Peter Franklin is an Associate Editor of UnHerd.
The Brexit section in Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech is just 79 words long. What’s more, it wasn’t a defence of our national liberation from the European Union, but an attack on Andy Burnham for reopening the issue.
Here’s the key passage:
“Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost, arguing with ourselves, with the EU, going round in circles, businesses not knowing whether they should invest.”
Note how — with the sole exception of the word “again” — David Cameron could have said the same thing 15 years ago. Granted, the context back then was rather different, but the underlying sentiment is identical: stop banging on about Europe.
Kemi is a committed Brexiteer. But quite clearly she’s downplaying the issue — and couching it in terms that might appeal to a moderate Remain voter. Why would that be?
If conference revealed anything it is that party strategists believe that the ex-Conservative centrist vote is re-winnable, especially in southern England. Furthermore, they reckon that by getting back a chunk of these voters, the party will emerge as the clear challenger in dozens of Labour and Lib Dem-held constituencies. From that position of strength, an appeal can then be made to Reform voters to vote Tory to defeat the Left.
Targeting the soggy centre to win over the populist Right does seem counter-intuitive. Nevertheless, the strategy does make sense if we can assume that a) there are enough centrists for whom the attractions of the Tory economic offer outweigh any misgivings in other policy areas; and b) there are enough Reform voters ready to vote for whichever Right-of-centre party is best-placed to beat incumbent Labour, Lib Dem or Green MPs. I’d be interested in any hard evidence to the contrary, but right now those look like plausible assumptions to me — especially in an electoral system where small shifts in support can make a big difference.
All that being the case, it makes sense not to go out of our way to alienate.
persuadable centrists in the Remainery South — or, for that matter, Left-of-centre voters who might lend us their tactical support in Conservative-Reform marginals.
In fact, I’d like to see the party leadership commit to their own strategy more completely. For instance, I hope that they might reconsider their relentless negativity on green issues. It’s all very well condemning quangos like the Environment Agency and Natural England on charges of regulatory overreach, but where are the positive, pro-nature policies that voters from all parties overwhelmingly want? We are the Conservative Party, so let’s conserve.
The case for treading lightly on centrist sensibilities certainly applies to Europe. Here, I’m not really talking about the voters who deserted us for the Lib Dems in 2024 — because those are relatively small in number and they aren’t the social and economic liberals that some commentators imagine them to be. Rather, we need to get serious about the much larger number of Remain voters we lost in the wake of Brexit.
It’s not a case of our party suddenly clambering aboard the Rejoin bandwagon, but not being distracted by it. There really is an opportunity to rebuild a broad-based alliance of voters around the themes of financial solvency, national security and institutional competence. Indeed, our country is in too much danger not to make this our over-riding mission. Playing-up issues that divide the conservatively-minded electorate is the last thing we need right now.
But will Andy Burnham allow us to keep the peace among “our people”? To the extent that he has a coherent strategy it is to promote policies that enthuse the Left, while wrong-footing the Right. As well as his anti-Brexiteering, there’s his stated ambition to fiddle with the electoral system, renationalise the utilities and establish a National Care Service.
Typically of the man, he’s putting-off the actual delivery until after the next general election. But remember that polling day could come early — and even if it doesn’t, he can still spend the next two years setting the political agenda by orchestrating a “national conversation” on the various options for achieving each goal. To put it another way, he wants to be the organ grinder and the rest of us his monkeys. The question, then, is how to keep ourselves from dancing to his tune — especially on Europe.
The first thing that the Conservative Party can do is to appoint a dedicated spokesperson on the PM’s Rejoin agenda. It doesn’t matter whether the eventual Labour manifesto promise is to fully Rejoin the EU or to “merely” seek British re-entry to the Single Market or Customs Union, we need someone willing to spend all day, every day in studios deconstructing each option that emerges from the Labour government and its fellow travellers.
Polling shows majority support for Rejoin, but that collapses as soon as the implications of EU membership are spelled out. It’s not just the obvious disadvantages like the £20 billion plus contribution we’d have to make to EU coffers every year or the resumption of free movement across our borders. It’s also the hidden pitfalls like having to leave the CPTPP; or the loss of our strategic independence on era-defining technologies like AI; or the very real possibility of federalised borrowing to prop-up an unstable Eurozone. So let’s have someone spelling out those implications ceaselessly.
There’s more than enough detail here to keep a dedicated spokesperson fully-occupied, but more importantly if we resource an oven-ready, go-to critic of Burnham’s Rejoin agenda, the Conservative front bench would be left free to prioritise what they want to talk about not what Burnham wants to talk about.
So what sort of person would be suitable for the role?
It needs to be someone who’s good with the technicalities (especially the economics) and who relishes a tough interview while coming across as a voice of reason. He or she needn’t have voted Remain in 2016, but they mustn’t be the least bit swivel-eyed about Europe or any other issue. Not being on the front bench would also be helpful, as they’d be free to take the fight to pro-Rejoin outriders from the Labour backbenches — for instance, Jess Phillips and Emily Thornberry who are already making the case for overturning Brexit without a referendum. Above all, this needs to be someone who can make the case against Rejoin to Remain and Leave voters alike. To my mind, an ideal candidate would be the former Shadow Chancellor, Sir Mel Stride.
So do I see no role at all for Shadow Cabinet in opposing Rejoin?
Not quite. There is of course the parliamentary business of holding the government to account over its current negotiations with the EU. But even more importantly there’s a job to be done on making sure that Rejoin is debated on the basis of the EU as it actually is, not the EU it’s British fans would like it to be.
The singer-songwriter Billy Bragg once declared his commitment to what he called “socialism of the heart” — that is, an idealised, emotionally-driven concept of Leftwing belief. Well, both Remain and Rejoin are fundamentally motivated by a “Europe of the heart” — a confection of happy travel memories, cultural identity and a desired panacea for this country’s ills, both real and imagined.
You can be absolutely sure that this is the Europe that Andy Burnham will be selling to us — not the Europe where parties of the populist Right lead the polls in both Germany, and France. No, he won’t be wanting to talk about that at all — nor the rioting in Paris and beyond, nor the ongoing row over the EU budget, nor the ominous warning signs of a second Eurozone crisis, nor the inability of the EU to secure its own borders.
Kemi Badenoch, Andrew Griffith and Tom Tugendhat don’t need to bang on about Europe to show us the real Europe. To do so — clearly, calmly and non-obsessively — is all the contribution they need to make.