Events in Westminster appear to be moving extremely quickly at the moment. The Prime Minister’s popularity is sliding more quickly than even his greatest critics would have anticipated.

In this febrile context, a wounded Conservative Party is growing increasingly impatient for its leader to start setting out concretely what it will stand for at the next election, so as to make sure it will benefit from the mishaps of this calamitous Labour government — not the buoyant Reform Party. Politics, as commentator William Atkinson put it recently, is currently being played at “ten times speed”; Kemi Badenoch needs to get on with a “substantive pitch”.

Badenoch has been at pains to avoid doing precisely this. She took a risk during the Tory leadership contest in not responding to other candidates with a policy platform. She has ducked and weaved in recent interviews with the BBC and the Spectator. And she will come under even more pressure in the coming months to start stating explicitly what a Conservative government would do next time around.

But in ruling out detailed policy proposals in the next few years, the Leader of the Opposition has undoubtedly made the correct strategic decision. Just six short months ago, the party suffered its worst ever electoral defeat precisely because the public ceased to believe they would actually deliver the policies they advocated for. Voters are simply no longer listening.

And nor would coming out with comprehensive policy commitments deal with the single biggest issue the party now faces: that in a context in which the public is shifting Rightwards, conservative voters are unconvinced that the Conservative Party is the best political vehicle for promoting their interests. Coming out with a suite of new policies now will not persuade them otherwise.

Instead, Badenoch should seek to do three things in the next two years. First, her party needs to rediscover how to make arguments from first principles. Javier Milei in Argentina, Giorgia Meloni in Italy, Pierre Poilievre in Canada — these conservatives are notable because, among other things, they have managed to communicate their values rather than merely offering specific policies. Conservative voters in the United Kingdom want to know that the Conservative Party proper speaks the same language as them.

Badenoch also needs to build a compelling diagnosis of why the Conservatives failed to deliver the things they said they would in government: lower taxes, lower immigration, greater prosperity outside of the European Union. Unending ink has been spilled on this, but much went wrong and righting those wrongs will be far from simple.

Most importantly, in the short term, the Tories need to devise a coherent critique of this Labour government. One line of attack should focus on securonomics as Labour’s ideological core. Far from being an innovative framework, it is simply the latest iteration of a very old statist dogma: one that believes the state is better at making decisions and allocating resources than individuals, families and local communities. It believes that if people give up a little more personal freedom, the state might better provide them security. It sees the state’s duty as the elimination of all risk in society.

Badenoch’s Tories must articulate how these ideas are actively making British voters poorer, and in the months since Rachel Reeves’s tax-hiking budget, there is now mounting evidence to work with. The Tories need to show how shifting resources from the wealth-creating to the wealth-consuming parts of the economy is destroying productivity and how borrowing to fund public investment is diminishing private investment. A more difficult thing to communicate, although its repercussions are clearly felt, is how the regulatory state often serves private interests, rather than the national interest.

Any doctor will tell you that effective healthcare requires accurate diagnosis before treatment. In the 1970s, this is what Margaret Thatcher and her shadow ministers poured themselves into. Out of that period came a powerful analysis which provided a lodestar for the Conservatives in government. Achieving this is the task before Badenoch now. Policy can come later.

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James Vitali is a Conservative Councillor in Dorset.

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