Every functioning party has red lines. Positions which are so central to its identity that abandoning them means abandoning what the party is for. For Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives, net zero and the ECHR are exactly that kind of question. They are not technical policy disputes to be settled by internal debate. The post Kemi begins her purge of the wets appeared first on Conservative Home.
Just the other day, I penned a ToryDiary piece asking how the Conservative Party can show it has genuinely changed since the last election. I used the question to make the case for a Shadow Cabinet reshuffle. The sort of argument which claimed that new faces at the top were the visible signal of renewal. Kemi Badenoch, it turns out, had other ideas. Rather than starting with faces, she has started with the wets. At long last.
In a move which properly began last Friday, Badenoch announced that only those who back the Conservatives’ commitment to scrapping net zero and leaving the ECHR will be approved as parliamentary candidates. Anyone who won’t fall in line will be blocked, or have the whip removed altogether.
It’s nowhere near Night of the Long Knives territory yet, but the operation has already claimed its first victim. Gavin Barwell had the whip removed yesterday evening, and he was not all too pleased about the matter. Writing on X, he said “As of 5.40pm I am still getting text messages from the Whips telling me how to vote so either the excellent Jason Groves has been misled or the party’s right hand doesn’t know what its left hand is doing.”
It was a response which mirrored the frustration of the wets more widely. In a statement just the other day, Prosper UK – the supposedly small-c conservative outlet headed up by Ruth Davidson and Andy Street – argued that “a selection process built around a single test on the net zero or the ECHR risks producing a narrower party that can actually win an election.”
As much as I hate to admit, there is a genuine point raised in this complaint. Prosper UK’s foundational claim is that a party which seeks to govern needs to be a broad church. Ideological breadth and diversity is not a hindrance, but rather what makes a party effective in government. That it can incorporate a range of ideas without collapsing under the weight of such diversity. Ideological conformity, if taken to its extremes, can prove to be a liability and force the party to shrink in a way that ends in irrelevance.
We need only look at Labour or Reform to see that disagreements – no matter how large a party may be – are fundamental to partisan politics. A party that tolerates no internal debate whatsoever is usually headed for a split.
But there’s a difference between a broad church and a party with no walls at all. You can welcome a wide range of views on tax policy, on planning reform, on foreign aid and so forth, and still insist that certain questions are not up for negotiation.
A sort of line in the sand, if you will.
Every functioning party has these lines. Positions which are so central to its identity that abandoning them means abandoning what the party is for. For Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives, net zero and the ECHR are exactly that kind of question. They are not technical policy disputes to be settled by internal debate. They go to the heart of what a Conservative government is supposed to look like, on sovereignty and on the basic relationship between the state and the economy. A party that can’t agree on those two things isn’t a broad church. It’s two parties sharing office space.
This is precisely how I am told Badenoch views the outfit of Prosper UK too. For months, she has sought to find a reason to eject them from the party – never truly viewing them as proper conservatives. Whilst they wore the rosette, they didn’t share the fundamental values of the renewed Conservative Party. That was an issue, and Badenoch had to take a stance on the matter – either now, or later down the line.
She chose to pull the trigger now.
But ridding the party of those who are Liberal Democrats in all but name is crucially important for how the Conservatives portray themselves as a renewed party. One of the most enduring puzzles of the 14 years of Conservative rule was that, too often, it would talk right but govern left. It would big itself up, but falter at close to every opportunity. The gap was not an accident. It was the product of a parliamentary party which had, over the years, taken in a number of MPs that were too wet for their own good. That had adopted their Liberal Democrat values and changed the colour of their rosettes to sky blue. It became so persistent a problem that one can only label them as an infestation amongst the Conservative benches.
Kemi Badenoch’s candidate policy is the mechanism for drawing that line properly, ahead of the next election rather than after another term of disappointment. This episode acts as a means to define the Conservative Party as a truly small-c conservative grouping. Having a broad church is acceptable and indeed necessary, but refusing to have red lines is where a party risks becoming too broad for its own good.
Many MPs I speak to compare Badenoch to a new CEO, who has been brought into a failing company, or as a sort of doctor which is seeking to cure a patient at risk of a terminal illness. The medicine she delivers will not be liked by all – and that is ok. But one has to recognise that what she is doing is redefining and renewing the Conservative Party into what it should have been for 14 years of rule – a small-c conservative party with actual conservative ideas. Not a rehash of the Liberal Democrats in a different shade of blue.
So it appears, therefore, that when I asked Kemi Badenoch how she would seek to renew the Conservative Party, she provided me with an answer. Whilst it was not what I was expecting – it is an answer which I am content with nonetheless, and one which readers should be content with if they want to see us become a truly conservative party.
The post Kemi begins her purge of the wets appeared first on Conservative Home.
