IT is now clear that for the next five years at least, the Tory Party will be led from the hard-line populist right.
Both the two candidates who Conservative MPs have forwarded to the party’s membership for a final vote, Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, are neo-Farageists — Islamophobic and authoritarian culture warriors.
How the Tories’ once-powerful “one nation” faction shot themselves in the foot is a matter of fevered speculation but is, in the end, irrelevant. It is very probable that Tory members would have ended up picking the most right-wing candidate in any case.
Most Star readers would say that there is no such thing as a good Tory leader — and they would be right. But that truth, learned through centuries of experience, should not blind us to the significance of the situation.
The next Tory leader will combine hardcore Thatcherite economics with a culture-war zeal mainly directed at migrants. Both are instinctive authoritarians opposed to the exercise of fundamental rights.
She or he will also, of course, maintain full-throated support for Israel’s Gaza genocide and region-wide aggression, but on that, there is bipartisan unity across the Establishment. It has nevertheless been extraordinary to see the two candidates trying to outbid each other in preposterous pro-Israel pronouncements.
The short-term effect of a win by either Jenrick or Badenoch may be to take pressure off the Labour government, in the complacent assumption that a Tory Party led from the right would struggle to win a general election.
And it is indeed true that Tory MPs who survived the cull on July 4 will be looking over their shoulder at a Lib Dem challenge aimed at their more centrist voters.
However, a Tory leader from the populist right will be well placed to eat into Reform UK’s support. The Farageists are polling impressively, but recent history shows their vote to be volatile and fickle.
Its forerunner, Ukip, surged to nearly 13 per cent of the poll in 2015 but then fell back dramatically to under 2 per cent two years later after the Brexit referendum. The Brexit Party then polled spectacularly while Labour and Tories were conspiring to block Brexit in Westminster, only to disappear shortly afterwards.
A Tory leader pandering to racism and offering a clampdown on migration could surely eat into the Farage vote anew.
It is here that the danger becomes evident. First, a quick glance around Europe would establish that right-wing populism is advancing almost everywhere and, in several countries, is on the brink of office.
There is nothing to say that it cannot happen here. And the threat is exacerbated by the fumbling performance of the government to date. Keir Starmer is in Downing Street largely because of the split in the right-wing vote in July, and his conduct thus far has only driven down Labour’s already meagre support.
Badenoch or Jenrick would be challenging Labour from hard-right positions, and on present form, the government will respond by shifting right, too, in a bid to pander.
That will only legitimise the nativist and populist narrative and drag politics further into Farageist territory. The already hostile environment for ethnic minorities and Muslims will only worsen.
So the labour movement now needs to gear up for a serious fight against right-wing populism, shortly to be entrenched at the heart of the parliamentary system.
It will need better answers to debilitating social problems than the government has offered so far and also to find a robust voice in pushing back against Islamophobia and culture war provocations. Badenoch or Jenrick will constitute a menace to democracy that must be taken seriously.
