The Conservative Party seems completely incapable of identifying who their natural political enemies should be. The party spent the last decade letting petty personal grudges dictate its direction, blissfully unaware of the continuously growing power of forces naturally opposed to anything right-wing or conservative. The Blairite state architecture was left intact, its various QUANGOs and constitutional arrangements treated as perennial features of British political life.

Instead of treating their political enemies for what they were, the Tories actively bolstered them, sometimes in farcically self-defeating ways. For example, the Conservative government was apportioning taxpayer money towards Hope not Hate, an organisation that then openly campaigned against the election of Tories. As Home Secretary, Priti Patel was in charge of a department that funded the same organisation that then tarred her as a member of the dangerous “radical right” in their State of Hate report. Quite the own goal.

Like a struggling nightclub desperate to attract hip new crowds, the Tories started to admit just about anyone

But perhaps it should have been no surprise that the Conservatives were so insouciant about strengthening enemies outside of their party, given just how blasé they have been towards admitting and promoting people within the party who seemed to lack a single right-wing cell, never mind bone. Like a struggling nightclub desperate to attract hip new crowds, the Tories started to admit just about anyone in the hope it would make the party attractive and modern. Yet in doing so it jettisoned any semblance of core ideals, becoming full of people dancing to completely different tunes.

Take the current Conservative MP for Rutland and Stamford, Alicia Kearns. The former civil servant admitted to only having voted Conservative for the first time in 2015, having previously been a self-described “centrist” Labour supporter. But even after having cast her ballot Tory blue for the first time, her previous political sympathies seemed to have endured. Writing about the Women’s Marches that took place in early 2017 in response to the inauguration of President Donald Trump, Kearns argued that the demonstrations “could be the start of a revolution”.

She outlined her view on how the energy that animated the marches ought to be directed: “We must eviscerate the blindness, fear, misunderstanding and misogyny that allow sexism, racism, xenophobia and hatred of those who live, and love, differently to us, to continue. Equally more people who have the courage to drive change, and who share our values of inclusion must put themselves forward for public office.” Inspired by her own words, just two years later Kearns stood and was duly elected to Parliament having been parachuted into an ultra-safe Tory seat. Why the Conservatives thought that someone whose writing could easily have been lifted from a Momentum manifesto ought to belong within Britain’s centre-right party is unclear. Unsurprisingly, since entering Parliament Kearns has been firmly on the left of the Tories, juggling her passion and expertise on foreign policy with her campaigns to advance transgender rights and import more Afghans into Britain.

A look along the Tory benches brings us to Caroline Nokes, whose string of Newsnight appearances left people wondering what exactly she was doing in the Conservative party. First, there was her reaction to Lawrence Fox’s peculiar sexist outburst on GB News, for which the former actor was subsequently sacked by the broadcaster. Objecting to Fox’s comments was understandable, but Nokes called for the whole channel to be shut down. The Conservative MP was calling for the television channel most sympathetic to her party’s cause, which had multiple Conservative MPs on their full-time roster, to be taken off air. Quite apart from philosophical arguments around free expression and the role of the state in regulating media — would she have called for the BBC to be shut down after Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross’s bizarre intrusive phone call to Andrew Sachs? —  did she not realise how contrary to the interests of the party she was meant to be representing such a closure would have been?

A few months later, Nokes was again on Newsnight, this time to discuss the shocking Clapham alkali attack by Afghan refugee Abdul Ezedi. Nokes, the then Chair of the Women and Equalities Committee, quite astonishingly managed to pivot the conversation about a horrific and violent attack on a mother and two daughters onto her experiences dealing with “microaggressions”. When the plurality of voters in her constituency of Romsey and Southampton North voted Conservative, did they ever expect that their representative would end up on television speaking like a parody of the out-of-touch and perspective-fre liberal elite? 

Yet no figure typifies the Conservative’s habit of admitting and promoting their natural opponents more than Baroness Sayeeda Warsi. A legacy of David Cameron’s attempts to modernise the Conservatives and diversify the previously pale, male and stale intake, Warsi was given a peerage in 2007, then becoming the first ever female Muslim Cabinet member in 2010. Since resigning over the war in Gaza in 2014, Warsi has carved out a new role as the chief critic of what she perceives to be an inadequate response by the Tories on Islamophobia. In 2018, she called for her former colleague Zac Goldsmith to undergo “mandatory diversity training” following his unsuccessful run to be London Mayor. The following year, she sat down with The Guardian’s Owens Jones to once again discuss Islamophobia within the Tory party, in which she claimed that global anti-Muslim attacks were the result of politicians and opinion columnists who “gaslight and greenlight bigotry”.

Calls for mandatory diversity training. A desire for a restriction in speech that is claimed to “gaslight bigotry”. These are not utterances typically associated with conservatism. And the Baroness has only become more overt in her antipathy towards her own party. She has spent the last few years doing the rounds as the token “right winger”, giddily lapping up applause on left-wing television shows after declaring that her Conservative colleagues in government and Cabinet “are so shit”. In another appearance,  she called the then Conservative Attorney General “Cruella” Braverman (get it?). Yet despite these crude outbursts and rather lame attempts to get plaudits from anti-Tory crowds, Warsi remains on the Tory benches in the House of Lords. How many more times must she openly insult her colleagues, or further causes that are evidently contrary to basic conservative notions, before the party realises they have a natural opponent in their ranks?

The Conservatives have long been a party with internal factions, divided over even the biggest political issues of the day (remember that whole Brexit thing?). Yet a commitment to being a broad church does not preclude the exclusion of those who seem closer to your political opponents on almost every issue. For even if a party is to be a broad church, it must at least have a common commitment to a shared doctrine, even if the interpretations of that doctrine may then vary. Without such commitments, the Conservatives are doomed to political irrelevance — and they will deserve it.