Kemi Badenoch’s first genuinely consequential reshuffle as Conservative leader, completed today, can easily be described as a move to the right. Andrew Griffith has replaced Mel Stride as shadow chancellor; Claire Coutinho has been elevated to an unusually powerful position as shadow business secretary and Griffith’s deputy across economic policy; Katie Lam, among the most uncompromising Conservative voices on immigration, has taken James Cleverly’s old housing and communities brief; Andrew Bowie moves to energy; and two members of the 2024 intake enter the shadow cabinet. By replacing Stride with Griffith, Badenoch has cut loose a conspicuously cautious economic spokesman and prominent critic of Liz Truss’s minibudget in favor of a man who supported Truss, served in her Treasury, and on receiving his new job immediately promised lower taxes, deregulation, more oil and gas production, and an “economic revolution.”
But a reshuffle that also brings Tom Tugendhat back from the wilderness to replace Priti Patel at the Foreign Office and installs Damian Hinds at health hardly amounts to a purge of Conservative moderates. Tugendhat opposed Badenoch in the leadership election, belongs temperamentally and historically to a different part of the party, supported Remain, and had previously declined to serve in her shadow cabinet. Hinds, a former education secretary, supplies experience rather than ideological excitement. Even Patel has been given a consolation prize in “international engagement” (whatever that may be), rather than being unceremoniously dispatched.
The upshot is that Badenoch is moving the party rightward on the questions over which the Conservative–Reform struggle is actually being fought, without making ideological conformity the organizing principle of her leadership. Every move toward Reform’s positions, however, becomes both an asset and a liability: When Badenoch adopts a harder position, she can say that the Conservatives have changed, and Farage can say that Reform forced them to change; when she hews to the center, her hard-right rival can say the Tories have not changed enough. Reform can therefore claim some share of the proceeds whichever choice she makes.
Margaret Thatcher’s first years as Tory leader reveal a precedent that was considerably less tidy in practice than it became in retrospect. After 1975, Thatcher presided over an unmistakable movement away from the assumptions that had governed Conservative economic policy under Ted Heath, without immediately constructing an ideologically homogeneous front bench. Her opposition remained divided among converts, skeptics, and figures whose political usefulness outweighed their doctrinal reliability. Keith Joseph supplied much of the intellectual insurgency, but Geoffrey Howe rather than Joseph took control of economic policy, while figures belonging to the older Conservative establishment remained indispensable. Even the Centre for Policy Studies sometimes complained that Thatcher was proceeding too cautiously. The ideological revolution subsequently imposed upon the period can obscure how provisional, improvised, and politically managed it looked while it was happening.
Although Badenoch is operating under very different circumstances, something of the same pattern is discernible. Griffith, Coutinho, Lam, and Bowie move the party’s center of gravity rightward; Tugendhat and Hinds establish that doing so doesn’t demand expelling moderates. A leader confident enough about direction need not demand complete factional tidiness, and Tugendhat may actually be more useful to Badenoch because nobody could plausibly mistake him for a Badenochite.
The Thatcher analogy fails, however, at the point at which it becomes most flattering. Thatcher inherited a Conservative Party that had lost an election, not one fighting to retain its claim to represent the British right against an organized rival. The Iron Lady could spend four years arguing about the kind of Conservatism the Conservatives should offer, whereas Badenoch must both define “Conservatism” and persuade voters that her party remains its natural champion. Reform, it seems, has turned an internal ideological argument into a struggle over ownership.
Since its 2024 defeat, the Conservative Party has moved considerably to the right, most conspicuously on immigration. Lam’s importance lies partly in how far she has been prepared to carry an argument that once concerned principally the number of, and procedures for, future admissions. As a shadow Home Office minister, she argued that changes to indefinite leave to remain should apply to migrants already in Britain and subsequently went considerably further. A “large number” of people had come legally, she said, but “in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so”; some people already possessing the legal right to remain should lose it and “go home” as part of creating a country composed of a “mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people.”
This went significantly beyond tightening the qualifications for permanent settlement. The Conservatives had already proposed restricting indefinite leave to remain (ILR) to migrants earning at least £38,700 and denying it to those claiming benefits, while Lam had argued in Parliament that tougher settlement rules should apply to people already in Britain but not yet granted ILR. Her later argument extended the principle retrospectively to at least some people already granted permanent residence. A government can conclude that its predecessors admitted too many people and impose much stricter conditions on future migrants without disturbing the status of people admitted under the old rules. Lam questioned whether the state should remain bound by some of those earlier decisions once their demographic and cultural consequences came to be regarded as undesirable.
