The traditional test of effectiveness in a leader of the opposition is whether the holder of that office looks like a prime minister in waiting. It is famously hard to achieve when fronting a party that was recently expelled from office.
Kemi Badenoch is struggling with that challenge in most areas, but especially with regard to immigration and asylum. Mrs Badenoch has warned that “Britain is being mugged” by foreigners who treat the country as “the world’s softest touch”. She has urged Conservative-run local authorities to follow the example of Epping council, which this week was granted an injunction by the high court to prevent asylum seekers being housed in hotels. On that point she had already been upstaged by Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, who joined protests at the hotel in question, mingling in a crowd alongside notorious far-right activists.
Rival parties have been quick to point out that the Conservatives’ appalling record of managing the asylum system in general, and the accommodation question in particular, disqualifies them from commenting on the subject. Nigel Farage has called Mr Jenrick a “fraud” on the grounds that he was the responsible minister in September 2023, when the number of asylum claimants housed in hotels peaked at 56,042. Official figures released on Thursday show that that number was down to 32,059 at the end of June this year – lower than in March but higher than a year ago.
Labour insists that it is bringing the situation under control, noting that the backlog of asylum cases is falling. Over time, that should ease pressure for temporary accommodation. But the government struggles to make a case for patience and incremental change when the terms of debate are framed by opportunists and demagogues waging a campaign of social division.
There is little space for a rational conversation about fair asylum processes when prominent politicians depict all claimants as criminals and cast the entire system as a conspiracy to transfer public resources from native-born Britons to undeserving foreign interlopers. Those paranoid, xenophobic assumptions are not new, but their capture of mainstream politics has accelerated recently. In part, that expresses the cowardice of a Labour government that projects more anxiety about Britain somehow becoming an “island of strangers” than it does for the systemic corrosion of refugee rights.
But it is also a symptom of moral collapse in a Conservative party that finds its function as the official opposition eclipsed by Reform UK, with Mr Farage playing the role of prime minister in waiting. Mrs Badenoch looks intellectually and strategically paralysed by her predicament. She claims not to make common cause with Reform while refusing to articulate any ideological distinction between the two parties. Mr Jenrick openly manoeuvres to replace her as leader and, in the process, erases any remaining distinction between traditional Conservatism and radical anti-immigrant nationalism. A party that was once a broad church is folding itself up into a narrow hardline sect.
Mr Jenrick’s defeat in last year’s leadership contest suggests that there is – or was then – a substantial portion of the party that mistrusts his agenda. Some MPs may even be appalled by his antics. If so, the time to speak up is long overdue. Otherwise their continued silence can be taken as acquiescence in the total extinction of moderate Conservatism as a force in British politics.
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