"The Tory leader has made her job harder by adopting a shallow, ideologically blinkered analysis of the challenge. She started from the premise that her party had talked right but governed left a perverse revision of history given that she was describing prime ministers who implemented austerity, a hard Brexit, a sequence of increasingly draconian anti-immigration laws and, in the case of Liz Truss, a wild tax-cutting mini-budget that detonated the economy."
"Viewing the Conservative predicament through such a warped lens leads Mrs Badenoch into strategic misjudgments. Since she doesn't hear anything in radical rightwing rhetoric around Brexit and immigration that might alienate mainstream voters, she has no understanding of why the Liberal Democrats were able to win scores of seats in what had once been her party's affluent southern heartlands. Her belief that Britain is suffocating under the dead hand of woke bureaucracy prevents her engaging with the real causes of inadequate public service provision"
Last year's Conservative conference followed a crushing election defeat and produced a shallow talent pool of leadership candidates. Kemi Badenoch won the contest but has not positioned the party for renewal. The Conservatives now face lower opinion-poll ratings than the 23.7% achieved under Rishi Sunak at the general election. One MP has defected to Reform UK and further defections are possible. Badenoch has diagnosed the party as having 'talked right but governed left,' a framing at odds with recent Conservative policies such as austerity, hard Brexit, strict immigration laws and Liz Truss's mini-budget. That misdiagnosis yields strategic errors and a failure to address service cuts and voter concerns.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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