None of the contenders for the Conservative Party leadership inspire much confidence, partially because they’re all Conservatives.

Having been ineffectual in government, the Tories must prove to the people they can be an effective opposition — and ultimately an effective government once again, which is a fruitless exercise as it’s hard to view them as anything but losers.

This is compounded by the obvious is the lack of fresh ideology. Sure, the party lost because it broke its promises, but it broke its promises as there was an enduring mismatch between its ideological priority and promises; the party was consistently reluctant to act on immigration and its proxy issues (such as Brexit) unless it was (without hyperbole) threatened with electoral annihilation on two consecutive occasions.

As such, you’d think the current contenders would seek an ideological overhaul; at the very least, some genuine semblance of originality or reinvention. Apparently not!

Total War Tom presented as a no-nonsense, details man with a military background, yet his leadership campaign was clearly the most fanciful, primarily running on a return to good vibes with policy proposals being few and far between. Tugendhat’s apologetic sentimentalism was served with incessant medal jangling — supposed credentials to validate his insane neoconservative worldview.

BAME, lame, and more of the same, Cleverly is the de-facto continuity candidate, which is hardly a good thing. The Shadow Home Secretary is offering a “Reaganite” pastiche of lower taxes and increased defence spending, as well as taking credit for reducing immigration to a measly 450,000. Naturally, he doesn’t mention liberalising immigration from the high-earning nationsfolk of India during his one (1) year tenure as Foreign Secretary. If you want an “economic” approach to immigration without the baggage of discussing demographics, look no further!

Jenrick’s transformation from an unknown Tory apparatchik Remainer to an immigration hawk of the party’s right-wing has been so well-timed and convenient it makes once-Never Trumper JD Vance’s conversion to Trumpism in the run-up to his candidacy for the Senate seem like an organic political journey. Ignore the public’s perception of him as “smug” and “slimy” at your own peril.

Following his demotion from a cabinet secretary to a minister attending cabinet, specifically during the Tories’ death spiral in the polls and the growing anger over their failure to control immigration, it’s pretty clear Jenrick saw the writing on the wall and realised his best chances for advancement resided in re-ingratiating himself with the grassroots.

More to the point, considering the ire aimed at Suella Braverman over immigration, you’d think similar criticism would be levied at the guy specifically tasked with bringing the numbers down.

However, despite the ambiguity regarding his “true” politics, one of the two consistencies of Jenrick’s career is his willingness to beat his chest on behalf of Israel. The overwhelming majority of Tory MPs are avidly pro-Israel, but Jenrick is so staunch and unsubtle about it that I’m surprised it took an anti-Hamas hoodie and a proposal to plaster the Star of David over the border gates for people to mention it.

As a member of the Conservative Friends of Israel, even whilst serving in the cabinet, Jenrick pressured the UK government to move the British embassy in Israel to Jerusalem, travelled to Israel on multiple fact-finding missions, received generous donations from Israeli contacts, and spearheaded legislation for Israel’s political benefit.

Even his supposed immigration restrictionism is couched in his pro-Israel philosophy. For Jenrick, widespread ethnoreligious sectarianism from the immigrant and immigrant-descended population wasn’t bad because it was exactly that, but because the protestors were anti-Israel and often anti-Semitic. Indeed, it seems Jenrick was disinterested in revoking visas until a Palestinian student calling Israel “oppressive” and delighting in news of the October 7th attack.

The second consistency is Jenrick is basically a Cameronite — that is, economically Thatcherite and socially Blairite; economically liberal, but wishy-washy (but essentially liberal) on basically everything else.

Despite his promise of a new Conservative Party, he’s arguably the least original of the already unoriginal candidates, citing Margaret Thatcher, Keith Joseph, and Nigel Lawson as his political heroes. (Such diversity of thought!)

Far from tokenistic choices, Jenrick regards “Global Britain” as the only viable post-Brexit model, viewing economic liberalism — including the creation of a “managed but liberal” immigration policy — as the ultimate priority of any prospective government.

In terms of policy, Jenrick’s not offering us anything particularly cutting-edge, promising to tackle illegal immigration, cut the number of visas, only import the brightest and best, leave the ECHR, even touting the idea of a British Bill of Rights.

