If you’ve so much as glanced at the latest polling… yes, the one causing heart palpitations at CCHQ and audible gasps in the leather armchairs of the Carlton Club, you’ll have seen it.
Reform UK: 29%.
Labour, meandering at 22%.
Conservative Party, the once-mighty leviathan of British political life, reduced to 17%.
Seventeen! It’s not a number. It’s a dirge. It’s a whisper at the wake of a party that once roared like a lion.
This was the party of Churchill, Thatcher, and a half-million-strong membership. The party that faced down fascism, tamed inflation, won wars, won peace, and won the hearts of a country that believed in the virtues of thrift, sovereignty, hard work and patriotism.
Now? It is headed, unless we act, with serene inevitability toward oblivion.
Let us be brutally clear: Kemi must go.
This is not a wobble. This is not some sort of US mid-term malaise. This is not a protest vote that will melt like frost in May. This is a structural collapse, a rejection so fundamental that even the faithful no longer feel the call. The Conservative Party is bleeding support, credibility and identity. And Kemi Badenoch is simply not the leader to halt that descent.
She is not cutting through. She is not captivating the country. She is not commanding confidence.
And in politics, as in war, you cannot inspire a counter-attack with confusion at the helm.
Now, predictably, the usual suspects will leap out from the hedgerows of Twitter and Substack to declare with glee, “Let the Tories die! Burn it down! Let Reform rise from the ashes!”
To which I reply: Rubbish. Dangerous rubbish.
Because to abandon the Conservative Party is to abandon the very idea of an established, stable, serious government on the centre-right. And make no mistake: Britain needs a Conservative Party. Not out of nostalgia, but necessity. Without it, the centre-right fragments into angry atoms… indignant, isolated, ineffective.
The country doesn’t need more protest. It needs purpose.
There is, thank God, a way out of this death spiral. A lifeboat in the storm.
His name is Robert Jenrick.
This is not just about policies, though his are sound. This is about presence. About the ability to cut through the fog. In an age of information overload and digital warfare, Jenrick has done what most politicians seem incapable of: he really connects online.
He speaks in straight lines. He carries himself with calm conviction. His videos don’t just go viral, they earn respect. When he speaks of borders, national integrity, and the right of Britain to determine its own destiny, people don’t roll their eyes. They lean in. They listen. He’s also super smart, a KC.
He gets it. He gets law. The public get him. And that, in politics, is the golden thread.
So yes: Kemi must go. And Jenrick must rise.
But leadership is only the beginning. The party needs nothing less than a renaissance.
Rebuild CCHQ. Fire the stale strategists who’ve turned campaigning into spreadsheet consultancy. Remove Dougie Smith and the rot of anonymous influence. Stop training MPs to be bland, bureaucratic clones. We need fighters, thinkers, communicators.
And above all, we need a message. A cause. A reason for people to stand up and say, “Yes, I believe in this again.”
There are hundreds of seats to fill in 2029. A generation of candidates to inspire. A base to reawaken. And the blueprint is already being drawn.
Look to the Great British PAC. Under Ben Habib’s courageous leadership and Andrew Hunt’s sharp policy vision, it is producing bold, common-sense policies that are resonating. Reform UK is scooping them up. The Conservatives, whilst being offered them too, remain frozen… looking at them like a Victorian might stare at an iPad.
That must end.
The Conservative Party must stand for something again. Stand for borders. Stand for enterprise. Stand for the family, the nation, the flag. It must no longer speak in beige. It must speak in bold, brilliant colour.
Because if it doesn’t, if it remains a party of equivocation and managerialism. It will die.
But it is not too late.
Not yet.
The Conservative Party is still the grand old oak in the middle of the field: scarred, yes, battered, undeniably, but rooted deep in the soil of British identity. Reform is the sapling: vigorous, energetic, rightly impatient.
We need both.
Come 2029, mark my words, there will be a coalition. Not of compromise, but of conviction. But that will only happen successfully if both branches of the centre-right are strong, and proud, and principled.
So here is the call to arms, sounded not with despair, but with defiance:
Make Robert Jenrick leader.
Rebuild the movement.
Speak for the nation—not to it, but with it.
Reject decline. Reject defeat. Reject the lie that the Conservative Party’s best days are behind it.
Because they aren’t.
And if we have the courage to act now… to restore, to reform, to rise again… then history will not write an epitaph. It will write a chapter. A great, thundering, unexpected chapter in the story of this great nation.
And who knows… perhaps even a certain blond, tousle-haired titan might return to write a few lines of it himself. There is, after all, some unfinished business.
By Claire Bullivant
US TRADE DEAL SET TO BE SIGNED THIS WEEK (DAILY MAIL)
Nah. Jenrick is just May Mk II.
A sheep in wolf’s clothing. He entered parliament as a staunch Cameroinite, wa mentored by arch-remainer Anna Soubry, then when he sensed the wind changing, he changed his colours.
His rapid conversion to the right is too obviouos – he’s the next Tory party “wet plant” – he will say the right things and then fail to implement them if we’re daft enough to elect him/them.
And even if he were a true believer… as long as the MPS are 2/3rds wets… how can he achieve anything? If they block policy implementation, or defenstrate him via 1922 rules if they don’t like what he’s doing… he can’t achieve anything in government, so why elect him?
This publication seems to have smelled the coffee in backing Reform, but rather slow to understand that the Tory party is dead – and to understand the valid reasons behind its demise.