Their near-total annihilation in urban Britain now, however, seems like the least of their problems after their 2024 omni-battering. You wouldn’t necessarily know this from the bizarre air of complacency that hangs over their conference, which apparently hasn’t been much dented by John Curtice telling them that they have made no progress since their 2024 hammering, and indeed are actually doing worse. The submerged theme of the conference is that even their natural heartlands are slipping away from them. Worse, neither Kemi Badenoch’s decent personal ratings nor MRP polls showing the Tories reaching the giddy heights of 130 MPs can really cover up this still-ongoing destruction.

Take where I live, a fairly affluent village in rural Cambridgeshire. Over the course of this year’s local elections, not a single leaflet or communication of any kind from the Tories materialized. Indeed, one would have had to have been a detective of considerable ability to uncover any evidence of a Conservative Party activist — a living one anyway — within many miles of my home. When the vote duly came, the Tories came a bad third in my ward, only beating the Greens by 60 votes.

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The death of the Young Conservative

By Alwyn Turner

Until perhaps a decade ago, places like this were rock solid for the Tories. Now, though, they’re pretty much a one-party Liberal Democrat state. There are now just two Conservative councillors left on the South Cambridgeshire district council, compared with 43 Lib Dems — who also comfortably won both of the local parliamentary seats in 2024. It wasn’t close, with Ed Davey’s party sweeping my constituency of St Neots and Mid-Cambridgeshire by over 5,000 votes. Since 2024, there has been almost no sign of a Tory recovery.

To be frank, if the Tories are still the political walking dead in St Neots, of all places — where there are more Green district councillors now than Tories — then anything they’ve said this week in Birmingham is probably a colossal waste of time. This is doubly true because the Tory collapse is not just a result of the short-term impact of Bojo’s travails, or even the Liz Truss debacle. Though 2024 represented a dramatic culmination of Conservative failure, it was not a sudden process.

Cambridgeshire is again a good example. As Cambridge became ever more expensive, the rest of the county has attracted more and more house-price refugees. Most are graduates; many are academics; and others work at tech start-ups in Cambridge Science Park, or at Addenbrookes Hospital. These educated, mostly socially liberal voters have transformed local politics. The farmers, the culturally conservative old rural middle class, the self-employed tradesmen and so on — they no longer dominate, and even many of them presumably couldn’t stomach voting Tory in 2024. Jeremy Clarkson may finally have shown up to their conference, but the people he speaks for are not those that the Tories need to win in their former seats. This new demographic intake is as likely to set up a local Orange Order and hold a “No Popery!” riot as they are to ever vote Tory.

So when I hear breathless online Tories talking up the “Kemi bounce” and the supposed Tory come-back, I can’t help but roll my eyes — and not just at her Timmy Mallett tribute act at the Young Tories’ disco. Yes, Badenoch has relatively good personal ratings; yes, Reform has clearly had a bad summer as Farage’s clown-car by-election backfired and his party’s backbiting intensified. One or two polls even suggest that the Tories may reach the lofty heights of second place.

Yet none of this can alter the underlying truth: that in large swaths of Britain, the Tories essentially no longer exist, because they have a small and contracting social base, which is itself vulnerable to Reform. They no longer retain a comfortable baseline of support anywhere, apart from places with very specific characteristics: non-urban; on average low educational attainment; elderly; white. The only one of these populations that is growing is pensioners, and even among them, polls often show Reform in the lead. That’s even as cohort effects — with whole generations that have no history of voting Tory soon coming of pensionable age — mean retirees are less likely to show loyalty to the party over the longer-term.

Meanwhile, across England’s affluent south, prosperous places that would previously have been Tory shoo-ins are now awash with graduates who can’t afford to live in big cities: Surrey, Oxfordshire, Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire. These people will blanch at voting for any restrictions on immigration, or abolishing Net Zero, or withdrawing from the ECHR. How much future is there for a Tory Party that faces an uphill struggle to remain relevant in Berkshire or Buckinghamshire, where they now have respectively one and two MPs?