Following complaints from moderate Conservatives, Badenoch eventually drew back from that position (after initially allowing a spokesman to say that Lam was “broadly in line” with Conservative policy). She said that people already possessing ILR would not have it retrospectively revoked. But the disagreement had already carried an argument previously conducted mainly over future immigration into more difficult territory: whether restrictions can properly be applied to people who arrived legally in reliance on rules established by the British state; whether permanent residence should in fact be permanent; and whether economic contribution alone, or some wider conception of cultural integration, should determine membership of the settled population. Reform has proposed abolishing ILR and requiring existing holders to move onto renewable visas, while Labour is itself replacing the conventional route to settlement with a substantially more demanding system based on residence, contribution, conduct, and integration.
Although the parties remain very far apart on retrospectivity and removal, their argument increasingly concerns not merely how many people Britain should admit but the terms on which millions already admitted may become permanent members of British society. The importance of this issue and of its as yet largely unstated ramifications cannot be exaggerated. It will almost certainly emerge as the fundamental question not merely in electoral politics, but in the far wider public discussion and understanding of the nature and direction of British identity and society.
Lam’s promotion from a junior Home Office position to one of the principal domestic briefs thus carries considerably more weight than the usual advancement of a promising new member of Parliament (MP). Badenoch rejected Lam’s most radical proposal less than a year ago without treating it as disqualifying; she has now promoted its advocate into the shadow cabinet. Arguments recently associated with the Tory insurgent edge have acquired not merely greater respectability but a conspicuous route to advancement. Cross’s promotion and Bowie’s move to energy similarly strengthen the anti–net-zero, pro-North-Sea flank, while Griffith and Coutinho place the economic argument firmly with Conservatives who believe the post-2024 party has been too timid about deregulation, energy costs, taxation, and the size of the state.
It’s tempting to explain all this as Farage dragging Badenoch to the right. He plainly exerts that pressure, but the Cameron years offer a caution against assuming that a challenger can be defeated simply by adopting much of its program. The UK Independence Party (UKIP) made Europe and immigration mutually reinforcing sources of Conservative vulnerability: Voters already inclined to distrust the party over immigration increasingly encountered an alternative that could also accuse Cameron of equivocation over Britain’s place in Europe. The Conservative response conceded much of the ground on which UKIP had prospered. Cameron promised an in–out referendum on EU membership, while successive Conservative manifestos pledged to reduce net migration to the tens of thousands. UKIP nevertheless won 27 percent of the vote in the 2014 European election and nearly 13 percent at the 2015 general election.
Some of the voters moving between the two parties had already supplied a rehearsal for Badenoch’s present difficulty. The Conservatives attracted voters in 2010 partly through a promise to reduce immigration; when the Tory–Liberal Democrat coalition government failed to deliver the promised reduction, UKIP acquired voters already supportive of the objective but no longer persuaded that the Conservatives could achieve it. Cameron’s shift of Conservative policy toward UKIP’s positions could narrow the ideological distance between the parties; it would be harder to repair the loss of trust that had made UKIP attractive in the first place. Each of Cameron’s concessions could even be turned against him: The policy remained inadequate, or had been adopted only because UKIP forced the Conservatives to adopt it.
Adopting a challenger’s concerns doesn’t necessarily strengthen the challenger; Cameron, after all, won a majority in 2015. Credibility presented the harder problem. The Conservatives could appropriate UKIP’s issues more readily than they could acquire its freedom from responsibility for previous outcomes. The Tories had promised lower immigration in government and failed to deliver it, helping to create the constituency UKIP occupied. Cameron eventually offered the referendum partly to contain the resulting pressure; it destroyed his premiership, transformed his party, and ultimately delivered much of what UKIP had demanded, although the insurgent party itself never won more than a single Westminster seat.
With Reform, Badenoch confronts the same mechanism in a more dangerous form. The Conservatives cannot merely say that they now agree with voters who want lower immigration. They said so under Cameron, May, Johnson, Truss, and Sunak. Cameron’s “tens of thousands” target became one of the great undelivered promises of the coalition years; Johnson promised that overall numbers would fall; Sunak made stopping the boats one of his five defining pledges. Reform’s case against the Conservatives is retrospective as well as ideological: Conservative governments repeatedly promised the outcomes Reform voters wanted and then failed to deliver them.
