The Conservative New Coke problem

At the heart of most of the Conservative Party’s difficulties is the challenge of persuading the electorate that they are a new party, with new ideas, all while trying to maintain the institutional advantage that they have as a party that has been around in some form for 192 years. 

In another European country, the Conservatives would almost certainly have taken the view that since the public don’t like what they’re selling they should change their name. In just the decade since its founding, Emmanuel Macron’s governing party has gone from “En marche !” to “La République en marche” to “Renaissance”, for example. But being a member of “the oldest and one of the most successful political parties in the democratic world” is incredibly (and often detrimentally) important to its remaining members, and so the name sticks. It’s obviously not a foolish insistence, because this tribalism is the one thing they have going for them — in Britain, people will unashamedly continue to brandish their credentials as former president of their university conservative society long into adulthood, in a way that doesn’t really happen for the Ultimate Frisbee Club or Harry Potter Soc. The core of residual, life-long members is the only reason they still exist in Westminster politics, and it is the thing that their rivals on the right, Reform, do not have.

There is, of course, another way. After the Second World War, Coca-Cola had a 60% share in the US for cola drinks. By 1983 it had declined to under 24%, predominantly due to competition from Pepsi. Pepsi was outselling them in the supermarkets, and much like aspects of Conservative Party support, Coca-Cola was only holding on thanks to its legacy — albeit in the form of soda vending machines and McDonald’s fast food restaurants rather than local Conservative associations.

When Roberto Goizueta became Coca-Cola CEO in 1980 he was prepared to leave no stone unturned in how the company did business, including how it formulated its drinks. Faced with something approximating the Conservative Party’s conundrum of regaining market share without sacrificing brand loyalty, in 1985 it launched New Coke to coincide with the company’s centenary.

So, should Kemi Badenoch rebrand the Conservatives as the New Conservatives?

Notwithstanding the fact that it sounds like the name of a 2000s landfill indie band doing the graveyard shift at Reading Festival, there are some other problems at the bottling plant.

On immigration, it’s quite hard to persuade customers to try the taste of your new drink when the last one tasted like rotten milk — there is nobody with a worse record than the Conservative Party. In the entire history of Britain — something that has existed as a geographical concept familiar to its inhabitants for at least 3,000 years — nobody has overseen more migration into the country than they. As everybody knows, the numbers are staggering and would be bewildering to those even in wartime. A total of around 194,000 people arrived by small boat alone between 2018 and 2025, with the burden of their housing and processing swallowing up the entire income tax revenues of the combined graduates of a handful of top universities. Many of Britain’s brightest graduates work for several months each year merely to fund the associated costs of the legacy of the Conservative Party’s boats.

It is extremely hard to disclaim that legacy, to the point where raking over their record on it feels like needlessly speaking ill of the politically dead. However, let’s do the Conservative Party a favour and park “the immigration stuff” to one side for a moment (as many have noted, it’s something that Kemi Badenoch herself has been keen to do of late. Where the party leader previously appeared in front of a “Stronger economy. Stronger borders.” slogan, we’re now down to just “Stronger economy.”).

As far as it’s possible to discern, the case for the Conservative Party to be re-entrusted to manage Britain’s economy is roughly this: none of this was our fault. The last decade of the 14 years of Conservative Government was marked by turbulence. The Cameron-Osborne project was derailed by Brexit — an expression of popular democratic will that some members of the current Conservative shadow cabinet opposed, including the shadow Home Secretary, Defence Secretary, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer, but the party has now agreed to kind of mostly support. The uncertainty over the future of post-Brexit realignment dominated the Theresa May-Philip Hammond years and made any longer-term strategy difficult to manage. The Boris Johnson years with Sajid Javid and Rishi Sunak were disrupted; first by more Brexit, then by Covid and finally by the actions of Boris Johnson. Liz Truss was a rush-of-blood-to-the-head mistake committed by the party which has agreed to never again attempt anything so drastic, and the Rishi Sunak-Jeremy Hunt years were clobbered by Ukraine inflation, footing the bill for Covid, and the accumulated fatigue of all that came before.

The Conservative Party proposition is that they never really had a chance to properly get to grips with the economy, because of “events, dear boy, events”. A lot of the people involved in the management of the party are no longer involved (although quite a few still are), and they promise that given another chance then it will get to do things properly, using exactly the same formula as before.