Tory “moderates” such as Andy Street and Ruth Davidson like to claim that these places can be won back by changing tack on “culture war” commitments, and making a socially liberal, economically center-right pitch. But why the middle classes of Surrey, Cambridgeshire or Hertfordshire are going to favor nicey-nicey Cameroon redux politics rather than sticking with the more socially acceptable Lib Dems isn’t clear. Many of the upwardly mobile younger couples living in the affluent home counties who might in theory be attracted by the Tories’ promise on removing the £100,000 threshold on free childcare are those who have a rigid cultural taboo against voting Tory, even if such a policy would benefit them. They live in a world of ingrained cultural assumptions and status dynamics that make voting Tory an unthinkable solecism.

Even if struggling graduates in these places could be persuaded to vote Tory on a pro-growth platform, there is another obstacle. These same constituencies are also stuffed with older Nimbies, and if they do anything to annoy pensioners, the Tories might equally wave goodbye to their only remaining reliable voter bloc: the gray vote. This is why we have had to endure the contemptible spectacle of CCHQ attacking Burnham as some sort of granny-killing maniac for suggesting a tiny reform to a policy — the Triple Lock — that most senior Tories privately acknowledge is unaffordable. Perhaps such industrial-grade hypocrisy is the price of maintaining any activists at all: a Tory agent told me recently that their party membership is literally dying. Looking at the “deaths” column of a local newspaper is generally the most reliable way to keep their membership records up to date.

In short, it is still hard to see how the Tories can get out of their current dilemma, no matter how many infatuated young Tories write Katie Lam’s name on their pencil-box, and how sharp Badenoch may prove in PMQs. The underlying logic of polarization — between the left-behind provinces, and Home Counties progressivism — hasn’t gone away: and the Tories are still ill-positioned to capitalize on either side of this divide.

What might have saved the Conservatives was doubling down on Boris Johnson’s abortive re-alignment, and becoming the genuine party of the left-behind blue-collar areas that are now, post Makerfield, trying to decide between Burnham and Reform. Unfortunately, between Johnson’s open-door immigration policy and the Truss debacle, the Tories blew that opportunity so comprehensively that the only thing that might save them is Reform’s implosion, or Ed Davey remaining Lib Dem leader. Meanwhile, recent Tory policy ideas, such as abolishing inheritance tax, are little more than an attempt to cling on to what little is left of their base. And their fresh appeal to affluent professionals — best evidenced in their plan to end the £100,000 childcare “cliff edge” — seems much the same. Andrew Griffith, their new Shadow Chancellor, is putting a lot of faith in a reheated Thatcherite tribute act. His ridiculous pledge to abolish a new tax in every budget failed to convince even his own party faithful, let alone any Tory-curious floating voters.

Much clearly depends on Andy Burnham. If he turns out to be Keir Starmer with a guitar — which is still possible, his fluent conference speech notwithstanding — then the main winners will be Reform. Certainly, it would take a singular collapse indeed to render Farage as unpopular in the Red Wall as the Tories are now; let’s not forget that the Conservatives lost their deposit in the Makerfield by-election. If, on the other hand, Burnham succeeds in sustaining a meaningful Labour revival and the Reform wave subsides, there will be only marginal benefit to the Tories.

Given all this, it still seems that even in the best-case scenario, all the Tories can hope for is holding onto their meager 2024 seat haul and perhaps slightly increasing their presence in the Commons. The only viable course for survival would probably be some sort of merger between the Tories and Reform, but even that is extremely hazardous for either side, bedeviled by personal resentments and the emotional fallout from recent defections. Bitterness means that such mergers tend to take a long time to happen: it took the Canadian Right a decade to unite after the main center-right party was near-annihilated in the 1993 election.

