This week, it was reported that Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch had launched a “purge of Tory wets” after Gavin Barwell, Theresa May’s former chief of staff, lost the whip for pushing back on the party’s tougher stance on human rights. This came just a few days after Badenoch had made it clear that prospective Tory candidates must support leaving the European Convention on Human Rights and scrapping 2050 Net Zero targets if they want to be selected.

In response, the centrist Conservative pressure group Prosper UK, fronted by former Cabinet ministers Amber Rudd and David Gauke, criticised the move as an attack on the party’s tradition as a “broad church”. But the real question concerns whether the Tories should be trying to cling onto the broad church at all. In modern Britain, that idea seems anachronistic.

For most of the postwar period, British political parties had to rely on a broad church of support. Under first-past-the-post, with only two parties realistically able to govern, both Labour and the Tories had to absorb voters and factions who, in a proportional system, would simply have formed their own parties.

The Conservatives housed Thatcherites and One Nation Tories, free-market liberals and social conservatives, Europhiles and Eurosceptics. Internal compromise was the price of electoral success because there was nowhere else for those voters to go. That model worked because most disagreements were about policy rather than the overall purpose of the party. But while a broad church can survive disagreements over policy, it cannot survive disagreements over first principles.

Brexit did not create those divisions so much as expose them. Once Britain had left the European Union, arguments about Europe became arguments about sovereignty itself. This included questions about whether remaining inside the ECHR is compatible with democratic control, or whether Net Zero is a prudent environmental goal or an economic straitjacket.

In the years after Brexit, the Conservatives never resolved these defining arguments of modern British politics, an internal issue which ultimately became an electoral liability. A party built to contain fundamentally different answers to those questions eventually struggles to offer any clear answer at all. That incoherence is what opened space for Reform.

Nigel Farage’s party has absorbed the populist Right, while the Greens are doing the same on the Left. The Liberal Democrats, meanwhile, still largely hold the socially liberal centre ground. Instead of compromising between two giant parties, voters can now choose between several narrower ones.

Badenoch’s red lines on the ECHR and Net Zero are a recognition that the Conservatives can no longer win by being all things to all people. But solving the Tories’ internal problem immediately creates an external one. If the party increasingly shares Reform’s instincts on some of the defining questions of the day, it cannot simply ask voters to choose between two versions of the same diagnosis. The party now has to explain what distinctive role it performs on the British Right.

The answer lies less in offering different policies than in offering a different proposition: Conservatives as the governing Right rather than the insurgent one. Reform has been effective at naming Britain’s frustrations around migration, energy costs, and national sovereignty. But governing requires translating those frustrations into workable policy, institutional reform, and durable delivery.

Badenoch’s task is to persuade voters that the Conservatives retain the experience, administrative competence, and institutional memory to do what Reform can only promise. Similar opportunities exist when it comes to economics. Reform is attempting its own broad coalition of free-marketeers and economically disillusioned ex-Labour voters, meaning the Conservatives can instead offer a more coherent centre-right economic philosophy.

None of this guarantees the Conservative Party any success. Badenoch is correctly dismantling a failing model; but by narrowing the party’s offering, she also narrows the gap with Reform. The decisive question now is whether a more focused Conservative Party can win back enough voters on delivery and competence, while still attracting enough centre-right moderates under first-past-the-post. Coherence is necessary in an age of two competing parties on the Right, but it may not be sufficient.