Here, however, we’re presented with another sticking point with the idea of The New Conservatives. The Coca-Cola recipe is famously a closely guarded secret. It’s said that only two employees know the full formula at any given time; these employees are never allowed to travel together, no single system stores the entire recipe, and access is segmented by role and need-to-know policies. Launching a new recipe is therefore a matter of public perception that can be shaped by marketing and novelty. The recipe to the prevailing Conservative Party view of the economy is a very public one. It’s also a recipe that is prone to going wrong whenever things get shaken up in any way, and — unlike the global face of capitalism Coca-Cola — it has more in common with the stuff you get served in expensive cafés when it’s past time for a coffee, but not quite time for a glass of wine. “We don’t actually serve Coca-Cola, it’s Shoreditch Cola, it’s locally made, gives back to the community. Is that ok?” You know the stuff. It’s not “ok” – it costs three times as much as Coca-Cola and it tastes nothing like it and you wish you’d just had an 11am glass of rosé on a weekday instead. I digress. 

Since the end of the Cameron-Osborne era, the Conservative Party has been tied to the Shoreditch Cola idea that GDP growth should be pursued to help maximise tax receipts to fund public spending. It was such an obsession, that it became a running joke of the Boris Johnson years. There was nothing that couldn’t have “and fund Our NHS instead” tagged onto the end of it. Boris was often attacked on his claim that “we send the EU £350m a week, let’s fund the NHS instead”, but nothing made Conservatives happier than pointing out that in fact NHS spending had gone up by a billion a week since then. Under famous Coca-Cola fanatic Rishi Sunak, taxes were hiked to the highest level since since the Second World War — in line with the rest of government finances, which looked like a country on an existential war footing. Even now, unburdened by the pressures of great offices of state, Rishi Sunak underlines that the Conservative Party philosophy is above all a progressive social democrat one – that growth is essential to maintain state spending, welfare, and public services. 

So why is the Conservative Party so gun shy about slashing the size of the state? On one hand, there is a strong, perhaps now dominant strain within the Conservative Party that believes that the role of the private sector is to provide the revenues for the state to intervene in people’s lives. But it is also that a huge swathe of the post-2016 cohort of Conservative MPs were spooked by campfire scare stories about austerity. There is a very good blog post dissecting the 2015 general election here. Among other things it contains a reminder that, contrary to much of the media spin, the idea of austerity — of living within one’s means — was actually popular with the general voting public. Whether or not there was very much austerity at all in absolute terms is neither here nor there. Slashing spending on state healthcare, on education, on benefits was bad, particularly if it was done by The Evil Tories.

New Coke, of course, was a massive flop. Despite stated preference for the new drink in taste tests, revealed preferences were for loyalty to the old Coca-Cola recipe. There was even an Old Cola Drinkers of America lobby group formed by a Seattle retiree, Gay Robbins, to attempt to lobby Coca-Cola to either reintroduce the old formula or sell it to someone else. It was rejected, but it was part of a clear demonstration that the people demanded the old recipe.

At which point it’s worth considering that the biggest barrier to Kemi Badenoch rebranding as The New Conservatives is that they’ve already been trying to flog a new recipe for years, and the public has decided that it simply does not refresh like the old stuff.

While it’s true that the shadow government of Kemi Badenoch has done little to formally separate itself from the past, that is of course not true of all members of the 2024 Conservative cohort.

Those that have joined Reform have, to all intents and purposes, made some kind of formal repudiation of Conservative Party politics of the recent past, all while expressing their support for the great taste of original Coca-Cola — Thatcherite supply side reforms, shrinking the state, living within one’s means.

Kemi Badenoch and her team might be very keen to paint former Conservative Party members joining Reform as losers and outcasts, but most of the natural supporters of Reform are fairly at ease with the idea of being disillusioned with the Conservatives and, like the Old Cola Drinkers of America, seeking a more rooted home elsewhere.

Until Nigel Farage announced that he would be taking over as leader of Reform on 3 June 2024, the party did not really exist in the mainstream. And for most people’s adult lives until that point, if you were to the right of the centre politically, the Conservative Party was the default party to associate with. This means that the vast majority of people that join Reform will have previously either been Conservative Party politicians, members, activists, or will have been members of a Conservative Party adjacent society while at university. They probably grew up on the original taste of Thatcherite conservativism, and nothing else quenches.

Coca-Cola didn’t ultimately win back soda drinkers to their brand by telling Pepsi that their new customers were “their problem now”. They reintroduced the great taste of Coca-Cola that everybody loved. The recipes are out there — the Conservative Party needs to decide whether it wants to go the way of New Coke, or whether it wants to stand behind the real thing.