Badenoch’s position is therefore fundamentally different from Cameron’s. UKIP could punish the Conservatives, distort their electoral coalition, win European elections, and frighten Tory MPs into changing policy, but hardly anybody expected Nigel Farage to become prime minister in 2015. Badenoch has accordingly made increasingly little effort to preserve the fiction that Reform is a troublesome cousin with whom the Conservatives will eventually patch up their differences. Her belligerence reflects the greater threat. For most of the past century, parties to the Conservatives’ right could influence Tory policy precisely because they could not plausibly replace the Conservative Party. Reform has spent more than a year making that presumption considerably less comfortable.
Badenoch must therefore persuade voters who deserted the Conservatives for Reform that the party has changed without confirming the larger Reform indictment: that after 14 years of Conservative government, another set of Conservative promises should be believed because this time the personnel sound more determined. Moving right cannot by itself answer the charge, since every move in Reform’s direction permits Farage to reply that the Conservatives have discovered another conviction after losing the voters who already held it.
The Conservative years in the wilderness after 1997 supply another warning, since William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith, and Michael Howard each began, in different ways, by attempting to broaden or reconstruct the party after its catastrophic defeat. Under electoral pressure, each eventually returned to issues on which the existing Conservative electorate felt most comfortable. Hague’s early language of compassionate and changing Conservatism gave way to the pound, asylum, and the “foreign land” campaign of 2001; Howard’s initial attempt at a broader managerial Conservatism culminated in a 2005 campaign heavily dependent on immigration. Contemporary Conservatives who later constructed Cameronism regarded this retreat toward the core vote as the trap their predecessors had failed to escape. Historical studies of the period have been somewhat kinder about the constraints facing those leaders, without greatly altering the record of strategic inconsistency between 1997 and 2005.
Badenoch faces an almost inverted version of their problem. Hague and Howard could move toward their core vote because the voters beyond it were largely being held by a dominant Labour Party. Badenoch’s core itself has split: Remaining Conservatives stand on one side, Reform voters who once voted Conservative on another, while Liberal Democrat and Labour gains have eaten into the party from the opposite direction. She cannot begin Cameron’s 2005 maneuver by visibly distancing herself from causes associated with the Tory right, since Farage would happily collect the voters thereby discarded; nor can she reproduce Hague’s later strategy of defending the fortress when Reform is already inside it.
For all its headline support, Reform’s coalition is less securely Faragiste than it may appear. A large portion consists of former Conservative voters rather than bearers of a new and settled political identity. Farage has accomplished the difficult first part of replacing a major party by persuading millions of voters that the old one deserves to die. He has yet to persuade those same voters that his party should govern the country.
The reshuffle is directed partly at that vulnerability. Griffith was not chosen simply because he stands to Stride’s right. He was chief operating officer of broadcaster Sky and chairman of food delivery company Just Eat; the Conservatives have advertised his private-sector experience almost as aggressively as his tax-cutting instincts. Coutinho, rather than another ideological outrider, becomes his economic deputy. Tugendhat’s return gives Badenoch one of the party’s few frontbenchers with an independently established reputation in foreign and security policy, while Hinds adds another former cabinet minister. Even the rapid promotion of Lam and the 2024 intake serves a double purpose: ideological renewal, certainly, but also separation from the discredited governments of 2010–24. Badenoch is trying to acquire some of Reform’s insurgent energy without surrendering the residual advantages of a party that has governed Britain for most of the past century.
When David Cameron became leader in 2005, he immediately brought William Hague back as shadow foreign secretary, retained his defeated leadership opponent David Davis at the Home Office, and found a role for Kenneth Clarke (who had been chancellor under John Major). Cameron intended a conspicuous break with the Tory presentation of the previous decade without assuming that renewal required a front bench populated exclusively by Cameronites. Hague in particular supplied experience, reassurance to the party, and a political identity independent of the new leader. Tugendhat can perform something of the same function for Badenoch, allowing the party’s policy argument to move right without requiring every recognizable inhabitant of the old Tory broad church to depart.
