Kemi Badenoch’s call for a “muscular liberalism” at the International Democracy Union (IDU) Forum in Washington D.C. might have made for a nifty little speech in the late 1970s. In 2024, on the other hand, it sounds as stale as the crumbs at the bottom of a bread bin. 

Even the term inspires a sense of déjà vu. “Frankly,” said David Cameron in 2011, “We need a lot less of the passive tolerance of recent years and a much more active, muscular liberalism.” Now, Britain is a country where a Muslim MP calls for blasphemy laws in Parliament and a teacher is in hiding for showing his students a caricature of Muhammad. Great job, Dave.

What will Badenoch’s “muscular liberalism” mean? “We don’t want to throw away any of the things that are good about our society,” she says, “But we need to police the boundaries otherwise our opponents will blur them to the point where they no longer exist.” Mrs Badenoch, what decade are you living in? The opponents of British tradition and prosperity are not on the “boundaries” of public life. They are at its heart. Just to pick one example from the weekend’s news, white Britons are being blocked from applying for internships with the security services. Is GCHQ on the “boundaries”?

Liberalism, Badenoch tells us, is vulnerable to being “hacked” by its opponents. True enough. But she sounds like she lives in an alternative universe where this is a marginal phenomenon. “We talk about free speech,” says Badenoch, “And then our enemies use it to feed self-loathing propaganda to our children on social media.” The biggest problem with “free speech” is not that the Russians are using it to poison our precious bodily fluids — it’s the extent to which it doesn’t exist. People are being jailed for making nasty jokes in private and for posting “offensive” memes on Facebook. The police are arresting people for “misgendering” and for silent prayer. The call — from the police, to invite you in for questioning — is coming from inside the house.

The Conservatives lost, says Badenoch, because of “talking Right, but governing Left”. There’s truth to that. But she isn’t clear on what this means. “There was complacency about the nature of the enemy we were fighting,” she says, “Because a lot of people did not recognise it for what it was.” It’s true that the Conservatives allowed outright leftists to prosper, with jobs and patronage (see Charlie Peters’ excellent article “Why do the Tories love to promote their enemies?”). But it wasn’t leftists who created the historic rise in immigration that Patrick O’Flynn calls “the Tory flood”. It was, well — the Tories, with Badenoch among them. To shift the blame onto a shapeless “enemy” is to avoid serious introspection. 

It was also the Conservatives who imposed extended lockdowns, maintained and expanded irrational equalities legislation, and obsessed over implementing what Christopher Snowdon called “petty prohibitionism”, which makes Badenoch’s insistence that the Conservatives have to “explain the value of liberty” ironic. Physician, explain it to thyself.

Well, the Tories cannot spend all their time apologising. What is more ironic, though, is that Badenoch doesn’t really tell us what the “value of liberty” is. I’m not trying to make too much of a “post-liberal” point here. Conservatism, if it is meaningful at all, should contain a vision of the good that demands more substance than a vacancy of government, but it is nonetheless true that Britain has suffered, in many ways, from statist overreach. Yet the abstract language of liberalism, unlike the concrete language of flourishing, has little use here. Even Liz Truss had the sense to give it shape with her emphasis on growth.

Six months ago, I criticised Badenoch for using identity politics when it was rhetorically convenient. I thought it was a bad strategy. Now, I think it is the only weapon in her argumentative arsenal. “Just this morning,” Badenoch says: 

… the British Prime Minister made a joke about how I worked at McDonald’s. He would never have dared to do that, if I was a left-wing activist. And if a Conservative Prime Minister had made those comments about a black party leader, they would have been called a racist and asked to resign. 

Badenoch is being disingenuous here. It was not a joke about how she had worked for McDonald’s. It was a joke about her claim that her brief stint as a McDonald’s employee made her working class. Would a Conservative PM have been “called a racist and asked to resign” over those comments? Eh, I don’t think so. I think that Badenoch is trying to have her cake and eat it — to imply that an inoffensive joke was racially problematic while casting it as hypocritical.

We’ll politely scoot past Badenoch’s suggestion that an unmemorable speech she delivered in 2022 might have inspired Argentina’s Javier Milei. Perhaps it was a joke. Perhaps it is a joke, in fact, that a Conservative leader who is trying to rebuild the party after a historic electoral defeat is just reheating Cameronism. The alternative — that this is the best idea the Tories can come up with — is too depressing to contemplate.