Tunbridge Wells, Tunbridge Wells

What is Kemi Badenoch’s theory of Tunbridge Wells? In one of her many lengthy podcast appearances last week (we listen so you don’t have to), she laughed at the idea that the Liberal Democrats had cost her party the election. Her view remains the one she set out during the leadership campaign, that voters rejected the Tories because they had “talked right but governed left”. 

It’s easy to see why this was a winning message in a party leadership contest: we just need to be truer to ourselves! Our ideas were good ones, but we were let down by wicked lefties Boris and Rishi! But it really doesn’t explain the swathe of Lib Dem seats in the Home Counties: half the constituencies in Surrey now have Lib Dem MPs.

This is a question in which the Conservative Party seems spectacularly uninterested. Badenoch’s focus is entirely on Nigel Farage’s Reform Party. That’s understandable: Reform is the immediate threat to her position. The party came third last year, and sometimes polls first this year. Armed with what is effectively his own TV channel in GB News, as well as his tremendous knack for getting attention, Farage is the stuff of Conservative nightmares.

And Reform definitely cost the Tories seats in 2024. It’s very far from clear that every Reform voter would otherwise have been a Conservative, but it doesn’t seem excessive to suggest that there were dozens of constituencies that might have gone the other way had the party not run.

But there were plenty of others that the party would have lost even if every Reform voter had put a cross in the Tory box. And some of them are quite surprising. Chelmsford, for instance, or Chesham and Amersham. Badenoch needs a theory of politics that explains why these usually very safe Conservative seats backed Ed Davey. It’s probably not because Rishi Sunak was refusing to machinegun small boats.

Just because Badenoch is struggling in her early days, it doesn’t mean she’s doomed

(Beyond “much lower immigration, and possibly repatriation of immigrants”, it’s not clear what Reform voters wanted at the last election: the manifesto was a strange mix of tax cuts for the rich and billions more for the NHS. The places where the party does best seem unlikely to benefit greatly from Farage’s proposal to raise the stamp duty threshold or give tax breaks on school fees.)

There is a fairly obvious explanation, of course, for voters of all stripes rejecting the Tories: they were a total mess, a party begging to be put out of government. There’s no need to rehearse the chaos and disasters and scandals. You’ll have your own list, and so does everyone else — that is very much the problem. 

What is odd is Badenoch’s unwillingness to acknowledge this. There have been coded phrases — “we deserved to lose” — and a very specific apology, for letting immigration rise. But asked in her first days in the job about Boris Johnson — from whose government she resigned in protest — Badenoch defended him. Why? She is surely not naïve enough to believe that he would ever return the favour.

Just because Badenoch is struggling in her early days, it doesn’t mean she’s doomed. In 2021, the general consensus was that Keir Starmer had proved a dud as leader of the opposition. Now, as then, an election was a long way off. A lot could change, as indeed it did for Starmer. A global recession — the result, perhaps, of a trade war — could cost Labour the next election without Badenoch having to do much more than look vaguely plausible. It’s possible that the hard-living Farage might be forced out of politics by health problems, and without him, Reform would struggle.

Starmer did, though, get one thing right very early on: he got Jeremy Corbyn out of Labour. Voters had decided that Labour was wrong to offer Corbyn as prime minister. At the next election, the party wasn’t even offering him as an MP. It was an obvious way to acknowledge things had gone wrong and show that they had changed. Whether it was Starmer’s intention or the happy result of Corbyn’s own stubbornness over antisemitism hardly matters. Badenoch needs to find her own way to show that she gets why the Tories lost and is determined to change things.

And part of the secret of Starmer’s success in opposition was his flexibility: the manifesto with which he won the prime ministership in 2024 was quite different from the one that won him the party leadership in 2020. His critics say he doesn’t know what he stands for. A more generous interpretation is that he is willing to take advice and abandon positions that aren’t working. One of the most interesting questions right now is whether he can do that in government as well.

Badenoch isn’t famed for her flexibility, seeming to view it as a weakness. But the message that won her the Tory leadership simply isn’t going to win back Tunbridge Wells. And if the Conservatives can’t win Tunbridge Wells, it’s very hard to see how they can win the country.