This article is taken from the April 2026 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £5.
There is a commonly shared assumption amongst many on the British right that the next election will be the last opportunity to “save” Britain. Fiscal, demographic and cultural trends are such that, by their reckoning, Britain in the 2030s will be beyond repair.
But to whom do they turn to save the day? Is it the party that abjectly failed throughout the 14 years it was entrusted with the task, or the alternative that is untested and inexperienced in statecraft? The dilemma raises further questions, not least whether Tory defectors risk making Reform appear to be the Conservative Party 2.0. Who has the clearest intent? And who can deliver in practice?
The mild-mannered Neil O’Brien is hardly the kind of firebrand that the more fevered members of the British right look to for such a task. Yet it is to the Conservative MP for Harborough, Oadby and Wigston that his party is turning for strategic direction comparable to the faith that Reform has placed in O’Brien’s thoughtful and softly spoken former colleague, Danny Kruger, to do some of its harder thinking.
For his part, having previously seconded the shadow education secretary, Laura Trott, O’Brien was elevated by Kemi Badenoch to the new post of shadow minister for policy renewal and development last July. At least he does not lack think tank experience: he chaired Open Europe and Policy Exchange in succession, before going on to found Onward.
Whilst we await Conservative solutions for the country’s plight, is O’Brien beginning by asking the right questions? Of all Britain’s problems, he thinks “the biggest has got to be an incredibly sluggish economy. One per cent growth a year for the foreseeable future. When you’re used to the levels we were at in the 1990s where it was like four or five or something like that, it is pretty disappointing. That’s probably the underlying issue driving a lot of discontent in politics. Then the other major issue is immigration — both legal and illegal.”
There is, he maintains, an emerging conservative consensus on how to tackle some of the “really obvious” existing problems — Britain’s building constraints, the crippling cost of Net Zero, runaway government spending and proportionately record-high taxes. But there are competing ideas about how to deal with emerging risks, like how to deal with China and its expanding influence over the world economy and how AI will impact the jobs market.
“Then, there’s the challenge of improving public services — how you increase productivity in health, and the criminal justice system. We’ve talked about having 10,000 extra police, but there’s 1,000 other things to do about prolific criminals, future prisons, how to get our courts back on their feet and to stop the still-rising court backlogs.”
I suggest this sounds a little managerial. If the country’s problems are so great, isn’t a transformational course more urgently required than a corrective one? Tackling education issues, where Bridget Phillipson “is going in completely the wrong direction”, requires a corrective course, he maintains.
Immigration policy is another matter. “You have a system that is just completely unselective, and even though numbers will come down from the insane highs they were at, that will still leave us with the incredibly large number of people coming, and a lot are going to be net beneficiaries,” he believes, sidestepping which party so long presided over such a scenario.
Nevertheless, O’Brien has come to conclude that “the whole set-up is all wrong”. He says: “You have courts and tribunals that are completely out of control, interpreting the ECHR in the most insane way. I was arguing for us to leave the ECHR before the election and it is now party policy, but there’s a lot more to do in terms of actually delivering the end of illegal immigration.”
Mention of judicial activism in support of immigration begs the question of how the Conservatives will approach the problem of diminishing ministerial decision capacity that so many of his colleagues complained about, but failed to solve, whilst in government. O’Brien thinks:
There is a massive reconsideration about the tremendous amount of arm’s-lengthism in government, a hangover from what was originally the ‘Next Steps’ [a 1988 initiative] under the Thatcher government, then ‘agencification’ under New Labour. There was a long time in think tank land after 1997 where a lot of people proposed an MPC for every issue, arguing they wanted to take the issue ‘out of politics’. And it was false: the Bank of England wasn’t independent, it was operationally independent: politicians told them exactly what to do, and then they tried to deliver it.
The reality of “this depoliticalisation actually just meant a bunch of non-elected people taking massively political decisions. There’s Natural England saying you can’t build any houses, the Sentencing Commission saying we must have two-tier sentencing based on skin colour. We need ministers to be able to have discretion and make decisions, not be mired in legal battles because of the ECHR or judicial review.”
But legal constraints were only part of the problems the last Conservative government faced in delivering their agenda. Many ministers also blamed the institutional hostility of the civil service. O’Brien puts this down simply to the nature of an over-large state: “In Number 10 and the Treasury, you come across really good people, and you think, wow, the state’s getting a bargain here. But the further you get from the centre, you find more people who should be managed out, but aren’t. The really good people often leave, because they are not getting paid enough, and that multiplies the problem.”