For now, the horrible truth for the Tories, irrespective of whatever optimism might be generated at their conference, is that their fate isn’t in their own hands. They have to hope that they can pick up enough scraps in forthcoming electoral scrambles to keep themselves alive. Their survival, let alone their existence as a major party, remains very much in the balance.

The master who gave that speech was one of the world’s greatest experts in geo-engineering. His predecessors were similarly renowned in their scholarly fields. He had taken over from David Crighton, an applied mathematician who made important contributions to the study of aeroacoustics. His immediate predecessor was Colin Renfrew, an archaeologist of global fame.

These facts came to mind when I read that the current master of Jesus, Sonita Alleyne, had signed the Good Law Project petition claiming that criticism of alleged plagiarist and serial fantasist Jason Arday was nothing more than one part of a racist campaign to “undermine Black people who hold positions of influence”.

Arday had been made a fellow of Jesus College when appointed Professor of the Sociology of Education at the Education Faculty. If the allegations of malpractice could be batted aside by the standard ritual accusations of bigotry, then clearly the reputation of the college that enthusiastically offered him a fellowship, and its master, would be protected. Whether this was Alleyne’s motivation, or she genuinely believed that Arday was a victim of racist abuse — rather than, say, an ethically challenged connoisseur of Australian soap operas with all the academic heft of a Sun showbiz editor but without their basic literacy — I cannot say for sure. One can draw one’s own conclusions.

Initially, my reaction was simple ire at Alleyne’s total indifference to the extensive evidence of his plagiarism. I had been an undergraduate at Jesus, then an MPhil and PhD student there. I remembered well, as a history postgraduate, being given very stern guidance about how serious plagiarism was, and how negligence or ignorance of citation practices was no excuse. The punishment, it was implied, would be harsh and definitive.

I also remembered that I had known genuine academic wunderkinds, students who had got double firsts, who had not even managed to get funding for a PhD at Cambridge, let alone a college fellowship at Jesus. The appointment of a man who was unable to even punctuate the title of his PhD thesis correctly, and conducted junk “autoethnographic” research, seemed a grave insult to those disappointed friends, not to mention the standards the master during my time had clearly taken so seriously. To accuse anyone who objected to this of “racism” made me feel sick.

Sick, but not surprised. I soon remembered that, following Alleyne’s appointment in 2019, I had wondered what the academic expertise of my alma mater’s new head would be. Quantum dynamics? Medieval Latin poetry? Not quite. She was, in fact, not an academic at all, but a co-founder of a music production company who had become a trustee of many artsy charities and a BBC trust member. She had a degree from Cambridge, but that was it academically.

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Why Reform needs Danny Kruger

By George Owers

This seemed, and still seems, bizarre to me. Imagine a media corporation deciding that the natural new appointment for its board was a professor of Greek philology. Obviously, this would never happen. So why did anyone think that someone with close to zero experience of scholarship, university teaching or indeed anything much relevant to academic life should become the master of a venerable Cambridge College? The cynic in me says that the rising tide of identity politics, which appears to have afflicted Jesus worse than most Oxbridge colleges, led to the conclusion that Nothing Else Would Do except the appointment of a black woman. Even this seems hard to understand, given that there are many black women with distinguished academic records who would have been superior choices.

Whether Alleyne’s appointment was gesture politics or not, the college is certainly no stranger to such ethical self-indulgence. It conducted a quixotic, expensive and unsuccessful attempt to remove a chapel memorial to Tobias Rustat, one of its most munificent historical benefactors, due to his investments in the African slave trade. The campaign, spearheaded by Alleyne, failed when a church consistory court decided against the college, giving her the near-unique distinction of failing to convince the modern Church of England to abase itself over the historical slave trade.

The campaign was whipped up in an atmosphere of exaggeration and moral self-flagellation over historical wrongs, driven by a modish obsession with “decolonization”. The point, of course, is that removing a memorial is nice and symbolic and crucially cost free — unlike, for instance, refusing to accept or disperse the “tainted” money that is still paid out from Rustat’s bequest to fund scholarships and grants. This, of course, Jesus have failed to do.

