Why the Conservatives need new faces again
Why resist verification?
When David Cameron took the reins as Conservative leader more than twenty years ago, he announced that he wanted to “change the face of the Conservative party by changing the faces of the Conservative party”. It was a conscious attempt to break with the past and alter the party’s image to make it look more like the country it sought to govern.
Today’s Tories have a new reason to think seriously about changing the faces at the top: putting further clear blue water between themselves and Reform UK. It is an idea gaining traction inside both LOTO and CCHQ.
In recent weeks, Reform’s steady intake of Tory defectors – including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi – has saddled Nigel Farage’s party with a growing quantity of political baggage. Reform now boasts more alumni of Liz Truss’s cabinet than Kemi Badenoch has in her shadow cabinet.
A dividing line is opening up, handed to Badenoch courtesy of Farage’s twin instincts: to recruit those with ministerial experience (even when that experience produced outcomes he denounces) and to finish off the Conservative party altogether. Those close to Badenoch believe she should exploit it as part of the route back to power.
Reform’s problem is simple: it has no fresh pool of elected talent. Instead, it has been forced to fish in Tory waters, reeling in figures already scared by their own records – Braverman and her Home Office record; Jenrick and the Afghan scandal; Zahawi and his tax affairs.
This irony was neatly illustrated yesterday when Reform’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, quote-tweeted a newly elected Tory MP’s Commons video questioning a policy from 2022, by asking: “Who was in government in 2022?” The answer, inconveniently, is that this person wasn’t an MP at the time, while half of Reform’s parliamentary cohort were. Recycling the same old faces risks turning Reform into Tories 2.0.
The Conservatives, by contrast, have options. At the last election, a new intake of 26 MPs entered the Commons on the Tory benches, personally untouched by the sins of previous governments. “Hard-working, competent, young, ambitious,” one senior Tory tells me. “Some are ripe for the picking” – and would offer a visible break with the past.
As one of the new intake tells me: “If the top team are only the Truss/Sunak people who the voters dumped, Conservatives will look stale.”
History offers a useful parallel. Cameron, Osborne and Gove felt like a different era from Major, Heseltine and Rifkind – the outgoing generation they replaced. Badenoch’s challenge is to find the new faces to make the party around her look fresh – to make her assertion that the party is renewed genuinely credible – in five years, not thirteen. That means promoting unknown faces quickly.
All of the 2024 intake were given junior …
Why resist verification?
When David Cameron took the reins as Conservative leader more than twenty years ago, he announced that he wanted to “change the face of the Conservative party by changing the faces of the Conservative party”. It was a conscious attempt to break with the past and alter the party’s image to make it look more like the country it sought to govern.
Today’s Tories have a new reason to think seriously about changing the faces at the top: putting further clear blue water between themselves and Reform UK. It is an idea gaining traction inside both LOTO and CCHQ.
In recent weeks, Reform’s steady intake of Tory defectors – including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi – has saddled Nigel Farage’s party with a growing quantity of political baggage. Reform now boasts more alumni of Liz Truss’s cabinet than Kemi Badenoch has in her shadow cabinet.
A dividing line is opening up, handed to Badenoch courtesy of Farage’s twin instincts: to recruit those with ministerial experience (even when that experience produced outcomes he denounces) and to finish off the Conservative party altogether. Those close to Badenoch believe she should exploit it as part of the route back to power.
Reform’s problem is simple: it has no fresh pool of elected talent. Instead, it has been forced to fish in Tory waters, reeling in figures already scared by their own records – Braverman and her Home Office record; Jenrick and the Afghan scandal; Zahawi and his tax affairs.
This irony was neatly illustrated yesterday when Reform’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, quote-tweeted a newly elected Tory MP’s Commons video questioning a policy from 2022, by asking: “Who was in government in 2022?” The answer, inconveniently, is that this person wasn’t an MP at the time, while half of Reform’s parliamentary cohort were. Recycling the same old faces risks turning Reform into Tories 2.0.
The Conservatives, by contrast, have options. At the last election, a new intake of 26 MPs entered the Commons on the Tory benches, personally untouched by the sins of previous governments. “Hard-working, competent, young, ambitious,” one senior Tory tells me. “Some are ripe for the picking” – and would offer a visible break with the past.
As one of the new intake tells me: “If the top team are only the Truss/Sunak people who the voters dumped, Conservatives will look stale.”
History offers a useful parallel. Cameron, Osborne and Gove felt like a different era from Major, Heseltine and Rifkind – the outgoing generation they replaced. Badenoch’s challenge is to find the new faces to make the party around her look fresh – to make her assertion that the party is renewed genuinely credible – in five years, not thirteen. That means promoting unknown faces quickly.
All of the 2024 intake were given junior …
Why the Conservatives need new faces again
Why resist verification?
When David Cameron took the reins as Conservative leader more than twenty years ago, he announced that he wanted to “change the face of the Conservative party by changing the faces of the Conservative party”. It was a conscious attempt to break with the past and alter the party’s image to make it look more like the country it sought to govern.
Today’s Tories have a new reason to think seriously about changing the faces at the top: putting further clear blue water between themselves and Reform UK. It is an idea gaining traction inside both LOTO and CCHQ.
In recent weeks, Reform’s steady intake of Tory defectors – including Suella Braverman, Robert Jenrick and Nadhim Zahawi – has saddled Nigel Farage’s party with a growing quantity of political baggage. Reform now boasts more alumni of Liz Truss’s cabinet than Kemi Badenoch has in her shadow cabinet.
A dividing line is opening up, handed to Badenoch courtesy of Farage’s twin instincts: to recruit those with ministerial experience (even when that experience produced outcomes he denounces) and to finish off the Conservative party altogether. Those close to Badenoch believe she should exploit it as part of the route back to power.
Reform’s problem is simple: it has no fresh pool of elected talent. Instead, it has been forced to fish in Tory waters, reeling in figures already scared by their own records – Braverman and her Home Office record; Jenrick and the Afghan scandal; Zahawi and his tax affairs.
This irony was neatly illustrated yesterday when Reform’s head of policy, Zia Yusuf, quote-tweeted a newly elected Tory MP’s Commons video questioning a policy from 2022, by asking: “Who was in government in 2022?” The answer, inconveniently, is that this person wasn’t an MP at the time, while half of Reform’s parliamentary cohort were. Recycling the same old faces risks turning Reform into Tories 2.0.
The Conservatives, by contrast, have options. At the last election, a new intake of 26 MPs entered the Commons on the Tory benches, personally untouched by the sins of previous governments. “Hard-working, competent, young, ambitious,” one senior Tory tells me. “Some are ripe for the picking” – and would offer a visible break with the past.
As one of the new intake tells me: “If the top team are only the Truss/Sunak people who the voters dumped, Conservatives will look stale.”
History offers a useful parallel. Cameron, Osborne and Gove felt like a different era from Major, Heseltine and Rifkind – the outgoing generation they replaced. Badenoch’s challenge is to find the new faces to make the party around her look fresh – to make her assertion that the party is renewed genuinely credible – in five years, not thirteen. That means promoting unknown faces quickly.
All of the 2024 intake were given junior …
