Ashley Bower-Dyke is a lifelong Conservative with deep roots in the local community and a strong record of grassroots activism
In David Gauke’s recent ConservativeHome column, he argues that Kemi Badenoch is carrying out a “purge” of the Conservative Party by requiring prospective parliamentary candidates to support her positions on the European Convention on Human Rights and net zero.
In short, he claims that setting clear tests of belief amounts to excluding moderate Conservatives. The reality is that he has fundamentally misunderstood what is happening.
Those stuck in the past need to accept that the Conservative Party is changing. More importantly, it is changing for the better. Kemi Badenoch is rebuilding a party rooted in actual Conservative values. Her so-called red lines are not there to exclude people for the sake of it. They exist to ensure that those seeking to represent the Conservative Party actually believe in the direction the party is taking. She is showing leadership – not heightening factionalism.
Some may point to my previous ConservativeHome article, where I both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. I did, and I also stand by much of what I wrote. But supporting a leader does not mean pretending they were without fault.
Boris Johnson connected with voters in a way few politicians ever manage. He understood the public mood and won an extraordinary majority because people believed he would Get Brexit Done and govern as a small-c conservative. Liz Truss recognised many of the right economic solutions, particularly on tax and growth, but she moved far too quickly and lost control.
Neither of those realities changes my central point.
The defining failure of the 2019-24 Conservative Government was not that it became too conservative. It was that it stopped governing with conviction. Too often we drifted. We tried to keep everyone happy. Principles gave way to pragmatism, pragmatism became compromise, and compromise became confusion. Before long, voters simply didn’t know what the Conservative Party stood for.
That is where I believe David Gauke’s argument falls short. In his article, he portrays conviction as a purge.
I see something very different.
Kemi did not begin her leadership by asking which opinions poll well, and what people wanted to hear. She began by asking a much more important question: what should the Conservative Party stand for?
From that came detailed, sensible policy – not slogans.
She is rebuilding the Party not around personality or populism, but around serious conservative ideas. Backing business by cutting taxes, scrapping unnecessary regulation and supporting our high streets. Raising school standards and restoring discipline in the classroom. Regaining control of our borders, reforming citizenship and withdrawing from the ECHR where it prevents Britain from securing them. Fixing welfare such that work always pays and ensuring that the welfare state becomes a safety net rather than a destination. These are real policies, properly thought through and ready for government.
These requirements are hardly revolutionary. Kemi expects prospective parliamentary candidates to support leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if it prevents Britain from controlling its borders. She also expects them to reject the legally binding 2050 net zero target.
Those are not obscure ideological tests.
They are two of the defining policy positions on which she is rebuilding the Conservative Party. The wider principles behind them are equally familiar. Freedom of speech, free markets, personal responsibility, living within our means, lower taxes, a smaller state, putting Britain’s national interest first and securing our borders.
If someone wishes to become a Conservative MP but cannot support Kemi Badenoch’s central policies, or the principles that underpin them, then surely it is reasonable to ask whether they should be representing the Conservative Party in Parliament at all.
A political party is not a student debating society. It exists to persuade the public, win elections and implement a manifesto. Voters rightly expect Conservative MPs to support Conservative policies. That is by no means a purge – it is common sense.
Critics often argue that the Conservative Party has always been a broad church. They are right, but broad churches still share a common faith. Without shared principles, a broad church simply becomes a collection of competing opinions. That is what many voters saw us as.
To make this point even clearer, let us take a constituency I know well.
Bracknell was won by a Labour candidate who was parachuted in. Yet Labour did not win because thousands of lifelong Conservatives suddenly embraced Labour’s vision for Britain. They won because too many Conservatives either stayed at home or switched to Reform.
The election results here tell the story. Compared with 2019, the Liberal Democrats actually lost vote share and the Greens made only modest gains. Reform entered the race with 17 per cent of the vote, while the Conservative vote fell by more than 23 percentage points.
We did not lose our voters to Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. We lost them because many concluded that the Conservative Party itself no longer looked or sounded Conservative.
Our candidate was a strong centre-right Conservative and a hardworking local MP who earned enormous respect across the constituency. Time and again on the doorstep, people spoke warmly about him. They admired his work ethic, his integrity and the way he represented Bracknell.
Yet they still voted against the Party.
Not because they rejected the candidate, but because they rejected what they believed the national Conservative Party had become. It was a pattern repeated across the length and breadth of the country.
And that distinction matters.
Repeatedly, voters told us the same thing. High taxes. An ever-expanding state. Liberal ideas that no longer reflected the values they had supported in 2019. Their vote for Reform was not always an endorsement of Reform itself. More often, it was a message to us that we had drifted too far from the principles that had earned their trust.
That is why I believe Kemi Badenoch is taking the right approach.
Before we start chasing voters elsewhere, we must first reunite the centre-right vote. We must win back the Conservatives who stayed at home or lent their vote to Reform because they no longer believed we were acting like Conservatives.
David Gauke is right about one thing. Winning again requires building a coalition.
Where we differ is where that coalition begins.
I do not believe it starts by watering down Conservative principles in the hope of appealing to everyone. It starts by rebuilding trust with those who once voted Conservative and no longer do. As I wrote in my previous ConservativeHome article, “Badenoch now has one job: put the fight back into the Conservative Party.”
That is exactly what she is doing. Like any good engineer, she has identified the fault, diagnosed the cause and started fixing the problem. And that is not a purge. It is leadership.
