Just when we need rational politics most, Tories stage a GB News-style freak show

When it came to the content of the speeches, though, it rapidly became clear that rather than seeking to review and rebuild, the candidates were far more inclined to deny, and double down. The four candidates are not all the same, of course. The conference hustings opened with a slightly puzzling pitch from Tom Tugendhat, widely touted as a “moderate” choice, who said that he wanted to be a Prime Minister rather than an opposition leader, but looked like neither. James Cleverly appeared next, in an elegant dark suit, and seemed marginally more anchored in reality than the other three candidates. He talked a lot about his mum and dad, and pointed out – bravely – that immigration is a complex issue.

Patriotic ranting

The preferred candidates of the Tory party membership, who will make the decision, though, are the other two, Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch; and what they have in common is a shared culture of absolute denial about what went wrong with the last Conservative government.

Jenrick’s showy Reform-Party-style speech pulled off the trick of adopting a radical tone – he said he would launch a “new Conservative party”, to replace the old one – but then producing a list of key policy points that said nothing new at all, since the first was all about “securing the border” and “stopping the boats” – which Jenrick wrongly suggests could be achieved by ditching the European Convention on Human Rights. The second was about abandoning all climate change measures that might in any way disrupt the UK’s existing economy; the rest fizzled out in a patriotic rant.

As for Kemi Badenoch – well, Kemi also talked a lot about her mum and dad; she said her dad was a doctor, who taught her that you can’t fix any problem without first getting the diagnosis right. Yet Kemi’s diagnosis of what is currently wrong with the Tories is so wide of the mark as to be almost hallucinatory. Like Jenrick, she notes correctly that many voters were annoyed that the Tories said they would cut immigration and stop the boats, and failed to do so.

Moving ever further to the right

That, though, is the sole point at which her analysis connects with reality. Both she and Jenrick attack Labour relentlessly; but they do so in tones which suggest that Labour, not the Tories, has somehow been in power for the last 13 years. They are therefore, apparently, in full rebellion against the UK shaped by the governments of which they were both part; yet they have no analysis at all of how the pro-market and anti-state ideology embraced by the Conservatives for the last 45 years finally dwindled – between 2010 and 2024 – into the UK’s current mess of low and depressed pay, an endemic housing crisis, sky-high energy prices, inadequate benefits, Third World public transport, poor health, mounting poverty, and crisis-ridden local services.

Instead, they indulge in a GB News-style political freak show, in which the only answer to right-wing failure is to move ever further to the right. This week alone, Kemi Badenoch has suggested that Britain’s stingy and maternity benefit and leave provisions go too far, that many British civil servants should be in jail for undermining right-wing policies, and that right-wing students are being marked down for their views in British universities, an allegation for which she produced no evidence whatever. She added the breathtaking assertion, that “Conservatives don’t manage decline”, when in fact recent Tory governments have so markedly accelerated the UK’s decline.

Wrecking-ball billionaires

Now of course, it’s easy to make fun of this spectacle of one of Britain’s two leading political parties gradually becoming unmoored from reality; if we didn’t laugh at some of this, we would certainly cry. Yet this is a tragedy, and not only for the Conservatives. Through their heavy decade-long flirtation with the global far right and the wrecking-ball billionaires who fund it, the dominant tendency in the Conservative party has colluded in grossly damaging the economic and material interests of ordinary Britons, and limiting the prospects of our young people.

They have adopted the culture-war language of those who want to see democratic politics paralysed by division, and incapable of addressing the drastic imbalances of economic power that form the backdrop to most of our current problems; they have degraded UK political debate, and skewed it to the right, with far-right clickbait talking-points. They have also trashed and sought to discredit almost every international body and agreement that might help us to deal with the terrifying series of global crises we now face, from looming all-out war in the Middle East to the ever-intensifying impacts of climate change; and if either Badenoch or Jenrick wins the leadership contest, those tendencies can only continue.

Here in Scotland, in other words, the Scottish Conservatives and their new leader Russell Findlay should now be considering how far they can afford to be associated with this travesty of what was once a centre-right Conservative party. And everyone in UK politics should now be considering how far they want to follow the Tory right down a moral and intellectual rabbit-hole that leads to the death of politics itself; into a place where politics is reduced to mere performance, a series of sensational and freakish notions paraded to distract the voters, while all the big decisions about our future, and our very survival, are taken by people who are accountable only to the managers of a failing global financial system – or in the case of the world’s growing numbers of super-rich, accountable to no one at all, except themselves.