A party conference that still sticks out in my mind is Labour in 2011. Their 2010 conference, having just come out of government, felt fun, big, spectacular even. Labour were about to decide their future in one of the most interesting leadership contests of all time, seeing as how the two main contenders were brothers. Everyone commented in 2010 on how happy the delegates seemed to be considering their party had just lost a general election.
2011 was the come down. That’s when the corporates thinned out, the members came in much fewer numbers, and there was no leadership contest to make life interesting. It was the point at which the long road of opposition that lay ahead came into focus for a lot of people within the Labour Party.
The comparison with the Tory conferences of 2024 and 2025 seem apt. 2024 felt fun, light and strangely optimistic. 2025 is a different story, with a lot of empty hall speeches and fringe meetings bearing witness to that. This is the come down conference for the Tories.
Except that at least in 2011, Labour had 250+ seats (enough to win the next general election with a bit of a push as opposed to a mountain to climb), and were at 43% in the national polls, usually around 5 to 6 points ahead of the Tories, with their rivals on the left, the Lib Dems, polling in single digits. In 2025, the Tories have only 119 seats and are languishing at around 17% in the polls, sometimes coming in fourth place behind the Liberal Democrats. Not only that, their rivals on the right, Reform, are polling at 34%. Things are going very badly for the Conservative Party - and conference 2025 might be the time and place they realise quite how badly.
In the midst of this, Kemi Badenoch is trying to get her party noticed with the hopes of boosting that polling figure. Her banner announcement is that not only will Britain leave the ECHR if the Tories win the next election (no sniggering at the back, please), every sitting Tory MP and candidate will have to sign up to leaving the ECHR or face deselection. This is another terrible mistake made by Kemi.
For a start, the ECHR announcement shouldn’t have been the centrepiece announcement anyhow. Perhaps in a world without Reform in first place in the polls, I can see the argument for it, but given that’s not the world we’re living in, making ECHR the one thing the Tories want everyone to take away from their conference is daft. Reform announced they would do this ages ago. Which means if you’re trying to convince Reform voters to vote for you instead of them, promising to do something Reform are already going to do is a silly way to go about it. If they were going after Reform voters, the Tories needed to be ahead of the game, not way behind. I can see the ECHR pledge of Kemi’s being tested in focus groups in the coming months, with loads of people saying, “Didn’t Farage already promise to do this? Why would I vote for the Tories for being less enthusiastic about doing something than Reform?” And there will be no sensible response to this because it doesn’t exist.
Secondly, forcing everyone to sign in blood around the ECHR is foolish. Kemi talks a lot about wanting to bring the Conservative Party together, but then in practice often does things that threaten to rip it apart. All I can see the pledge thing doing is pushing more people away, either leaving and sitting as independents, or quitting politics and forcing a bunch of by-elections on Kemi that Reform will inevitably win.
Kemi has a list of faults as long as both of my legs, but top of the list must be that her strategy is completely wrongheaded - which means that even if she were a much better performer and thinker, the Tories would still be stuck in the teens national polling wise. Trying to be “second best Reform” is a losing strategy - as we’ve seen already in actual numbers, both in polling and in electoral contests since the general election. No one wants “second best Reform” - they either want something completely different to Reform or they want Reform. And if they want Reform, they will vote for Reform. Rehashing their policies six months after the fact is very obviously not going to change that.
I’m not even saying the Tories shouldn’t be pledging to leave the ECHR. They probably have to at this stage. What I’m saying is that announcing it like it’s a game changer is embarrassing. They needed something much bigger and bolder - something that really was game changing. I think this conference will probably be the proper start of the end for Kemi’s leadership - and having nothing better than “second best Reform” to say will be the reason.
Acknowledging Brexit was a mistake, and pledging to rejoin the single market- that would be a game changer
I know that times are dreadful but once tiny consolation is seeing the once-mighty Tory party reduced to a hotdog-stand