The Conservative Party, of which Kemi Badenoch has just been elected leader, has been betraying its supporters since 1834. The new Reform party has not yet begun betraying its supporters, but undoubtedly will if it selects parliamentary candidates centrally. Those Brits wishing to achieve the distant miracle of having their country competently governed therefore have a choice to make. Either they must try to reform the Conservatives to become more Tory, in the tradition of the fine 1783-1830 governments, or they must Toryise the Reform party. Both appear difficult, but the difficulties are different, and deciding which Matterhorn to attempt will set the history of the next decade.

Sir Robert Peel, the Prime Minister, was supposedly highly intelligent but he was not one of the world’s clear thinkers. He would show this in 1829, when he reversed himself to pass Catholic Emancipation, a “reform” that did little for Ireland but revolted the English and Scottish electorate, thus losing the Tories the next election and forcing the Duke of Wellington and Toryism out of office forever. (It would have been far more constructive to give Ireland “Home Rule,” thus short-circuiting almost a century of Irish obstruction and making Catholic Emancipation nugatory.) Peel’s lack of common sense was also shown by his adoption of unilateral free trade with the 1846 Repeal of the Corn Laws, a “reform” that over the next 70 years destroyed Britain’s economic supremacy.

However, perhaps Peel’s greatest intellectual folly was the 1834 Tamworth Manifesto, which destroyed the “Conservative” party’s link to traditional Toryism and set it on a road of endless compromise with an increasingly aggressive and intemperate left. Yes, the Whigs had passed the 1832 Reform Act and the Tories had been hugely defeated at the following General Election. But a moment’s analysis should have shown Peel that the Reform Act had narrowed rather than broadened the franchise – the “£10 householder” who now got the vote was roughly five times as rich as the “Forty Shilling Freeholder” who had possessed the vote in most constituencies before 1832 (40 shillings being £2 not £10). The main and huge effect of the Act had been a gigantic gerrymander, creating over 100 new mostly spurious Whig constituencies and abolishing time-hallowed Tory ones.

Thus, there was no need to adopt leftist shibboleths like free trade, because the electorate had grown no more “democratic.” The old verities (alas including Protestant supremacy, now a dead letter) would have remained perfectly attractive to an electorate who at that stage, before Whig historians and the ineffable Benjamin Disraeli had poisoned their well of knowledge, remembered the huge successes of the Liverpool government. Had Peel stayed true to Liverpool’s principles instead of repudiating them, he would have returned to power just as quickly (in 1841) and governed much better when he did return.

After Peel, the leftist betrayals of Conservative voters, let alone the principles of Toryism, came thick and fast. Not all “Conservative” party leaders were conscious betrayers – the 3rd Marquess of Salisbury, Neville Chamberlain and Margaret Thatcher were notable exceptions, though all three made serious mistakes. (Thatcher’s handing the succession to John Major may in time come to seem as big a disaster as Chamberlain’s getting Britain into World War II 27 months before the Americans, who alone could win it.) But the list of betrayers is much longer than the list of non-betrayers – Peel, Disraeli, Arthur Balfour, Harold Macmillan, Edward Heath, Major and Theresa May, to list only the major ones, the others being short-lived and/or so feeble they could not even betray effectively.

The last 14 years of Conservative government in 2010-24 were a more or less continuous betrayal, with only the 2016 Brexit referendum being a bright spot. Even that, through betrayal and incompetence, was implemented so badly that it remained vulnerable to socialist undermining. The leadership election between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch at least avoided the odious and inept James Cleverly but was held among the small remnant of Conservative MPs, almost all of whom had been selected through a process rigged by the “modernizing” David Cameron “reforms” of 2006-07, under which Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) selected constituency MP candidates using various “woke” criteria, notably excluding Toryism.

Badenoch herself is a tribute to the “DEI” proclivities of CCHQ. By the time she was given a seat in 2017 members of the majority ethnic community were firmly excluded from consideration if they supported traditional Tory principles, but a traditional Tory of Afro-Caribbean heritage like Badenoch could still slip through. More recently even Afro-Caribbean Tory-leaners have been effectively barred. The result has been a “Conservative” Parliamentary contingent that is almost entirely composed of metropolitan liberals with few if any connections to traditional Toryism. Notably, this process has also resulted in a halving in the number of Conservative party members since its recent peak of 200,000 in March 2021. Now, a new “Reform” party that better represents traditional Tory beliefs, at least in the short term, is breathing down the Conservatives’ necks, with 75,000 members already and 14% of the vote in July’s General Election.

