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Kemi Badenoch, Conservative leader, has been warned by two former Tory premiers not to follow Reform UK’s Nigel Farage down a populist path and that the party is losing touch with its core moderate vote.
Sir John Major and Baroness Theresa May have given separate speeches in which they claim that the Conservatives risk going down a right-wing blind alley, alienating the middle ground.
Major, UK prime minister from 1990 to 1997, told a Conservative lunch on Tuesday: “When our party says ‘No’ to Europe, ‘No’ to climate change, ‘No’ to overseas aid, it falls out with the majority of public opinion.
“Such policies may delight a minority of opinion but not the broad mass of electors in our essentially tolerant and kindly nation: it seriously alienates many of them.”
Major, speaking to retired Conservative agents at the RAF Club in Piccadilly, said that whenever the party “lurches too far to the right” it left many traditionally Tory voters homeless.
He said it was “beyond stupid” that any Conservative should suggest forming an alliance with Reform, warning it would destroy the party. Badenoch has rejected such a pact.
Major urged Badenoch to reach out to One Nation Tories, who he said believed in “personal freedoms, private enterprise, free trade, fair laws, prudent public spending, an international outlook and compassion for those facing hardship”.
He added: “A look at the recent decimation of Conservative seats in our once solidly supportive counties of Kent, Surrey, Sussex, Hampshire and the West Country is a reflection of how support has been lost by this abandonment of the centre.”
A YouGov poll released on Tuesday has shown the scale of Badenoch’s challenge, as the Conservatives wallow with support of below 20 per cent, alongside Labour, the Liberal Democrats and the Greens.
The survey gave Farage’s party a commanding lead on 27 points, with Labour and Tories tied on 17, the Greens on 16 and the Lib Dems on 15, confirming an emerging multi-party political landscape.
May, in a speech on Monday in the Robing Room of the House of Lords organised by Lord Speaker John McFall, gave an equally forthright warning to Badenoch and her shadow cabinet colleague Robert Jenrick not to pander to populist forces.
Allies of both May, prime minister from 2016 until 2019, and Major denied there had been any co-ordination of the speeches.
May criticised Badenoch’s plan to repeal the 2008 climate change act as an “extreme and unnecessary measure” and risked turning the issue into a “dividing line in our politics rather than the unifying issue it once was”.
She also criticised the “villainisation of the judiciary”, a reference to Jenrick’s Conservative conference speech in which he criticised “judges who blur the line between adjudication and activism”.
The Conservative party was approached for comment.
