Despite the visceral hostility between them, Robert Jenrick and Liz Truss have much in common: like the majority of Conservative MPs ten years ago, for instance, they both voted to Remain in the EU. As much as they, and others, have tried to talk it down since, much of the mainstream British Right were Remainers. And I was one of them. As the journeys of Jenrick and Truss show, though, British politics has changed almost beyond recognition since then . But there are some, esp

Well, they’ve done it: Reform UK have, by the defection of the former Tory MP Danny Kruger, grown their Parliamentary party to five – exactly as it was after last year’s general election. Each rise and fall of Nigel Farage’s gang of MPs speaks to Reform’s weaknesses and strengths. The loss of James McMurdock and Rupert Lowe, both of whom were elected as Reform but now sit as independents, reflects the party’s issues with candidate selection and inability to contain anybody wh

It’s fifty years since Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservatives. Over the decade and a half in which she led the party, Thatcher would remake conservatism, the state and the economy in her own image. Yet she may never have become leader, and the word ‘Thatcherism’ may never have crossed anybody’s lips, had it not been for the singular arrogance of one man: her predecessor, Edward Heath. Heath was a consequential leader of the Tory tribe. He was the first grammar

Conservative Party leadership elections have rarely been out of the headlines in recent years. Since David Cameron resigned in 2016 there have been five contests to decide who will lead the United Kingdom’s oldest and most successful political party. Yet for all the familiarity of Tory leadership battles, they are a surprisingly recent phenomenon. Until the mid-1960s there was no mechanism for the party to choose its leaders. They were expected to ‘emerge’ via unknown and unk

What was Liz Truss’ biggest mistake as Prime Minister? Attention has, not unreasonably, tended to focus on the mini-Budget which fractured the Conservative parliamentary party, spooked the markets, forced out the Chancellor and ultimately precipitated her resignation. But the mini-Budget was arguably the product of an earlier poor decision: forming a Cabinet which excluded dissenters. Of Truss’ Cabinet of 23, 18 had backed her in the summer 2022 leadership election. The other

After fourteen years in government, in which five different prime ministers imposed their own vision of politics onto the Conservative Party, the Tories’ values have become unclear. As Kemi Badenoch, one of the frontrunners to lead the party in opposition, recently put it: ‘ the past decade saw us twist and turn in the wind, unsure of who we were, what we were for and how we could build a new country. ’ Fixing this problem won’t be easy. Conservatism, more than any other poli

A ppointments to the House of Lords have long been a sore on the British body politic. In 1922 David Lloyd George was exposed for egregiously selling peerages in exchange for donations to the Liberal Party. The Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act followed in 1925, but the banning of such overtly corrupt practices didn’t restore complete confidence in appointments. A century later, Boris Johnson’s resignation honours list and the peers it created (or, in several cases, did not