For Brexit aficionados the start of this week felt comfortingly familiar: late-night negotiations with Brussels over fishing quotas, and even complaints about betrayal. There was, however, one big difference: the Conservatives were united.
It is one of the great political paradoxes of recent years, that a party that repeatedly tore itself to pieces over Brexit is now speaking on the subject with one voice, while much of the rest of the country appear to have lost interest.
A day after Kemi Badenoch condemned the revamped arrangements with the EU as a “surrender deal”, YouGov found her party in fourth place nationally, behind Reform, Labour and the Liberal Democrats. Their support, at 16%, was the lowest Tory score ever recorded by the pollster.
Another YouGov survey said 66% of voters now favour closer ties with the EU. Almost as many, 62%, think Brexit, the great Conservative project of the last few decades, has been a failure, against 13% who view it as a success.
If senior Conservatives have noticed this sea change, they are not showing it. At a press conference on Monday, Badenoch competed with her shadow foreign secretary, Priti Patel, and shadow environment secretary, Victoria Atkins, over who could sound most outraged at what Patel called “the great Brexit betrayal”.
Some veterans from the 2016 remain side still linger on the Conservative benches, a few even in the shadow cabinet. But more widely, the parliamentary party has been all but purged of moderate, one nation-minded voices.
Some MPs and pundits see a link between this shift and the party’s slump in the polls, particularly against a Reform party which offers similar fare to the current Tory direction of travel, but within the more charismatic packaging of Nigel Farage.
“They’ve just painted themselves into a corner, in the sense that they’ve tried to follow Farage down this line for years, and this is where it has got them,” said Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary University of London and a historian of the Conservatives.
“I think they have to go back to their traditional strengths, which are the economy, their relationship with business and their concern to keep taxes as low as possible and spending as low as possible, consonant with a safety net and welfare state.
“And some degree of scepticism about Europe, but not the hostility and antipathy that we’ve seen on display over the last day or two.”
While a lot of Conservative MPs will concede in private that Badenoch has done, at best, an underwhelming job since becoming leader last November, there is minimal desire yet for a change.
This is in part because voters made it clear that they intensely disliked the internal warfare that saw a carousel of four Tory prime ministers in slightly more than three years. There is also the belief that a move against Badenoch would see her replaced by the ambitious and even more Reform-chasing shadow justice secretary, Robert Jenrick.
One centrist Tory MP said that while the importance of a single YouGov poll should not be overstated, “it does underscore the scale of the challenge we face”. The answer, they argued, was not panic, but a return to more core values and “rhetoric that clearly demonstrates we are grownups”.
They added: “My hope is that this does not lead to a tack to the right and end up pushing the more liberal Conservative vote away for a generation.”
Another MP, a former minister, said that while the YouGov poll was “obviously not ideal” they had not picked up any immediate disquiet about the leadership. “I don’t think anyone thinks now that you can reach for an easy-solutions button,” they said.
“We have to keep up a hard slog showing relentlessly that we’re focused on what matters to people, all of which is harder when fighting on two fronts. But there are no alternative routes available that I know of.”
So how bad could things get? The two most commonly cited parallels are Canada’s 1993 election, which saw the Progressive Conservative party slump from 167 federal seats to two; and the precipitous decline of the Liberal party in the UK after the first world war.
Could Badenoch be leading her party on a similar path?
“I would have said a few months ago, no, they’ll make some kind of recovery,” Bale said. “But I am beginning to wonder whether it’s going to be any more than the kind of recovery that the Liberals managed after the 1920s.
“It partly depends on Reform not imploding, but it just doesn’t look to me that they are going to be a flash in the pan in the same way that the Brexit party was. It seems to have professionalised, and Farage seems to be there for the long term.”