And yet for all its concern with the abuses of 350 years ago, when it comes to contemporary human rights violations Jesus has been far more relaxed. One of its longest standing fellows is Peter Nolan, a well-known apologist for the Chinese Communist Party and its authoritarian dictatorship. Nolan founded and ran Jesus’ China Center for years and cautioned against any debate on the persecution of the Uyghurs. The fact that Nolan and Jesus College have accepted various sinecures, appointments and payments from the Chinese government or government-aligned sources over the years presumably is just a coincidence.

There was, eventually, a review of the college’s cozy relationship with China, but little of the strident moralizing that came so easily when discussing what Rustat did 350 years ago. It seems that the college takes a moral absolutist attitude through time, but a very relativist one through space: Rustat is evil, but the current Chinese government must be respectfully engaged with — no matter how many people it tortures or locks up or puts in labor camps.

In this context, appointing Arday must have seemed like a similar bit of cost-free symbolism, particularly in a university where there are many figures like Alleyne. Many college heads are now hacks, media luvvies, corporate consultants and washed-up state administrators. Such people tend to have a far weaker investment in the standards that have historically made Cambridge distinctive: its non-negotiable commitment to academic standards; its rigorous system of small-group teaching; its decentralized nature. They have ended Cambridge’s relative isolation from the trends that have long beset much of the rest of higher education, not least rampant commercialization and modish progressivism. They find willing allies among even genuine academics whose politics — which usually runs the gamut between post-colonial hard Left and soft-Left liberalism — too often trump their commitment to academic standards.

This has gone hand in hand with the rising power of the centralized apparatus of the university itself, and the ballooning class of managers it employs. The UAS — the university’s central administrative body — has seen its numbers rise by 133% since 2010. Meanwhile, short-term and fixed-term contracts have tended to make academics less secure in their tenure and less likely to see themselves as permanent and secure guardians of the university, instead making them beholden to the whims of a managerial class.

Those who stand up to the hectoring of their administrative overlords face bullying and punishment, as yesterday’s employment tribunal judgment against the university and its vice-chancellor Deborah Prentice demonstrated. Wyn Evans, a professor of astrophysics, accused the university of misogynistic bullying and retaliating against whistleblowers. The tribunal found that “there was a shared desire to close down whistleblowing complaints which might be damaging to Cambridge University and the Institute of Astronomy”.

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Jason Arday: Cambridge’s DEI darling

By Kathleen Stock

In short, Cambridge has become more like most other universities. The colleges, the independence and sheer variety of which provided some protection against top-down diktat from a centralized bureaucracy, are gradually losing their power. Insofar as they retain it, they are being colonized by those doyennes of the progressive professional-managerial-corporate classes who have wrecked most of our other institutions.

All the while, masterships of colleges are increasingly seen as cozy berths for undistinguished, symbolically useful or failed members of the media-civil service-charity nexus that constitutes the progressive wing of the establishment — or else a respectable backwater for corporate managers. The university chases the high fees brought in by foreign students and the high-profile grants awarded by the research councils and makes its senior appointments accordingly, often doling out professorships to “safe” second raters rather than genuinely world-class talents.

There is some room for hope. Few faculties are as compromised as Education: most still contain many academics who remain committed to the highest academic standards. The college system still exists, and there is strong resistance in some quarters to the new fads. Trinity College recently bucked the trend of appointing luvvies or hacks to masterships, instead appointing a proper botany scholar as its new master. But the vision of a self-governing community of autonomous scholars pursuing the very highest standards of scholarly endeavor, the vision of Jesus masters past, has long since been compromised. Arday is just one symbol of that, and I doubt he will be the last. The reckoning for Cambridge’s recent follies is only just beginning.