The difference is again more important than the resemblance. Cameron’s strategic task was to demonstrate distance from a Conservative brand that voters associated with ideological narrowness. Badenoch must demonstrate distance from a Conservative government voters associated with failure while defending much of the ideological territory to which that government had already moved. Cameron could advertise change by talking about climate change, poverty, public services, and social liberalism. Badenoch cannot make herself new by repudiating Brexit, immigration control, fiscal restraint, or skepticism about an expanding state without vacating territory to Reform. Her modernization therefore has to occur largely through personnel, emphasis, competence, and the claim that previous Conservative governments failed to practice Conservative policies adequately—a considerably less comfortable basis on which to advertise renewal.
Both the greatest potential reward and the greatest danger consequently attach to the Griffith appointment. Stride represented the post-Truss Conservative instinct to establish fiscal respectability before promising excitement; Griffith represents the belief that respectability without excitement has left the Conservatives marooned. The party now talks about growth, lower and simpler taxes, deregulation, North Sea drilling, and rolling back Labour’s employment legislation. These positions compete with Reform for voters who think Britain has become overtaxed, overregulated, and economically stagnant, while allowing Badenoch to attack Labour on terrain more congenial to Conservatives than a bidding war over deportations.
Here Thatcher provides a more useful comparison than Truss’s admirers usually allow. The economic argument constructed by Thatcher, Howe, Joseph, and their allies during the later 1970s was radical partly because the existing settlement had visibly ceased to work. Inflation, industrial conflict, weak productivity, and the IMF crisis had made arguments previously confined to Conservative intellectual circles newly plausible. But Thatcher’s opposition didn’t simply promise the largest possible tax cuts at the earliest possible moment. Howe’s importance lay partly in translating an ideological change into something capable of being presented, and eventually accepted, as a program of government.
For Badenoch, Truss makes that distinction especially difficult to sustain. Labour scarcely needs ingenuity to connect Griffith’s economic radicalism with the Conservative episode that did most to damage the party’s reputation for economic management: he supported Truss and served in her Treasury. The attack cannot simply be dismissed as partisan opportunism (although partisan opportunism is naturally involved). Badenoch requires voters to separate a supply-side Conservative program of tax reduction, cheaper energy, and deregulation from the fiscal and institutional recklessness associated with September 2022, while her opponents have every incentive to fuse them. The Conservatives of the late 1970s eventually combined economic radicalism with credibility; Griffith and Badenoch have the additional inconvenience of following a Conservative government that conducted a memorable experiment in what happens when markets cease to regard the two as compatible.
On immigration, the same problem appears in reverse. Moving Lam into housing and communities gives Badenoch an unusually effective advocate of the harder Conservative position and helps prevent Reform from enjoying an uncontested claim to represent anger over migration. But Reform can always move another yard. A conventional party trying to outbid a populist competitor eventually encounters constraints that the competitor, until it enters government, does not share: legal feasibility, administrative capacity, diplomatic consequences, fiscal cost, and the requirement that policies survive contact with departments rather than merely with television studios. The Conservatives know these constraints unusually well because 14 years in office supplied a prolonged and, for them, frequently exasperating demonstration. Reform’s freedom from the compromises of government remains both an electoral advantage and the principal Conservative argument against entrusting it with government.
Badenoch appears to have concluded that lecturing Reform voters about those constraints will not bring many of them back. She must first recover enough common political ground to make an argument about competence plausible. Hence the harder immigration policy, the hostility to net zero, the emphasis on tax and regulation, and the refusal to treat Farage as a prospective coalition partner. Reducing the ideological distance then permits the Conservatives to press the question on which their residual institutional advantages are strongest: Which party could actually run the Treasury, Foreign Office, Home Office, and Ministry of Defence? Tugendhat is especially useful in such a strategy. His appointment sits awkwardly with an account of Badenoch simply surrendering the party to its right but comfortably with an attempt to make the Conservatives look simultaneously more radical than the party defeated in 2024 and more governable than Reform.
The most successful recent Conservative reconstruction offers Badenoch both encouragement and a rather awkward precedent. Boris Johnson in 2019 did not recover the Conservative coalition that Cameron had assembled in 2015; he built a different one. Brexit permitted him to lose some affluent, graduate, metropolitan, and southern Conservatives while gaining enough Leave-voting former Labour seats to produce the party’s largest majority since 1987. Johnson identified the political cleavage dominating the election, accepted losses on one side of it, and made enormous gains on the other rather than attempting triangulation in the familiar sense.
