Who needs populists when you have the Conservatives?

You might not have bothered to follow the ongoing leadership contest for the British Conservative Party - as the fourth contest in five years, it’s kind of lost its shine.

But indeed, a leadership election is ongoing. Against their better judgment, six candidates have stood to become the next leader of the Conservative Party. After four rounds of voting amongst Conservative MPs, two candidates have made it to the final run-off before the wider party membership.

You’d think a crushing electoral defeat (their worst ever) would be enough to push the party in the direction of reform - instead, it has just pushed the party in the direction of Reform, the UK’s new far-right party, headed by Nigel Farage. But who needs ultra-right populist parties when you have the Conservatives?

Having lost a significant portion of their vote share to Reform, the solution the Conservatives have come up with is to become just as bad themselves. The two candidates vying to become Leader of the Opposition are so right wing as to be verging on insanity. On the one hand, Robert Jenrick plans to take the UK out of the European Court of Human Rights so that he can expel asylum seekers. On the other, his rival, Kemi Badenoch, is railing against bureaucracy, proclaiming that 10% of civil servants are so bad they should be in prison. She has previously written that “not all cultures are equal.” Centrists in the Conservative Party, represented by the One Nation Group, have refused to back either candidate.

A cursory glance at the Conservative Party leadership candidates shows that the Conservatives aren’t taking calls for renewal seriously. As the table below shows, every candidate for party leader has served in at least one of the last three Conservative governments. The two candidates in the run-off have even scored a hat trick of catastrophic political decisions.

CANDIDATE	MINISTER IN PREVIOUS GOVERNMENTS
	Boris Johnson	Liz Truss	Rishi Sunak
Robert Jenrick	X	X	X
Kemi Badenoch	X	X	X
James Cleverly	X	X	X
Tom Tugendhat		X	X
Priti Patel	X
Mel Stride			X

Robert Jenrick clearly doesn’t have any qualms about his association with this myriad of disastrous governments, stating that he would need “the best people” in his shadow cabinet, and would be “delighted” to welcome disgraced former Prime Minister Boris Johnson into his team. How Boris Johnson could possibly be considered as one of the “best people” to have back at the forefront of politics is beyond me.

Make no mistake: serving in these governments is not something candidates should be proud of. Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak were lying, law-breaking and anti-democratic, and Liz Truss, the shortest serving PM in UK history, nearly crashed the economy. In my opinion, anyone who served in those governments can be painted with the same brush.

Both Badenock and Jenrick are already marred by scandal before they have even entered the grubby world of Conservative Party leadership. Badenoch’s infractions so far include hacking into a Labour MP’s website in the early 2000s and accusations of bullying her staff and creating an intimidating atmosphere at the Department for Business and Trade.

Meanwhile, Jenrick was criticised in 2020 for ignoring travel restrictions during the pandemic, at one point driving 150 miles to his second home despite calling for the public to stay at home. Jenrick has also been accused of corruption on multiple occasions and was ultimately ousted from his ministerial role.

The fact that all the candidates in the leadership election are tarnished by their political careers says a lot about the state that the party is in. Their lack of fresh faces is yet another black mark on the party, which is proving itself once again unable to find a leader capable of bringing some pretence of dignity and integrity to the role.