The period between 1688 and the 1740s was roiled by culture wars and economic change as dramatic as our own. Long before today’s keyboard warriors stereotyped their enemies online — either as skinhead flag-shagging gammons or spittle-flecked blue-haired harpies — Grub Street partisans were doing much the same. Instead of mocking lager louts in England shirts, Whig propagandists attacked a target that was, in many ways, the 18th-century equivalent: the ruddy-cheeked fox-hunting squire who made up the backbone of the Tory Party.

Urbane Whig essayist Joseph Addison depicted the average Tory backwoodsman as being a savage boor with a passion chiefly for dogs, inebriation and xenophobia. He was depicted as a bluff, insular patriot hostile to travel (good only to teach a man how to “jabber French”) and foreigners, whom, he splutters, “will never be loved in England”. With Addison presenting the squire as a half-educated gout-ridden oaf, it’s not far off those online progressives sneering at the “Raise the Flag” movement today.

Such political caricatures, then as now, were rooted in the passionate hatreds inspired by both cultural divides and clashes of economic interests in a time of disorientating change.

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Reform is tearing the Tories apart

By Tanya Gold

The Tories had, in the period following the Glorious Revolution, become classic provincial “populists”. Their base — the staunchly Anglican landed gentry and their rural dependents — not only despised the Whigs for being the defenders of their religious enemies, the more radical Protestant Dissenters outside the Church of England, but also for material reasons. The Whigs, partisans of the new Dutch King William III, supported their new master’s expensive wars with France, wars which gave rise to higher taxes, rising state debt, and a new web of corrupt state clients in the form of government contractors, “stock-jobbers” and army officers. The cost of all this fell disproportionately on the Tory squires while a new financial elite prospered.

As a result, in the 1690s there was a dramatic political realignment as the old party of state authority and monarchy — the Tories — became the “country” party, hostile to the depredations of the central state. All the while, the old libertarianism of the Whigs faded as they became the party of a new, courtly “progressive establishment”.

The parallel with now is obvious. Just as the triumph of post-revolutionary Whiggery created fresh culturally inflected classes of economic winners (financiers, speculators) and losers (the rural gentry and their tenants), globalization over the past 30 years has created urban-progressive economic beneficiaries and provincial small “c” conservative economic casualties. Back then, Tories and Whigs clashed on the status of the Church of England and religious toleration, whereas now we debate trans rights and Net Zero. But if these debates are separated by hundreds of years, both nonetheless pitted “rooted” cultural conservatism versus the radicalism of a new “Anywhere” class. Then as now, meanwhile, such bitter divisions also reflect the material resentment that economically “left-behind” groups — the Red Wall and angry farmers now, the gentry interest then — have for their urban, “sophisticated” rivals who benefit from both economic openness and state patronage.

Both periods saw a new division — put crudely, nation and tradition versus international economic entanglements and cosmopolitan openness — replace the old political binary. What matters now as then is a dichotomy between those championing national cohesion, rooted in the ways of the provinces, versus those championing new paths of global dynamism rooted in innovation and “progress”. It’s Tory versus Whig all the way down.

There is, however, one major contrast between the two eras. As the Whigs went from being libertarian opponents of state overreach to defenders of a new economic status quo, one dominated by financial interests, so Labour has gone from being the champions of the provincial working classes to the party of socially liberal cosmopolitan graduates. That political realignment has its limitations for Labour, given urban progressives are always in a minority. But the modern Conservative Party has an even bigger problem: they have not made the “populist” transition that their ancestors did. Married to a world of globalization and neoliberalism, thanks to their donor class and backbench Thatcherites, they missed their chance to exploit realignment under Boris Johnson.

This mantle has instead been grasped by Reform. Farage’s revolt against the Blairite state resembles the populist Tory rebellion against the post-Glorious Revolution Whig settlement. Starmer, for his part, looks like a Whig desperate to hold back the tide against the dangers of an insular reactionary neo-Tory backlash. These parallels, in their complexities, hold lessons for both Reform and Labour.

