It’s a fascinating contrast that just as the Conservative Party has elected its second leader in a row from an ethnic minority background – one who identifies as “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant” – quite a few of its bright young things are becoming very interested in Enoch Powell. Across Twitter, blogs like J’Accuse and Pimlico Journal, and the pubs of South London, a new generation of neo-Powellites are sprouting with alacrity. Appalled by the last 14 years, wedded to a cask strength combination of immigration restrictionism and free-market economics, they are disillusioned by a Conservative Party they consider decadent, useless, and intellectually bankrupt.
A few right-wing bloggers are not representative of all young Tories. But Kemi Badenoch’s victory has crystalised a divide on the contemporary right: between a younger, angrier, online vanguard who consider her inadequate to the country’s challenges, and a grandee class that think she is remarkable. Among the Tories’ more restless cadres, Badenoch is not some philosopher-queen arisen to save her party, Instead, her relatively mainstream intellectual hinterland demonstrates only the paucity of conservative thought – and the radical new currents that are arising in the vacuum.
Nowhere was this better demonstrated than in Niall Ferguson’s championing of Badenoch’s candidacy. Sharing a podcast Badenoch had appeared on, the historian praised the new Tory leader for her “intellectual energy” and “personal authenticity”, and noted the influence of Thomas Sowell, the American economist, and the late Roger Scruton on her politics. According to Tom McTague, Badenoch’s politics are “a global Little Englandism… those of a middle-class Nigerian anglophile refracted through a world of alien English progressivism”. Raised in a Nigeria sliding into chaos, Scruton’s influence is clear in how she sees in Britain a country with fragile virtues – a sense of nationhood, law and order, neighbourliness – undermining its own foundations.
Both Sowell and Scruton are great conservative thinkers. And Badenoch is sadly unusual among her fellow MPs in being familiar with both. Most Tories today have read more Isabel Oakeshott than Michael. Finishing Basic Economics or England: An Elegy would be terra incognita. Intellectual laziness on the right is not brand new: John Stuart Mill didn’t think of us as the “Stupid Party” for nothing. But while Conservatives might be excused for not knowing Stanford University’s Thomas Sowell, Scruton suffered throughout his life from being a prophet unrecognised by his own party. His revival of the Conservative Philosophy Group for Tory MPs was ill-attended. His views on multiculturalism and same-sex marriage were simply too embarrassing for the urbane Cameroons.
Nonetheless, for Ferguson to suggest that Badenoch is exceptional for her interest in great thinkers sets an exceptionally low bar. Those of us who grew up with ready access to the internet were big fans of Sowell, Scruton, and co. by the time we reached our late teens. Badenoch is unusual only in her age. Driven right-wards by a childhood diet of Top Gear repeats on Dave, and perhaps radicalised by the Jordan Peterson’s interview with Cathy Newman, today’s Tory boys were consuming lectures, interviews, and podcasts from Badenoch’s heroes at the age at which she was still in Nigeria. The BBC’s loss was my gain when it came to streaming Ferguson’s TV shows on YouTube.
Consequently, that Badenoch is atypical amongst Tory MPs in having a worldview derived from such luminaries strikes most young right-wingers as more depressing than impressive – only bolstering the intellectual pessimism about our MPs that they derived from Dominic Cummings. Of course, exceptions to the “Stupid Party” label exist: Jesse Norman, Danny Kruger, Neil O’Brien, and Nick Timothy, to name a few. But should we not be striving for more? Should we not be treating Badenoch’s reading list as entry-level, rather than exceptional?
But Ferguson’s enthusiasm concerns me not only for what it says about Badenoch’s colleagues, but for what it means for the future of the Conservatives. I bow to no one in my enjoyment of Ferguson’s work. But his endorsement of Badenoch came alongside a fleet of similar seals of approval from a generation one might call, to be uncharitable, yesterday’s men. They straddle politics and journalism. William Hague, Charles Moore, Iain Duncan Smith, Simon Heffer, George Osborne, Daniel Finkelstein, Michael Gove: the Badenoch-backers are a who’s who of right-wing grandees. I grew up admiring all of them, and still do. But, in the words of one of their number, they “won’t be here in 30 or 40 years’ time”.
In their long hegemony over Torydom, they failed in Evelyn Waugh’s central dictum: to put the clock back a single second. Or, less prosaically, to make the country more conservative. One can point to individual successes, such as Gove’s education efforts. But the Tories left office this year not only hated, but with a record on immigration, growth, and housebuilding that fell short of our ambitions and promises. A generational divide has therefore opened up within the Tory membership, with many young members feeling as if Badenoch has been forced onto them as the choice of the older and wealthier average. This is not only because of a scepticism of the boomer belief that a right-wing ethnic minority woman will automatically outfox Labour – see Braverman, Suella – but that she didn’t speak to their concerns as Robert Jenrick did.
A comfortably retired shire Tory does not confront the realities of our present crises like a young professional paying £800 a month to live in a Zone 7 shoe box. Hence why Jenrick – with his simultaneously immigration-sceptic and Yimbyist pitch – appealed to groups like the “Next Gen Tories”. Young Conservatives care less about Badenoch’s culture war credentials than whether they can buy a house. This also explains why the Right’s intellectual vanguard are now more likely to be getting stuck into Enoch Powell and Friedrich Nietzsche than Margaret Thatcher and Friedrich Hayek. Having grown up admiring the Ferguson generation, they now find their heroes inadequate, insufficiently radical for the scale of change they demand.
If the new Conservative leader cannot satisfy that anguish, the young right will turn towards Reform or Dominic Cummings’s Start-Up-Party, if it ever moves from Substack to reality. They do not believe they owe a Tory Party blind to their interests their inherent devotion. Their revolutionary-reactionary ambitions owe more to Karl Marx than to Scruton: they aspire not only to philosophise about the world, but to change it. And while that is unfair on Scruton – his work behind the Iron Curtain showed a bravery few Tories match – it is a sign of where the Right is trending. Badenoch’s namedrops hold little appeal to the next generation. They are not your father’s Conservative Party.
[See also: The return of the Blairites]
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