The Conservatives have been hyperactive this past weekend, clearly desperate to regain the initiative from Nigel Farage and Reform UK’s self-branded “shadow cabinet”.

On Sunday, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch and Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott launched a bold new policy on student loans. The gist is that the crippling rate of interest on Plan 2 student loans — which Badenoch condemned as a “scam” — should be reduced to the rate of inflation only. The brains behind the proposal, Tory MP Neil O’Brien, explained that it would be paid for by ceasing to fund the provision of low-value courses.

Meanwhile, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel was on a mission to stop the “disgraceful Chagos surrender”. She’s meeting with “counterparts” in Washington this week to ensure that US President Donald Trump’s evident hostility to the deal translates into an official US roadblock to the transfer of the islands to Mauritius. Also making the news over the weekend was the Shadow Equalities Minister, Claire Coutinho, who was pressing home her campaign against the Government’s puberty blocker trial, which has been delayed by the medical watchdog.

This is all good stuff from the Tories. And yet, politically, there’s a fatal catch, which is that the Conservative Party is running against its own record in government.

Take the student loan policy. Plan 2 loans were offered from 2012 to 2023 — during which time five million people had their finances blighted by these pernicious debt traps. Is it any wonder that Tory support among younger voters collapsed over the same period? It’s great that some saner voices are now shaping Conservative policy, but the time to act was 15 years ago. Instead of reversing the legacy of the Tony Blair and Gordon Brown years, in power the Tories doubled down on it. Or rather, they tripled down — given that they tripled tuition fees while allowing the debt-fuelled over-expansion of the higher education sector to continue.

Badenoch’s pathological aversion to “psychodrama” prevents her from holding her Tory predecessors to account for their manifest failures. As a result, she’s unable to rebuild trust in the Conservative brand and thus gain a fair hearing for her own policies.

And it’s not just on the issue of student loans. For instance, the Chagos surrender can’t be blamed solely on Keir Starmer and his lawyer friends. Negotiations over the transfer of the British overseas territory began before the election, when James Cleverly — now a member of Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet — was foreign secretary. A process that a Conservative government should have strangled at birth was instead incubated, ready for Labour to take it to its hideous final form.

As for the puberty blocker trial, that too has echoes in the pre-election period. In particular, when Conservative ministers were standing up in the Commons to proclaim that “trans women are women”, and when the Tavistock Clinic’s Gender Identity Development Service (since shut down) was still operating within the NHS.

The impetus for these and other disastrous policies did not come from the Conservative Party itself. Instead, the rot spread from the subverted, dysfunctional institutions which constitute this country’s permanent establishment — universities, for instance, or the Foreign Office or the upper echelons of the NHS. Yet the party failed to recruit talented people who had not imbibed this worldview wholesale.

Badenoch has boxed herself in. By insisting that Britain is not broken, she’s unable to offer a deeper diagnosis of our national decay. She’s only willing to say that our politics is broken. Judging by the consequences, that’s a distinction without a difference.

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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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