This is basically a regurgitation of the many broken promises of David Cameron; half-way measures intended to contain the right and keep disaffected Tory members and voters invested in the party.

Cannibalised Cameronism. Specifically, Cannibalised Cameronism with Zombie Thatcherite characteristics. How can any right-winger be even cautiously optimistic about this? In what reasonable mind is it practical to settle for half-measures when a situation becomes twice as bad? Are we content for mediocrity in the face of failure, failure in the face of disaster, and disaster in the face of catastrophe?

Far from undergoing a right-ward transformation, Jenrick likely hasn’t changed since he was selected to fight the 2014 Newark by-election. More likely, the British right has become so thoroughly subverted and desperate that some austere (and moulding) scraps of meat are treated as proof of ideological advancement.

Conservatives are quick to counter accusations that criticism (and a general suspicion) of multiculturalism is a distinctly right-wing opinion, citing Cameron’s anti-sectarian doctrine of muscular liberalism — which explicitly targeted home-grown Islamism and the failures of the broader multicultural project — yet when Jenrick deploys rhetoric along similar lines, it’s used as a sign the grassroots are finally breaking through.

On the whole, Jenrick is an establishment candidate the grassroots can accept, not a grassroots candidate the establishment can accept.

Despite stumbling at the start line, Badenoch is evidently viewed as a major threat by rival camps. Credit where it’s due, Badenoch evokes genuine disgust from the liberal commentariat — opinions of the others range from basic partisan enmity to mild indifference.

Nevertheless, it’s clear Badenoch’s campaign is full of contradictions which call the authenticity of her right-wing credentials into question.

Badenoch wants to lead the party’s rightward march on immigration but proudly claimed responsibility for increasing student migration whilst in government. She simultaneously opposes and uses identity politics as part of her political USP, being the only contender to openly condemn anti-White rhetoric and use “White” as a barb in response to one of David Tennant’s seething liberal outbursts.

She’s open to pandering to the interests of ethnic enclaves and foreign nations as a means of securing support, which is no different to Angela Rayner (seemingly viewed by Badenoch as something of a spiritual rival). She described herself as being on the liberal wing of the party as recently as 2022, yet pitches herself as the candidate to reintroduce cultural conservatism to the Conservative Party.

Similarly to Jenrick, it’s possible that she has not become right-wing, but circumstances have shifted so fast that stances considered liberal in 2010 are regarded as right-wing in 2024.

Many have attacked Badenoch’s Culture Warrior persona, but for the wrong reasons. Regardless of what people say, Culture War is a highly important issue which cannot go ignored.

Far from petty and unserious business, if one cares to travel upstream of any allegedly trivial wedge issue, you’re likely to find a fundamental tension; a politically-charged division which exists between people and directly implicates the meaning of “our way of life” and similarly (and increasingly) lofty signifiers. Do we regard tradition the progress we inherit or as a form of oppression from beyond the grave by our ancestors? Where does our people start and end? By what standards or mechanism do we assess ourselves, our history, and our culture? What should we value as a society?

Badenoch forgoes answering these questions and, excluding questions which can be answered with a cursory glance at government data, opts to focus on questions either lacking a neat technical solution or too broad to be properly discussed (e.g. What kind of country do we want to be? Are they committed to this country? Do they want to be British?).

Rather, Badenoch seems to substitute the identification of unresolved problems for actually having an approach. By her own admission, she cannot propose anything because she doesn’t have a plan, and a plan is essential for the politics she’s trying to sell because (as you may have heard) she’s an engineer — an adage which risks becoming as asinine as Starner’s “my dad was a toolmaker” bit.

Badenoch (correctly) identifies leaving the ECHR is not a fix-all to illegal migration, pointing to how other countries in the ECHR have managed to carry out deportations and deny asylum at a higher rate than Britain, but stops short of supporting an exit from the ECHR — which we should do regardless, it’s an inherently bad institution!

She identifies (again, correctly) that the previous government’s ability to deal with immigration was significantly undermined by government bureaucrats and extra-governmental institutions (media, NGOs, etc.) but has yet to provide anything more than a stray joke about arresting civil servants — it’s not exactly Project 2025.

