The Tory leadership fiasco is not necessarily good news for progressives

As the news broke that Conservative MPs now have to choose either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick as the next party leader, Labour and its supporters began celebrating their own election victory. Not the one three months ago, which somehow already feels like a distant dream. The next one, at least four years early.

The glee is understandable. Jenrick is a lacklustre bureaucrat prone to occasional fits of cruelty or just plain weirdness, like painting over a Disney mural in an asylum centre for lone children, lest it seems too welcoming; suggesting every entry port to Britain displays a gigantic Star of David, which would help no one but peddlers of antisemitic conspiracy theories; and earnestly accusing British troops of routinely committing war crimes, while arguing that the best way to stop them committing war crimes is to quit the European Convention on Human Rights. Kemi Badenoch is a culture warrior, a kind of cross between Candace Owens and Georgia Meloni with an extra helping of transphobia. Her attacks are somewhat more scattershot: jail civil servants! cut maternity pay! but please leave Britney the British Empire alone! Still, underneath is a strong, consistent, far-right ideology - more refined and extreme than Farage’s, for instance.

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On social media, there was many a variation on the slightly sad joke of whether Labour should register the final round of the leadership contest as a gift (you’d think they’d want us to stop thinking about the freebies, surely.) But the most succinct response came from journalist Matthew Stadlen: “Tory MPs just voted themselves out of power for a decade.”

Stadlen is probably right, but three caveats immediately come to mind. One is that this was all but a given, anyway: if anyone at Labour thought they might possibly lose their 174-seat majority to James Cleverly, the Starmer project must be even less confident than even this past month of nightmarish press would suggest.

The other answer is that given the Tory’s penchant for self-decapitation even when in power, it seems unlikely anyone handed the job this month would still be leader in the next General Election circa 2029. So in that sense, too, celebrations are a little premature.

But the third answer is that the next general election is not that important - yet. In the UK, thankfully, we don’t have midterms to hamstring newly elected heads of government; and governments will healthy majorities get at least a couple of years to make actual policy before starting to measure everything against the electoral yardstick.

But it sometimes seems team Starmer hasn’t quite come to terms with any of it yet - neither with the time they have on their hands, nor theier thumping, rebellion-proof majority. For one, they themselves are already talking about winning the next general election, when arguably the approach should be going as big as possible now and paying for it later, because Labour can lose more than half of its majority and still rule comfortably for another term. More alarmingly still, Labour transition from a cautiously campaigning party to an ambitious party of government appears to be particularly tortuous, passing and announcing genuinely progressive legislation one day (just today, in fact) and tacking hard to the right the next; be it on austerity (winter fuel and, infinitely worse, the 2-child benefit cap) or on immigration, or on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

It is there that Labour is most vulnerable to right-wing opponents - particularly to ones legitimised by constitutional convention and the de-facto two-party system; the Leader of the opposition will be (wrongly) treated with much more deference than, say, Nigel Farage, even if they are both spewing the same nonsense. This deference and legitimisation of extremism are already risky business; but its Labour’s tendency to reach for the centre, no matter how far to the Right that centre drifts, which poses the real danger. (Even if Labour aims for the polling centre, rather than the theoretical middle between the rhetoric of two parties, there’s no telling what it’ll do if the polling centre continues to move rightward.)

Again: No one should shed a tear for the implosion of the Conservative party. Even the traditional warning that they will be supplanted by something like UKIP is no longer valid; the Conservatives have become UKIP, and worse than UKIP, long ago. In the very best case scenario, the remains of the party will be pulled apart by defections, whether to Labour or to Reform; and perhaps, just perhaps, the Liberal Democrats will succeed them as the official opposition. But so long as Starmer and company regard the Right as their poaching ground, the Conservatives - especially under Badenoch - can still do Britain serious damage, above where the overarching political narrative and the limits of political debate are concerned. If Labour doesn’t yank the Overton Window left and keep it there, this new gift will prove considerably more troublesome than Lord Alli’s.

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