From the above analysis, the possibility of a constructive future for the Conservative party clearly depends on CCHQ being removed entirely from any role in candidate selection. A clear-out of the personnel involved at CCHQ will not be enough; leftist bureaucracies have infinite means of perpetuating their rule. Just as the appalling “woke” infection of U.S. K-12 education can only be removed by the elimination of the Education Department and not merely by a change in Secretary of Education, so the same is true at CCHQ. Keep CCHQ’s functions of campaign management and fundraising if you must, but devolve candidate selection entirely to the local constituency parties, with no central oversight or restrictions.

With a devolved selection system, many eccentrics will be selected, and a few crooks and lunatics, but eccentrics and lunatics will usefully contribute to the party’s debate about policy. Only the crooks are undesirable, but experience has shown that those can slip through the CCHQ net also. Most important, the dominance of the parliamentary party by the parochial London interests will be removed, and geographical as well as intellectual diversity will thus be assured. The Tory Party was predominantly a party of country squires and local industry; it is disgraceful that traditionally Whiggish metropolitan, finance and now consulting interests should be so grossly over-represented in Conservative parliamentary ranks today.

Absent such a move by the Conservative party, the course is clear. Every effort must be made to support Nigel Farage’s “Reform” party, holding our nose at its naffer elements – Farage was educated at Dulwich College, but has spent too much of his life in pubs! Reform has already increased its support from 14% at the General Election to 18% in a recent opinion poll, and despite Badenoch’s best efforts may well do better in the lengthy interval before the next election, due in late 2028 or 2029, given Labour’s large majority. Badenoch may attempt to counter Reform’s appeal but can do little against the opposition of her MPs, most of which are left-liberal. Hence unless CCHQ is removed, there is every chance of Reform overtaking the Conservatives in the polls and at the next General Election.

Labour will undoubtedly become very unpopular. Through gross favoritism to the public sector and heavy taxes, the same policy mix as Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, it will return the British economy to a position much worse than the 1970s, because of the industrial decay that has taken place since then. You can easily imagine a 2029 General Election with Labour’s share of the vote reduced to around 20% from its present 35%. The extra 15% will have to go somewhere; if the Conservatives decline only slightly from their present position, to 23% and other parties remain the same, then Reform will lead the field at 31% — overall a similar position to the recent Austrian election, with Reform taking the place of Austria’s Freedom Party.

Here the innate superiority of the British electoral system would become manifest. Instead of being vulnerable to a despicable leftist coalition against it, as in Austria, Reform under “first past the post” with a clear 8% lead over any other party, would very probably have a clear parliamentary majority, or close to it. Should that take place, the Conservatives might as well shut up shop and sell off the Carlton Club; they will never from a government again. It would be a fitting punishment for 195 years (by then) of almost unremittent betrayal and futility.

The Reform program following such a victory should be clear. The National Health Service should be scrapped, and replaced with a mixed public/private system, such as those in Germany or Australia, in which insurance is funneled through the state and health service provision privatized. The myriad of leeching management consultants and administrators who have allowed the NHS’s costs to rocket up far more quickly than inflation should be fired, as should all the other consultants advising the public sector generally.

The Office of National Statistics’ most recent figures showed that public sector productivity was down 3.9% in 2023 compared with 1997, a period over which overall productivity in decently run countries was up at least 40%. During that 26-year period, under the pernicious influence of the malign Tony Blair and his inept Conservative successors, billions of pounds were spent on consultants with the remit of improving public sector productivity. Clearly, given the galactic productivity-enhancing inventions that have arisen in the world since 1997, the fees paid to those consultants were entirely wasted and their work was almost certainly highly damaging. Fire the lot of them and make the Civil Service and the public sector generally improve its own productivity! They can start by throwing out all the over-complex and useless management systems the consultants installed. Just making those reforms should swing the Budget into a healthy surplus, from which private-sector-enhancing tax cuts can be made. Reform should implement the same program as Thatcher in the 1980s, in other words, only without Thatcher’s mistakes, hesitations and compromises.

Finally, the BBC should be privatized and the license fee abolished; the government should not levy taxes to subsidize what under a Reform government would be hysterical anti-government propaganda.

The path ahead in terms of policy is clear. The only question is the mechanics of how to get there.

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(The Bear’s Lair is a weekly column that is intended to appear each Monday, an appropriately gloomy day of the week. Its rationale is that the proportion of “sell” recommendations put out by Wall Street houses remains far below that of “buy” recommendations. Accordingly, investors have an excess of positive information and very little negative information. The column thus takes the ursine view of life and the market, in the hope that it may be usefully different from what investors see elsewhere.)