You can’t afford to be vague when half the public can’t see a reason for your party to exist

At this point, one might start to ask if it’s a good idea to hire an engineer to answer what are essentially philosophical questions, but the main issue is Badenoch is running as a someone with an insider knowledge of the system’s faults and the skillset to solve them, but no indication or how or to what end. You can’t afford to be vague when half the public can’t see a reason for your party to exist.

Alas, Badenoch essentially tells us to fill in the blanks, and when we do get any indication of her ultimate vision, it’s delivered as forceful but boilerplate Thatcherite rhetoric on free markets, free trade, personal responsibility, entrepreneurial aspiration, colour/sex-blind meritocracy, British Values, and Western Chauvinism.

If this is what Badenoch actually believes, then so be it, but it shows literally every contender is running on the fumes of the New Right; a problem emblematic of the party’s stubborn fixation with Thatcher, incapable of showing intellectual creativity or producing any political talent since the end of her premiership over 30 years ago.

Indeed, one can scarcely imagine Powell or Joseph or even Thatcher trying to operate in today’s Conservative Party, which has abandoned philosophy wholesale. They’d be regarded as insane! At the very least, they’d be dismissed as pedantic or impractical for their fixation with first principles; they’d be dismissed as too alien, taking cues from “Hayek” or “Schumpeter” or “Mises” — all overcomplicated, abstract, continental gobbledegook!

For better or worse, Cameron (who infamously took his cues from Blair) was able to have some lasting impact on the party precisely because he made an attempt to distance himself from the New Right. Granted, the “Cameronite” label hasn’t exactly stuck, but it’s largely (and rather bizarrely) been meshed into the meaning of “One Nation” conservatism.

The uncomfortable truth many Conservatives need to accept is that the ideologues tend to have the ideas. Along with her peers, Thatcher was regarded as a zealous and ideological outsider in her day; a populist agitating against a Conservative establishment centred on running the nominally “moderate” Keynesian post-war consensus more proficiently than Labour, rather than doing away with it.

None of this is to imply the New Right favoured open borders. In part, it was a reaction to social transformations of the 1960s and 1970s, such as rising immigration. Nevertheless, it’s undeniable that border control played second fiddle to economic liberalism on both a circumstantial and (more importantly) an ideological level. Thatcher prioritised and achieved far-reaching privatisation during her tenure, yet oversaw the start of net-positive immigration into Britain, despite playing to voters who felt immigration was too high, recasting pre-existing concerns in relatively non-ethnic, welfare chauvinist terms.

Since the New Right’s ideological victory, economic liberalism has become the ideological priority of the Tory establishment, and whilst the aforementioned figures possess zero hold on party consciousness,  the New Right has become, well, old. The ‘conservative’ instincts of the British right’s class of ideological gatekeepers and representatives has attached itself to a different agenda; people who would’ve settled for the Selsdon Park Programme are unwilling to step beyond a cosy and familiar frame of increasingly platitudinous Thatcherism, even whilst staring down the barrel of political extinction!

Trying to defend its acquired position of orthodoxy, it’s contending with the insurgency of a right-wing which regards opposition to immigration as its ideological priority, economic reform being secondary.

As things stand, Farage is the parliamentary champion of the “New New Right”, although this is open to change, especially considering his less-than-reassuring comments, both past and present. Indeed, the New Right had to endure several false starts, from Enoch Powell and Keith Joseph in the UK to Barry Goldwater in the US.

If there’s going to be change, it must happen at the level of ideology

As Starmer’s premiership shows, political capital is a fleeting and finite resource. As such, whilst it’s not untrue that economic liberalism and immigration restriction aren’t mutually exclusive, it’s simply not good enough anymore. Despite calls for compromise, it’s abundantly clear compromise only go one way; even if only moderately or momentarily, the economic liberals get privatisation, corporate tax cuts, free trade agreements, and deregulation, whilst the national conservatives get nothing. Obviously, one has primacy and the other doesn’t.

Therefore, insofar immigration is regarded as a red meat issue, none of quick and desperate compromises made to Tory members, voters, and the wider public will suffice. The issue remains something “reconciled” with Toryworld’s modus operandi through limp half-measures designed to smoothen out the rougher edges of the present system. If there’s going to be change, it must happen at the level of ideology, not merely at the level of leadership, policy, or messaging.