Kemi Badenoch and the betrayal of an invented past

The UK’s new leader of the opposition Kemi Badenoch did her first interviews today and repeated the line which brought her victory: the Conservative government did not happen.

For, and contrary to the experience of so many of us, it turned out that in her mind the Conservative government of 2010 to 2024 was not truly conservative at all.

On the contrary, it was a sellout administration of Blairites in Tory clothing. Given such a betrayal, there is no way that the right could be held responsible for its epic failures.

Imagined pasts are normally utopian – life was better before mass immigration when parents stayed together and women stayed at home. To cope with its defeat, today’s right is not admitting that it made terrible mistakes – austerity, Brexit, Truss, to cite the most egregious. Instead, Badenoch and the Tory media are inventing a dystopia.

Our leaders betrayed us, they say. We failed because we were not right-wing enough.

So when Badenoch told the BBC today that the last government “got a lot of things wrong," she meant only that it had not been harsh enough on immigration and public spending, not that, for instance, Brexit had permanently hobbled the economy.

Here is my account of how Badenoch constructed a fantasy history and why it is so dangerous.

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Kemi Badenoch and the corruption of failure

The decadence of right-wing cynicism

All power corrupts. But how it corrupts depends on circumstance. In the case of the British right, 14 years of power without achievement have produced a cynicism that borders on nihilism. 

Like a ravaged old addict, the UK’s Conservatives experimented with every thrill known to the right. Their failure to find a high destroyed them – and nearly destroyed the rest of us.