Contrasting it with the efficient administration of Singapore, he diagnoses the British state’s malaise as a common one to many large institutions. “When it becomes too big and diffuse, officials start drifting into things like DEI initiatives and other non-core activities, and they churn out ever more peripheral regulation that simply creates work for others and adds friction across the system,” he says.
Delivering economic growth, cutting the size of the state, tackling immigration, improving public services and beating back the Blob are all familiar centre-right aspirations, but where is the differentiation from what Reform is offering? The voters who turfed the Conservatives out were looking for a new party, I argue, and given Keir Starmer’s underwhelming tenure, many voters now appear to want something closer to all-out regime change. If that is the scale of change they now seek, what is the philosophical difference between Reform and the Conservatives?
“Which philosophy am I defining myself against?” he asks. “Take the two-child benefit cap. They’ve gone from saying it was completely unfair and must be lifted, to saying it should be relaxed for some people, to now saying it’s an incredibly important policy that must be kept. Those are essentially opposite positions.”
“I genuinely wish them well in trying to work out what their philosophy is, because these questions matter. If you look at welfare spending by constituency, Conservatives tend to do better in areas with lower working-age benefit spending; Labour does better where overall welfare spending is higher.” None of that is surprising.
However, Reform “is strongest in areas where benefit spending is particularly high. Their U-turn on the two-child benefit cap is just a small example of the wider choices they face. And those choices become much harder in government. From my time at the Treasury, I can tell you there are plenty of people on the right who talk like Rambo on public spending, but when things get difficult they end up running for the trenches.
“Ultimately, in a democracy, the customer is always right, and they were definitely right in 2024. We were way off track.” As a result, the Tories will have to present “a very clear plan on how it will all work” that will require “a serious policy function to focus on the things that are really serious, rather than the needs of this week’s pressure release”.
Whatever may be rather pointedly said about the past directional failings of the Conservative high command, O’Brien appears to believe his party also suffered from cowardice in the ranks and that the nature of those rallying to Reform’s banner may similarly be the party’s undoing:
We ran into some problems in 2019 with MPs who had never expected to win and suddenly found themselves in Parliament. That problem would likely be even more acute for a populist party. Politics often involves telling people things they don’t want to hear and making difficult decisions — and then taking the flak for them. If you join an established party, you accept that trade-off. But if you join a movement built on the idea that there are easy answers and no hard choices, the reality can be quite different. When the pressure arrives — when the bullets start flying and your inbox fills with angry messages about the latest decision — that’s when the real test begins.
O’Brien clearly does not share the blasé attitude of some of his Conservative frontbench colleagues — particularly the shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel — whose efforts to justify their time in government extend as far as defending the “Boriswave” that set skilled worker visa requirements at a level that attracted tens of thousands of low-skilled immigrants.
Rather, seeking to find the educational value in bitter experience, O’Brien claims “the experience of things going wrong between 2019 and 2024 has actually been instructive. In some ways it’s a bit like the Heath government. The Thatcher government was much stronger for [the party] having been beaten up between 1970 and 1974. When they came back the second time and won, they had learned the lessons they hadn’t grasped the first time around. It teaches you that many of these problems are far more complicated than they look from the outside.”
He thinks that part of the problem “is that people often want to counterpose issues in the way it makes sense in Westminster but that makes no sense to normal people. For instance, there are not two distinct groups — one that wants to drastically reduce immigration and another that wants to reform the NHS to improve it. Those are, literally, the same individual people. These sort of dichotomies show a lot of the thinking in Westminster is just wrong.”
So what, I ask, would Britain after a successful Conservative government look like? For O’Brien, the answer is almost stubbornly prosaic: “You’d have the economy picking up and real living standards rising. You’d see better integration, illegal immigration brought to an end, and legal immigration significantly reduced. Public services would be improving, and they’d be more productive and more user-friendly. It’s a boring answer, but it really is that simple. That’s what success or failure would look like.” When I offer up the cliché about campaigning in poetry and governing in prose, he disagrees, “More like we’ll campaign in prose and govern in prose. Start as you mean to go on! I feel like I should have been more hopey-changey but I think ‘no-bullshit government’ is a more than good enough slogan. People are just sick of the dysfunction.”
Whether voters will be receptive is another question. The insurgent mood on the right is driven precisely by the belief that experience is the problem, not the solution — that those who presided over Britain’s stagnation cannot plausibly promise its revival. Yet O’Brien’s case rests on a different claim: that experience counts, and that a party that has governed before — and become bogged down — is less likely to do so again.
If the next election really is the last chance to change Britain’s trajectory, the electorate will have to decide which gamble it prefers — the chastened party that has failed before, or the untested movement that has never had to govern at all.
