The Conservative Party has discovered a revolutionary strategy: doing what they did before, but calling it a comeback. Kemi Badenoch, the new Tory leader, is positioning herself as a “classic old school Conservative” — which in modern politics means she has found some filing cabinets from 1979 and decided they contain blueprints for the future.
The centrepiece of this thrilling reinvention is scrapping a childcare benefits cliff edge. Workers earning over £100,000 face a sudden drop in support, which the party now claims to find scandalous. Apparently punishing people for earning more money is bad actually, a principle the Conservatives invented yesterday and will pretend to have always believed next week.
Why rebrand 70-year-old policy as a return to core principles rather than just admitting you’re out of ideas? Because it works. The narrative writes itself: Badenoch isn’t offering anything new, she’s rescuing something old from the dustbin of history where it was rightfully placed. She’s not pivoting, she’s remembering. The party is election-ready, focused on economy and welfare — two things that have definitely never been Conservative priorities before, which is why they need a major conference announcement to remind everyone they exist.
The machinery is humming. The rhetoric is locked. The only problem is that Britain spent the last fifteen years watching Conservative governments implement these exact principles and watched things get worse. But that’s context, and context is for people who remember things.