The strength of the appeal of the “country” Tories of the early 18th century was that they combined all the energies of a provincial populist insurgency with a deep sense of tradition. They wanted to dismantle what they saw as illegitimate and alien innovations that were distorting the traditional constitution and endangering liberty — the power of a new breed of financiers and a new class of parasitic state toadies that leeched off the bloated post-revolutionary state — without mostly abandoning the essentials of the post-1688 constitutional settlement. They were genuinely skeptical about the destabilizing implications of incipient financial capitalism, and prepared to countenance major “radical” reforms to ward off its ill effects, while still remaining the party of the church, constitution and squire. In other words, then, the Tories were both profoundly radical and profoundly conservative.

The contrast with Reform seems glaring. Firstly, there is every risk that Reform will be nobbled by the same donor class that rendered the Tories irrelevant, with the power of capital transforming Reform into another appendage of the uniparty. Secondly, elements within Reform appear to be ultra-liberals, albeit of a Right-leaning kind, who want to sweep away the Lords (or perhaps appoint their own cronies to it, Farage isn’t clear) and allow non-parliamentarians to sit in a US-style “cabinet”. They give the impression of skepticism towards a “woke” monarchy and of holding a desire to trash many of our institutions. Either or both of these tendencies may prove far from popular with precisely the marginalized provincial voters Reform is banking on, especially if they win power and the white-hot resentment of voters against the old two established parties fades with time.

This is why the defection of Danny Kruger seems surprising, but perhaps also hopeful. He is, after all, a Tory of the old school: a communitarian Christian and no “Right-Jacobin”. Given all this, he seems well-placed to help Reform negotiate these contradictions and channel the strengths of 18th-century Tory “country” radicalism. That there might also be more than an element of political calculation in the move as Kruger seeks to save his seat is probably true. Principle and pragmatism are, of course, not necessarily enemies, although he might find it a struggle to overcome the very different instincts of men like Richard Tice. We shall see how such a tension plays out.

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The decadence of Kemi Badenoch

By Alexander Pelling-Bruce

Meanwhile, Keir Starmer (or whoever succeeds him) will not avoid being swept away by a provincial populist backlash in the way that the original Whigs did: by the accession of George I, a king more than prepared to rig the political game in the Whigs’ favor. Nonetheless, Starmer might learn a lot from the man who helped secure Whig hegemony back in the early 18th century: Robert Walpole. Walpole wanted the Whig settlement to be truly secure, and he knew that the best way of doing that was to dampen down the deep economic and religious divisions that, when provoked, tended to work against the Whigs and in favor of the Tories.

So Walpole managed his new Whig economic and religious settlement very carefully. He gave the Tories much of what they wanted: he scrupulously avoided foreign wars and entanglements, kept taxes low and left the Church of England mostly alone. He reined in radical elements on his own side — defying his supporters from the ranks of Protestant Dissent who wished to curtail the privileges of the Church of England further — and compromised. In short, the economic and cultural wounds of the preceding generation were given time to heal. Political partisanship certainly didn’t disappear. But the temperature dropped, and Walpole remained in power for 20 relatively stable years.

The same principle could work today. There is no majority in the country for neo-Whig policies of open borders and neoliberal globalization. But Labour could — in theory — do what Walpole did and make his peace with the provincial patriots who otherwise look likely to power Reform to victory. He could give them what they want on immigration, just as Walpole gave the gentry what they wanted on peace. Starmer could also take real steps to assuage the economic pain of the hundreds of small cities and towns decimated by globalization, as Walpole reduced the land tax and bolstered domestic manufacturing. Starmer and Reeves could actually pull some of the economic levers available to the government: an industrial strategy with teeth and resources behind it, capitalizing regional investment banks, and a return to protective tariffs for key industries.

Alas, one fears that Reform will end up as a debased version of the current Tory Party and Labour will be unable to respond in any convincing way to the electoral tsunami that threatens to engulf them. The result could be a never-ending spiral of voter discontent and rising provincial fury. Let’s hope that Starmer and Kruger get mugging up on their 18th-century history, and soon.