When Kemi Badenoch’s leadership got off to a less-than-inspiring start, her defenders made a reasonable case that she needed more time. The Conservative and Unionist party had just suffered one of the most catastrophic routs in its long history; it would take more than a few months to right the ship.
But as month has followed month, disquiet has been growing in Tory circles. The latest reports about Badenoch’s showdown with Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) do not inspire confidence either.
This is telling, because to an audience of Tory activists, CCHQ ought to be an easy target. It’s hard to find anyone in the voluntary party with a good word to say about the organisation, with its control freakery, predilection for ‘woke’ HR practices, and its general incompetence. However, Badenoch’s reported broadside nonetheless misses the mark.
Badenoch appears to be blaming CCHQ for things which can never be entirely its fault. She reportedly told an all-hands meeting that all staff have ‘two jobs: campaigning and fundraising. If you’re not doing something to make either of those happen, you’re not doing your job right.’
Yet both of those things depend on the leader. Centrally-directed campaigning of the sort Matthew Parker Street ought to be responsible for depends on having things on which to campaign. Badenoch has made a virtue of having no policy positions, so what exactly have they got to work with?
A party cannot subsist on opposition research alone. Labour is having a miserable time, but it is bleeding more support to Reform UK, and even the Greens than to the Conservatives. Negative campaigning is not enough. Voters need a positive reason to even pay attention to the Tories, let alone vote for them.
As for fundraising, that too is ultimately the responsibility of the leader. Big-money donors expect personal attention, whilst donors on all levels need to believe in both the party’s programme and its credibility. In recent years CCHQ has tended to have a non-politician co-chairman who handles the money, but even then, the leader is the product they’re selling.
I’ve spoken to local Conservative parties who complain both that they can’t get money out of CCHQ and that local donors who don’t believe in Badenoch are refusing to open their wallets. That’s anecdotal but it does illustrate the problem.
But there’s an even deeper problem: Badenoch’s apparent critique is wrong. If you wanted a shorthand explanation for how the Conservative party reached its current parlous state, the idea that central office’s job consists solely of fundraising and campaigning is a good one.
Each is obviously important, but both are short-term goals focused entirely on the interests of the current leader. What has been missing, for the quarter-century since Wiliam Hague gutted the party’s democratic structures in 1998, is any long-term investment in the party as an institution.
Where is the investment in activist training and development, of the sort that comes to the left as second nature? The Tory party used to maintain Swinton College, an actual establishment, for that purpose. Networks of Tory trade unionists, academics, or even professionals (outside the City) are vestigial or non-existent.
Nor does the party any longer maintain the kind of national network of full-time election agents that once made it such a formidable election-winning machine. Not only are election agents hired in feast-and-famine fashion in time with the electoral cycle, but they are hired anew at each election in a new batch of target seats, with no long-term cultivation of the Tory vote over multiple cycles.
Finally, there appears to be nothing on maintaining the party as a social institution. Where once the Young Conservatives were a dating service in much of Britain, the central party is now so sensitive to scandal that it doesn’t have an autonomously-organised youth wing and goes so far as to condemn Tory students for hosting a (popular) fox-hunt themed pub crawl.
All this has served individual leaders well in the short term. But it has compounded other problems: there is no to little sense of there being an institutional or social Conservative party distinct from the leader. This means the full weight of sustaining the party as a campaigning force is on Badenoch’s shoulders – whether she likes it or not.
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