Has Kemi Badenoch “changed the political weather”? Writing in the Telegraph yesterday, Theresa Villiers, who was a cabinet minister under David Cameron, claimed the current Tory leader has done just that.

The polls do show a recent uptick in Conservative Party support, but some perspective is needed here. An average vote share somewhere in the upper teens is still way below the 24% the Tories managed in last year’s general election and that, of course, was the worst result in the party’s history. The latest from YouGov shows Reform on 28%, Labour on 18% and the Greens and Tories fighting it out for third place on 17%. Plug those vote shares into the Nowcast model, and the Tories are still on track to lose two-thirds of their seats.

So, though it’s fast becoming a cliché, the Conservatives’ leader has not yet pulled her party “back from the brink”. Villiers is right to praise Badenoch’s impressive parliamentary performances, but there’s a danger she’ll end up like William Hague when he was Tory leader — a star turn in the Commons, but a flop at the ballot box. While Hague did a great job of cheering up his colleagues, it came at the expense of building up a voter base capable of winning elections.

To avoid a similar fate, Badenoch needs to take her party out of its comfort zone, as Cameron did during his time as leader. By challenging the most retrograde elements of Toryism, he was able to win over affluent and aspirational voters in Middle England and the leafy Southern suburbs.

For today’s Tories, having so comprehensively blown their big chance in the Red Wall, it would be tempting to revert to the Cameron strategy by targeting the seats with the most to lose from Labour’s tax-and-spend approach, but which feel too sophisticated to vote for Reform UK. Seats, for instance, like Chipping Barnet in North London, which was Villiers’s constituency until she lost it in 2024. Clearly, she hopes that by emphasizing “our values of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes and backing enterprise”, the Tories can make a comeback.

The trouble, however, is that the electoral map has changed beyond all recognition since 2010. Quite simply, there aren’t enough Chipping Barnets to sustain a meaningful recovery. The Conservative Party could choose to specialize in representing that kind of voter, but in doing so it would be condemning itself to niche party status — like the Free Democrats in Germany or the Republicans in France.

What’s more, it would find itself on borrowed time. The economic liberalism that Villiers wants her party to champion is no longer working for large parts of the population, and especially not for young people. Research by More in Common, as featured by the BBC earlier this month, laid out the political consequences. In the 18-29 age group, Tory support is pitiful: just 16% among young men and 10% among young women. That’s despite plummeting support for Labour, most of which is going to the Greens or Reform instead. And it’s not just the youngest voters, either. YouGov polling from mid-November shows the Greens as the most popular party among the under-50s, with the Conservatives on just 9%. Unless the party makes a dramatically different offer, Tory decline is demographically predestined.

Even if the Cameron coalition were recoverable in the short term, it is dying off in the long term. Badenoch is therefore faced with a choice: seek temporary survival, or strike out as boldly as the reforming Tory leaders of the past. Neither way is guaranteed to succeed on its own terms, but only one has a hope of changing the weather.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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