Ashley Bower-Dyke is a lifelong Conservative with deep roots in the local community and a strong record of grassroots activism
In David Gauke’s recent ConservativeHome column, he argues that Kemi Badenoch is carrying out a “purge” of the Conservative Party by requiring prospective parliamentary candidates to support her positions on the European Convention on Human Rights and net zero.
In short, he claims that setting clear tests of belief amounts to excluding moderate Conservatives. The reality is that he has fundamentally misunderstood what is happening.
Those stuck in the past need to accept that the Conservative Party is changing. More importantly, it is changing for the better. Kemi Badenoch is rebuilding a party rooted in actual Conservative values. Her so-called red lines are not there to exclude people for the sake of it. They exist to ensure that those seeking to represent the Conservative Party actually believe in the direction the party is taking. She is showing leadership – not heightening factionalism.
Some may point to my previous ConservativeHome article, where I both Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. I did, and I also stand by much of what I wrote. But supporting a leader does not mean pretending they were without fault.
Boris Johnson connected with voters in a way few politicians ever manage. He understood the public mood and won an extraordinary majority because people believed he would Get Brexit Done and govern as a small-c conservative. Liz Truss recognised many of the right economic solutions, particularly on tax and growth, but she moved far too quickly and lost control.
Neither of those realities changes my central point.
The defining failure of the 2019-24 Conservative Government was not that it became too conservative. It was that it stopped governing with conviction. Too often we drifted. We tried to keep everyone happy. Principles gave way to pragmatism, pragmatism became compromise, and compromise became confusion. Before long, voters simply didn’t know what the Conservative Party stood for.
That is where I believe David Gauke’s argument falls short. In his article, he portrays conviction as a purge.
I see something very different.
Kemi did not begin her leadership by asking which opinions poll well, and what people wanted to hear. She began by asking a much more important question: what should the Conservative Party stand for?
From that came detailed, sensible policy – not slogans.
She is rebuilding the Party not around personality or populism, but around serious conservative ideas. Backing business by cutting taxes, scrapping unnecessary regulation and supporting our high streets. Raising school standards and restoring discipline in the classroom. Regaining control of our borders, reforming citizenship and withdrawing from the ECHR where it prevents Britain from securing them. Fixing welfare such that work always pays and ensuring that the welfare state becomes a safety net rather than a destination. These are real policies, properly thought through and ready for government.
These requirements are hardly revolutionary. Kemi expects prospective parliamentary candidates to support leaving the European Convention on Human Rights if it prevents Britain from controlling its borders. She also expects them to reject the legally binding 2050 net zero target.
Those are not obscure ideological tests.
They are two of the defining policy positions on which she is rebuilding the Conservative Party. The wider principles behind them are equally familiar. Freedom of speech, free markets, personal responsibility, living within our means, lower taxes, a smaller state, putting Britain’s national interest first and securing our borders.
If someone wishes to become a Conservative MP but cannot support Kemi Badenoch’s central policies, or the principles that underpin them, then surely it is reasonable to ask whether they should be representing the Conservative Party in Parliament at all.
A political party is not a student debating society. It exists to persuade the public, win elections and implement a manifesto. Voters rightly expect Conservative MPs to support Conservative policies. That is by no means a purge – it is common sense.
Critics often argue that the Conservative Party has always been a broad church. They are right, but broad churches still share a common faith. Without shared principles, a broad church simply becomes a collection of competing opinions. That is what many voters saw us as.
To make this point even clearer, let us take a constituency I know well.
Bracknell was won by a Labour candidate who was parachuted in. Yet Labour did not win because thousands of lifelong Conservatives suddenly embraced Labour’s vision for Britain. They won because too many Conservatives either stayed at home or switched to Reform.
The election results here tell the story. Compared with 2019, the Liberal Democrats actually lost vote share and the Greens made only modest gains. Reform entered the race with 17 per cent of the vote, while the Conservative vote fell by more than 23 percentage points.
We did not lose our voters to Labour, the Liberal Democrats or the Greens. We lost them because many concluded that the Conservative Party itself no longer looked or sounded Conservative.
Our candidate was a strong centre-right Conservative and a hardworking local MP who earned enormous respect across the constituency. Time and again on the doorstep, people spoke warmly about him. They admired his work ethic, his integrity and the way he represented Bracknell.
Yet they still voted against the Party.
Not because they rejected the candidate, but because they rejected what they believed the national Conservative Party had become. It was a pattern repeated across the length and breadth of the country.
And that distinction matters.
Repeatedly, voters told us the same thing. High taxes. An ever-expanding state. Liberal ideas that no longer reflected the values they had supported in 2019. Their vote for Reform was not always an endorsement of Reform itself. More often, it was a message to us that we had drifted too far from the principles that had earned their trust.
That is why I believe Kemi Badenoch is taking the right approach.
Before we start chasing voters elsewhere, we must first reunite the centre-right vote. We must win back the Conservatives who stayed at home or lent their vote to Reform because they no longer believed we were acting like Conservatives.
David Gauke is right about one thing. Winning again requires building a coalition.
Where we differ is where that coalition begins.
I do not believe it starts by watering down Conservative principles in the hope of appealing to everyone. It starts by rebuilding trust with those who once voted Conservative and no longer do. As I wrote in my previous ConservativeHome article, “Badenoch now has one job: put the fight back into the Conservative Party.”
That is exactly what she is doing. Like any good engineer, she has identified the fault, diagnosed the cause and started fixing the problem. And that is not a purge. It is leadership.