Badenoch would dearly like the gains without yet having identified an equivalent source of compensating votes. Moving right may recover Conservatives now voting Reform, but the party has already lost seats to the Liberal Democrats across southern England and remains vulnerable among graduates, younger voters, and professional suburbanites. Tugendhat’s appointment thus carries an electoral as well as a factional purpose. A party fighting Reform in Essex and East Anglia can’t afford to behave as though Esher, Cheltenham, Winchester, and the London commuter belt have ceased to exist, since the Conservative coalition destroyed in 2024 did not merely shrink but broke in several directions.
Labour, of course, further complicates the calculation. A Conservative Party that merely becomes more Reform-like may consolidate the right while making Labour’s task easier. Badenoch therefore needs votes to move in two directions at once: Reform supporters must come back because the Conservatives have changed, while voters nearer the center must prefer a recognizably Conservative government to either Reform or Labour. Tugendhat, Hinds, Griffith’s business credentials, and the repeated language of fiscal credibility belong to the same attempt to satisfy constituencies that do not naturally pull the party in the same direction.
Nor does the electoral geography allow an easy escape from the contradiction. The Conservative coalition that broke apart in 2024 didn’t disappear into a single rival party. Reform took a large portion of the defectors, while others moved to Labour, or the Liberal Democrats, or stopped voting Conservative without yet establishing another durable allegiance. Winning one group by becoming unacceptable to the other would merely exchange one route to defeat for another, and the old expedient of ideological triangulation is considerably harder when there is no single center toward which the lost voters can conveniently be triangulated.
Badenoch’s answer appears to be the separation of policy from personnel. On policy—particularly immigration, energy, regulation, and taxation—she is moving toward voters who now support Reform. But when it comes to personnel, she is assembling something broader: Griffith and Coutinho alongside Tugendhat and Hinds; Lam alongside more conventional Conservatives; conspicuous newcomers alongside former cabinet ministers. The ideological center of gravity thus moves right while the proposed government remains deliberately more capacious, an arrangement suited to an electoral market in which the Conservatives are simultaneously trying to recover former supporters from opposite directions.
Conservative history supplies enough examples to make the simple description “moving right” of limited use. Thatcher moved right after 1975, and won as her transformed program acquired credibility amid a crisis in the existing political economy. Hague moved right before 2001 and lost after concentrating increasingly on issues that animated the Tory remnant without sufficiently enlarging it. Howard fought heavily on immigration in 2005 and improved the Conservative position without coming close to power. Cameron moved conspicuously toward the center after 2005, then far enough toward UKIP on Europe to promise the referendum that destroyed his premiership. Johnson moved the party sharply along the Brexit divide in 2019 and won an enormous majority because the voters gained exceeded the voters lost. Badenoch has no equivalent assurance about the exchange rate between the two sides of her prospective coalition.
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Her reshuffle therefore has to address several problems that don’t admit of a neat ideological solution. Reform is both an ideological competitor and a protest against Conservative failure; Labour benefits whenever competition on the right makes the Conservatives less attractive elsewhere; and the Conservatives need to demonstrate a break with 14 years of government while exploiting the experience accumulated during those same 14 years. A shadow cabinet arranged according to factional purity would make one of those tasks easier at the expense of the others.
Instead, Badenoch has produced one that reflects the coalition she hopes somehow to reconstruct. It is more right-wing than the shadow cabinet it replaces, unmistakably so in the economic and domestic-policy briefs that will dominate the fight with Reform, but it is not a “Reform-ized” shadow cabinet. Tugendhat’s return almost ostentatiously prevents that conclusion, while Hinds and the emphasis on business and governing experience preserve a different Conservative claim. Farage can promise rupture; Labour can promise change without entrusting government to an untested insurgent party. Badenoch has to persuade voters that a party which governed for 14 years can somehow offer both rupture’s corrective energy and government’s accumulated competence.
After the Conservatives’ worst defeat in modern history, that is an awkward proposition, not least because every part of it carries an uncomfortable historical precedent. The party has recovered through ideological transformation, modernization, coalition-building, and ruthless exploitation of a dominant political cleavage; it has also spent long periods in opposition mistaking ideological movement for electoral recovery and the enthusiasm of its remaining supporters for evidence that anyone else was being persuaded. Badenoch’s reshuffle leaves all those possibilities open because, in the present Conservative predicament, she cannot yet afford to foreclose any plausible route to recovery.
