cost of his rides in ‘the Beast’ US politics 3 New Warning for Burnham over US link on military satellites Companies & Markets 4 New Starbucks ‘explores takeover’ of Chipotle Mexican Grill US business 5 Andy Burnham vows ‘deeper co-operation’ with EU to tackle Russia Politics I should add that you can still find branches in and around some of those places. They may have upsized and moved to a retail park on a bypass or opened a nice food hall down the road. You can probably find a nearby petrol station that sells Percy Pigs and nice sandwiches and gins in tins. Consumer habits have changed and M&S has changed with them. But this is a new world, and the old one — of benighted provincial high streets — is experiencing a conscious desertion by the brands they once knew so well. This Conservative conference sent much the same signal to the country. Badenoch’s rejection of Reform UK as a prospective governing partner was declared the speech’s watershed, and it was indeed significant. But she also closed the book on a much longer story. Her speech, and everything her shadow cabinet said in public and in private, marked the end of a decade in which the Conservative Party’s electoral strategy, ideological ambiguity and strategic priorities have been defined by the result of the EU referendum. Having set in motion a great realignment of British politics in 2016, the Conservatives have now given up on it. Advertisement Think about her predecessors. Theresa May spoke of relief for those who were just about managing, citizens of nowhere and burning injustices. In his 2018 budget, her chancellor, Philip Hammond, said: “The era of austerity is finally coming to an end.” Before Covid intruded, Boris Johnson planned to govern as a sort of British Gaullist. The economics was dirigiste and unembarrassed by state intervention — all the better to level up the coalfield towns that, thanks to Brexit, had unlearnt their ancestral hatreds and voted for the Tories. Scunthorpe steelworkers held up Vote Boris placards; to Labour’s fragile and complacent sensibilities it was as shocking and offensive as the Smithfield porters marching on Westminster chanting in support of Enoch Powell. Top stories 1 What would UK look like with proportional representation voting? Politics 2 China came for Congo’s gold. Then Ebola struck Africa 3 Our tower block caught fire — why are we still paying £1,500 a month? Mortgages 4 My daughter works part-time — can she rescue her retirement? Ask Times Money 5 Three popular money rules that you should rethink Saving & Investing For a little while, at least, Conservative governments even seemed relaxed about borrowing. Johnson rewrote the Treasury’s investment rules to facilitate new infrastructure projects in the regions. In June 2020, he likened his ambition for the country to Roosevelt’s New Deal. He even wanted to reprieve the communities sacrificed by the Beeching Axe so everyone could tell Steve Wright they lived in a big town with a railway station. Sajid Javid, while chancellor, told The Spectator that low interest rates meant the Tories could initiate a “new economic era” of state-backed development outside London and its environs. “You’re not looking for those high-level returns that you looked for in the past that you got from the southeast,” Javid explained. “But you can look throughout the country, and we can make many more investments.” Then came the pandemic, runaway inflation, rising rates, Liz Truss and the rest. Almost none of this new Conservatism came to life, not least because the MPs entrusted with delivering it after 2019 were pretty orthodox characters. Recall that Rishi Sunak resigned as Johnson’s chancellor not over partygate but over fiscal responsibility, and was caught on camera a few weeks later reassuring the blue rinse brigade in Tunbridge Wells that he had diverted money from “deprived urban areas” and back to the shires. Nonetheless, Brexit had created an electoral map that demanded different politics, priorities and posture from the Tories — even if they came naturally to only a few of them. All of a sudden they were weighing votes in towns such as Mansfield and Hartlepool as well as Arundel and Devizes and, like the Labour Party of old, Tory leaders had to manage their own unwieldy coalition of Hampstead and Hull. That was the country Boris built in 2016. Successive Tory prime ministers surfed the wave of the realignment, chafed against it, denied it and then were defeated by it. When they failed to deliver, Nigel Farage returned as its natural champion. Voters who disliked what it had made the Conservative Party — not so much right-wing as messy — turned to the Liberal Democrats. Sir Keir Starmer, or more accurately Morgan McSweeney, then subjected the Labour Party to cruel and unusual punishment in the hope of undoing it. Two years of local election results tell us they failed too. Advertisement Andy Burnham’s best hope lies in uniting the progressive left around pro-European and anti-Farage politics but, as the member for Makerfield, the class-conscious Labour leader is fighting on deep England’s old terrain too, hoping for a social democratic answer to the questions thrown up by the referendum. But Badenoch? She did not even pretend to be up for that fight and, offstage, her frontbenchers are even blunter. The red, or now teal, wall stands again: it was just a phase. Once again the Conservatives are the party of affluent England. Unlike Labour or Reform, no longer is this a party struggling with the pretence that it is for Bolsover or Bassetlaw. That map is in the bin, as is its clear path to a majority. Like M&S, the Tories have rationalised. It will make for a more coherent electoral coalition. But make no mistake: it’s also a smaller one. Listen to Patrick Maguire, Steven Swinford and Lara Spirit’s podcast, The State of It, wherever you get your podcasts