It was the talk of the town and the joke of the week. In the final round of voting among Tory MPs, before submitting to the final choice of the party membership, the more moderate flank of the party completely fumbled their lead and allowed their man, James Cleverly, to be overtaken by both of the more right-wing candidates – Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick.
The blunder means that, for the next few years at least, the Tory party is going to be aligning itself with the hard-right, convinced that the reason it lost many of its heartlands to the Liberal Democrats was because it wasn’t right-wing enough. Culture wars, anti-migrant politics and constant hostility to the EU will be the order of the day as the party tries to scrape together some kind of electoral coalition formed around their remaining core vote and whatever defections they might be able to secure from Reform.
Thinking purely electorally, Labour will probably be quietly happy about this outcome. Pitching heavily to the right is what Tory governments have been trying since at least 2016 and it has had mixed results at best. To the extent that there is an electorate for this kind of politics, it is one that has become completely disillusioned with the Tories. These voters are more likely to vote for Reform or not vote at all than vote Conservative at the next election.
But when it comes to Starmer’s Brexit agenda, the Tory party’s future direction is going to cause some headaches.
Obviously the Tories were never going to make life easy for Starmer when it comes to Brexit. It’s an issue where the party is almost totally united, where they believe taking a hard line will help them win votes and a point of principle that many Tory MPs actually believe in. The myth of Boris Johnson leading them to glory by ‘delivering’ Brexit is so firmly lodged in the party’s collective consciousness that no amount of evidence of Brexit’s failures is likely to dislodge it any time soon. Most of the party would tell you that the solution to Brexit’s faults is simply more Brexit.
Yet if someone more moderate, like Cleverly, had come to power, there was at least a chance they would have been a bit strategic in how they decided to push the issue. A sense perhaps that the public don’t want to hear about ‘Brexit betrayal’ every day of every week and that continuing the Sunak path of ironing out certain specific issues could actually help the Tories win back moderate centre-right voters.
But with either of Jenrick or Badenoch in charge, that tentative opening towards reasonableness can be discarded while the party embarks on a crusade of right-wing zeal.
What this means for Starmer’s Brexit reset is that he will not be given any space to make adjustments quietly or with minimal fuss. Much as he would like to brush Brexit under the carpet and avoid any real politicisation of the new government’s talks with the EU, it is unlikely he will be given such an opportunity. If any decision, word or action can be somewhat tied to Brexit, then the hard-right incarnation of the Tory party will certainly seize upon it.
Indeed, even if Labour stays still on the issue, a Tory party run by Jenrick or Badenoch will try to put Brexit on the agenda anyway. After all, it’s an area where they believe that the Tories are strong and Labour are weak.
We can already see evidence of this with Jenrick’s push to make leaving the ECHR a key dividing line in the Tory party, using the issue to mark himself out as the one most true to the party’s articles of faith.
Although the ECHR and the EU are separate things, ironically ECHR membership has become a Brexit issue since the security cooperation parts of our post-Brexit agreement with the EU are contingent on our continued membership of the ECHR. At the same time, Ireland is sure to impose a block on any kind of Brexit reset if we upend the Good Friday Agreement, which is also underpinned by the UK and Ireland both being in the ECHR.
Or look at the Chagos Islands. You would think that the UK transferring control of a group of islands in the Indian Ocean to Mauritius would be as distant from Brexit affairs as it’s possible to get. Yet no sooner was the decision announced, than leading Tories started suggesting that this was merely the prelude to handing over sovereignty of Gibraltar to Spain. The latter remains highly sensitive and subject to ongoing negotiations on how to preserve an open border between the British territory and mainland Spain in the wake of Brexit.
The likely reality is that Brexit will be on the agenda in the UK, whether the government wants it or not. That’s a problem for a Labour party that has built its Brexit strategy precisely around trying to avoid getting into big arguments (often referred to as ‘reopening old wounds’, as if these issues would stay in the past if only people would stop bringing it up).
The risk for Labour is that a Tory party that is proactively on the offensive will box in the government and limit its room to manoeuvre at every turn.
This is not inevitable. Starmer could change his approach. He could decide that if the debates are unavoidable then it is best to fight them and win them than to shrink away. But this would mean rethinking how the government manages Brexit and a real change of strategy. Otherwise the ‘Reset’ will be very shallow indeed.