This civil war on the British right is a charade – its politics are more united than ever

Kemi Badenoch is congratulated by Robert Jenrick after winning the Conservative party leadership contest, 2 November 2024. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesView image in fullscreenKemi Badenoch is congratulated by Robert Jenrick after winning the Conservative party leadership contest, 2 November 2024. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty ImagesThis civil war on the British right is a charade – its politics are more united than everJonathan LiewDon’t be fooled by its bickering leaders. Their calibrated fake fighting will probably end in coalition

Kapow! In a warmly received conference speech, Kemi Badenoch turns her fire on Reform UK, describing it as “weird”, and ruling out an electoral pact. Slap! Not to be outdone, her former colleague Robert Jenrick derides Badenoch as a champion of the wealthy, which is quite rich for a guy who looks like he’s just accidentally ingested a bundle of £50 notes through his sphincter. Bosh! Reform’s Richard Tice and Restore’s Rupert Lowe clash online over the result of a council byelection in Derbyshire, in which the Greens profited from a split rightwing vote. “Vote Restore get Islamists,” Tice chides. “Vote Reform, get some random Bangladeshi bloke,” Lowe responds.

Meanwhile, the Conservatives are back. The Kemibounce is real. The Keminaissance is true. We’ve all got a severe case of the Kemirrhoids. And you may wonder why much of the media are talking about a Badenoch revival in a year where her party lost 563 councillors and 40% of its councils, remains about four points below its apparent nadir of 2024, and in which the leader herself appears incapable of doing a broadcast interview without looking like a restaurant diner who received exactly what she ordered and is inexplicably furious at it. The point is that the Conservatives are a serious party of government again, and the reason is that we all said so.

And even if we take into account Badenoch’s curiously resilient personal polling, this does feel like a largely arbitrary volte-face. There was a soft-focus interview in the Financial Times, a warm editorial in the Sun, and generally positive coverage of the Tory conference in the rest of the rightwing press. Tom Tugendhat, the new shadow foreign secretary and once regarded as a party moderate, had a sympathetic platform in the Observer to defend the party’s opposition to net zero and the European convention on human rights.

Read moreFrom a safe distance, it is possible to regard these realignments in a fairly optimistic light. The right is tearing itself to shreds, potentially allowing a leftwing alternative – or failing that, Labour – to clean up. And in the continuing scrap between Lowe and Nigel Farage, or the series of aggressive Telegraph editorials aimed at Restore Britain, it is tempting to glimpse a reassertion of basic, consensual values in which, for all our many disagreements, certain voices will always be beyond the pale.

Occasionally you will even hear it said on the progressive left that a strong centre-right is a necessary, welcome bulwark against the extremist far right. That while we can disagree strongly and vehemently with Badenoch’s party, we can also recognise the ways in which a moderate right can act as a kind of cordon sanitaire against the nativists, ethnonationalists and race theorists who may otherwise get their hands on the levers of government. All of which would probably be true, if that were actually what was happening. But is it?

Let’s start with the Tories, who appear to be rapidly pivoting towards a demographic that one insider has described as “Waitrose Woman”: affluent, socially liberal, turned off by culture-war rhetoric but laser-focused on tax and the economy. “We have done a ton of opinion research over the last 18 months,” a Conservative source told the Mail on Sunday. “You do have to appear reasonable.” Or, as one shadow cabinet minister told the Guardian: “We have outsourced our toxicity to Reform.”

But in the real world, beyond superficial branding, how different are the two platforms? Shadow cabinet member Nick Timothy called Islamic prayers in Trafalgar Square un-British, “an act of domination”, “straight from the Islamist playbook”, and Badenoch backed him. Badenoch advocates a ban on pro-Palestine marches, but argued Tommy Robinson should not receive the same treatment. Another shadow cabinet member, Katie Lam, advocated mass deportations of legally settled immigrants in order to make Britain a “culturally coherent group of people”.

The Conservative police and crime commissioner Donna Jones responded to the masked vigilante protests in Portsmouth by blaming the government for failing to control our borders. A former neo-Nazi activist was selected as a local election candidate for the Tories, and subsequently appointed as an adviser. In the Telegraph, Badenoch wrote that anyone committed to net zero targets is no longer welcome in the party.

As for Reform, Monday’s announcement that it would immediately suspend the UK asylum system brought the party further in line with Restore, both of whom advocate ICE-style raids, the stripping of citizenship from people who thought they were here permanently, and the cessation of aid and visas to countries who refuse to take back migrants. Suella Braverman, a former Tory, now says she can “understand why some people are drawn to Restore”, and suggests people of colour cannot be English.

Indeed, you can argue that net zero, welfare, tax cuts, Israel, Brexit, defence spending, trans rights, Donald Trump, the obsession with grooming gangs and Islam, immigration and, most importantly, their common enemies, there is barely a sheet of nori to separate the three parties. And yet at the same time we are expected to believe that these parties engaged in an eternal blood feud, rather than three heads of the same army, pursuing different strategies towards a common cause.

Read moreNaturally Westminster will fall for this narrative wholesale, focused as it is on divisions over alliances, personalities over ideas. The Conservatives will be allowed to carry on decontaminating their brand without decontaminating their platform. Farage will continue as flag bearer for the movement, sweeping up donor money and airtime. Meanwhile Restore serve an equally important role as the engine of change, the pressure group, the brains trust: shifting the rhetorical window to the right while allowing Badenoch and Farage to look reasonable in comparison.

The civil war on the right is in fact a charade, a fake fight being enacted for our benefit. The right bloc is now a single basic substance, responsive and carefully calibrated to the different audiences it needs to capture. Reform, already in informal talks with Restore, can now tailor its offering to the post-industrial north, Midlands and Wales, leaving the rehabilitated Conservatives – the acceptable face of the project – to concentrate on their southern and rural heartlands. And if, after all the bickering and infighting, a coalition should be required? Do we really expect a Conservative party founded entirely on the gain and exercise of power to suddenly turn it down?

To those on the left, the idea of a rightwing meltdown feels vaguely reassuring. But in reality nothing here is being repudiated. The personalities may butt heads for our entertainment, but the ideas and politics are largely common among them all. The parts are being divvied out, but ultimately the production remains the same.