Sam Collins is Head of Public Affairs for Popular Conservatism.
What a difference a year makes. Conference 2025 was a depressingly empty, flat experience (and not just because it was in Andy’s Manchester). Many wondered openly if it was the equivalent of a Liberal Conference in the late 1920’s – a requiem for a party who had lost electoral relevance and being replaced. Reform seemed to be carrying all before them, and MRP polls were showing them winning an overall majority – and the Conservatives winning barely dozens of seats.
12 months later and we have Kemi Badenoch, like a modern Martin Luther, nailing her 95-page case for Conservatism to the metaphorical door saying, “here we stand, we can do no other”. The Conservatives have drawn level with Reform and there is vim in the air of Birmingham. Members who, twelve months ago, talked about how to stave off destruction now talk about taking the fight to both Reform and Labour.
It is important not to overstate the recovery. The Conservatives are still, at best, neck and neck with Reform. Despite Reform shedding around 10 per cent of the vote from their summer 2025 polling average peak, a worryingly small amount of that vote has returned to the Conservative column.
Another spoiler party on the right – Restore – has started siphoning off needed votes into an electoral cu-de-sac. Council by-election results in Dover, Northumberland and Blackpool – where a majority of voters split among the parties of the right and deliver seats to left wing candidates – potentially presages what the next General Election might look like.
However, if the Conservative Party can lead a government after the next General Election, it is clear that Kemi and her senior team, particularly Chris Philp and Andrew Griffith, understand the real problems facing the British state and seem ready to take the action necessary.
On Quangos, the civil service and the judiciary Kemi seems ready to confront the key issue – that as long as real power over policy remains in the power of unelected officials then little can change whatever colour rosette a Prime Minister wears. Plans to leave the ECHR, repeal the Human Rights Act and slash the civil service are a real step towards Parliament ‘taking back control’. Plans to reject the worst extremes of Net Zero policy show that the party is willing to be pragmatic rather than dogmatic.
If you spend any time listening to Kemi, Philp or Griffith, it is clear they understand what went wrong during the fourteen years of Conservative Government and are determined to avoid making the same mistakes.
But if “” shows the Conservatives are willing to pick up the PopCon thesis, we need to ask how we unite the right to bring it about. Because we can be under no illusions, the next election is not going to be a fight between a robust, positive Conservatism and Keir Starmer’s intellectually exhausted technocracy.
Instead, we will be fighting a government seeking a mandate to redefine Britain’s economic structure as surely and catastrophically as Blair redefined our constitutional one. Forget Kemi’s 95 pages, Burnham’s manifesto will be about reigniting the Brexit wars, an enormous new state care system and likely new populist measures on housing, employment rights and state control.
Listen to Burnham’s conference speech and you hear a leader not committed to growth or prosperity but instead to turning the clock back to 1978, when Britain was the sick man of Europe and our best and brightest fled abroad to escape a crushing tax burden. It was truly a speech red in tooth and claw, one not seen from a Labour Prime Minister since Wilson.
Preventing a hard left government made up from some constellation of Labour, Greens, Lib Dems and Nationalists must be our number one priority at the next election – particularly if we are facing one in 2027. Whatever Burnham says it is difficult to imagine him not needing an election in the next twelve months. When his budget inevitably falls flat later this month his only option will surely be to declare his shortcomings the fault of the Starmer manifesto and go to the country seeking a mandate for real socialist change.
But despite this imminent risk the right seems still more interested in beating up one another than engaging with this threat.
In many ways the overall right should be fairly chipper. The ‘Burnham bounce’ seems to have done little to move voters from the right to the left – the shared Reform/Conservative/Restore vote share is around 47.2 per cent, down only 1.5 per cent from Starmer’s nadir in May. It says something about the fractured nature of our politics that Labour’s recovery to barely over a quarter of the vote in the polling average is considered a bounce at all!
But with the right hopelessly split it may be enough. Fighting against one another seems primed to put Labour back into office, potentially as part of a five or six-headed hydra who will break up the Union, crush whatever shoots of growth survive Burnham and Healey, and put us further in hock to the bond markets with more borrowing.
A right-wing vote split even worse than in 2024 makes this more likely. Yet the leaders of the Conservative Party, Reform and Restore still seem more concerned about picking fights with one another. This is a recipe for catastrophe at the next election.
Our one hope is that voters might be ahead of the political parties on the need for acting tactically. It seems, in major by-elections if not council ones, voters have figured out which party of the right is best placed to win and acted accordingly. But whether this level of sophistication can occur in the heat of a snap nationwide poll is unknown. Unlike the left, which has formed localised, tactical arrangements at constituency level for political generations to ensure candidate of the left wins, voters on the right have never previously had to think in those terms, let alone put into practice.
We should not be asking the voters to bail us out. Instead, the parties on the right should be helping point the way. I want to see a “” Government. But it is our duty first and foremost to protect the nation from that six-headed hydra.