In one popular reading of the history of Tory successes, the party’s last three election-winning prime ministers – John Major, David Cameron and Boris Johnson – all swept into Downing Street on unifying one-nation platforms.
But for many people this year’s Tory conference, marked by its hardening rhetoric on asylum seekers and growing overtures to Nigel Farage’s brand of politics, feels a far cry from those broad principles.
Kemi Badenoch kicked off the gathering in Manchester with a pledge to withdraw the UK from the European convention on human rights, a move which would have been controversial inside the party just a few years ago but now commands the support of the vast majority of Conservative MPs.
The Tory leader has also committed to scrapping the UK’s net zero target by 2050, shattering the mainstream political consensus on the climate crisis.
It is no surprise then that insiders are asking whether Badenoch’s leadership – and the direction the party is taking under the influence of rightwingers such as Robert Jenrick – sounds the death knell for one nation Conservatism.
Those who believe it does point out that the One Nation parliamentary caucus has been quietly dissolved. One MP recalls an attempt to “reinvigorate” the group after the election, which went nowhere. At a gathering held shortly after Labour won power, MPs decided not to meet again. “People felt that there’d been enough factions and we needed to be united as a party,” a second MP who was present said.
Damian Green, the former deputy prime minister who chaired the One Nation caucus before the 2024 election, said the decision was made after Badenoch asked MPs to disband the factions that had caused so much instability for successive prime ministers.
“I don’t think the balance of the parliamentary party has particularly changed by the fact that we lost 250 seats. The makeup from left to right is about the same,” he said.
Key members of the new intake, including Harriet Cross, Neil Shastri-Hurst and Joe Robertson, are seen as carrying on the one-nation tradition. And some Tory MPs continue to convene regularly via the One Nation dining club, which is now chaired by Simon Hoare and was first founded in the 1950s by Tory figures including Ted Heath.
But even regulars at the dining club – such as Andrew Mitchell, the former deputy foreign secretary – have made it clear at conference that they support Badenoch’s policies to tackle illegal immigration. Others point out that Tom Tugendhat, a leading light among Tory centrists, launched his leadership pitch last summer by arguing he was prepared to quit the ECHR.
Mitchell said that centrist politicians were catching up with the need to take tougher action on illegal migration. “We will do the work and we must get the policy right, and we must do that in an honest, open way – and not kowtow to Nigel Farage,” he said.
One influential shadow minister said: “There is support for our ECHR policy across the spectrum of the Tory party.” They said that Nicholas Soames had been among those to endorse it. “You also have Labour figures such as Jack Straw and David Blunkett saying the ECHR is a huge problem.”
A moderate Tory MP said this demonstrated that the growing political consensus in favour of more radical measures to combat illegal immigration did not amount to a lurch to the right.
“There is a lot of genuine frustration around the lack of control around immigration,” they said. “It comes from a humanitarian mindset to say we cannot have people trafficked halfway across the world with a risk of drowning … even if the way our frontbench is talking about it does veer into dog-whistle language.
“We shouldn’t be drawn into focusing on a very small minority of asylum seekers who commit crimes to make a perfectly fair argument for reducing illegal immigration.”
But those Tory MPs who are uncomfortable with the rhetoric emanating from Badenoch and her top team do not feel that there is much point in doing anything about it now. “We’re not going to be in government for some time … and there is a view that she’s not necessarily going to lead us into the election, so what she announces right now is neither here nor there,” one said.
The hope among Tory centrists is that in any leadership contest Jenrick will lose to a more moderate figure such as James Cleverly, the shadow housing secretary, or Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor.
They point out that Stride’s message of fiscal responsibility represents a shift to the centre when compared with Liz Truss’s red-blooded libertarianism. “We will recover after a period of time has gone by since the massive defeat last year – we will get a hearing and it will be on the economy,” Mitchell said.
But others argue that the promise of fiscal prudence is hardly an election-winning platform. “The problem with all those guys is they think and hope the world is still 2010 and they can just be fiscally sound,” said a former Tory MP. “It isn’t and they have no other ideas.”
