Tories upbeat but polling poorly as Badenoch conference begins

The Conservative Party conference opens in Birmingham on Sunday with a mood noticeably lighter than the previous year, and nearly everyone inside the party agrees that Kemi Badenoch has steadied the ship as leader. Walk through the corridors and you'll hear talk of unity, of purpose, of a party that has stopped fighting itself. But there is a gap between the feeling in the room and the numbers on the page, and it is a gap that no amount of conference optimism can close.

"The mood is better but the facts are still very poor," one Conservative MP said plainly. "We are still a distant third in the polls, and if there was an election tomorrow we would lose, and badly. That means the mood is overhyped." Nearly two years into Badenoch's tenure, the party polls worse than it did in 2024, when voters delivered a catastrophic defeat. The Conservatives took 24 percent of the vote then. Now they hover just above 20 percent. The arithmetic is unforgiving.

Badenoch's strategy is clear enough: reclaim voters who drifted to Nigel Farage's Reform UK by offering them toughness on the issues they care about. The party has pledged to bar non-Britons from social housing, strip citizenship from dual nationals convicted of serious crimes, and cut benefits to subsistence levels with restrictions on alcohol and tobacco purchases. Overseas aid will be slashed to fund 50,000 new prison places. These are not gestures toward the center. They are bets placed on the right.

But this calculation carries a risk that some Tories, particularly those in the centrist One Nation faction, view with genuine alarm. "We need to be attracting as many voters who left us for the Lib Dems as Reform, and I don't personally think we have got the balance right," a shadow minister said. "There is an economic offering, but they don't want us to be so intolerant on social issues. The way we are going, we risk being seen as the nasty party again." That phrase echoes from 2002, when Theresa May warned the party against punching down and targeting narrow voter bases with punitive policies. The warning seems to have faded.

What is striking is how little open resistance Badenoch faces. The One Nation group, which might have mounted a challenge, has largely dissolved into acquiescence. Some of its members sit outside parliament. Others lie low on the backbenches. A few, like Tom Tugendhat, have been co-opted into the leadership structure. "The thing about the One Nation group is that we never actually did anything," one centrist MP reflected. "We got together and metaphorically held hands from time to time, but that was about it." The fracturing of the right—with Reform drawing away voters and oxygen—has left moderates without leverage or appetite for a fight.

Badenoch herself has improved as a performer. Her personal ratings have climbed, though the climb starts from a low place: her net favorability with YouGov has risen 20 points but remains at minus 15. When voters describe her, they use words like "strong," but also "mean" and "cold." She has learned to take time over decisions, to make her case methodically—the commitment to leave the European Convention on Human Rights came backed by a 185-page report from shadow attorney general David Wolfson. MPs respect the discipline. They are not openly rebelling.

The centrist pushback, such as it exists, comes from Prosper UK, a grouping launched this year by Andy Street, the former West Midlands mayor, and Ruth Davidson, who led the Scottish Conservatives. David Gauke, a cabinet minister under May, sits among its vice-chairs and has been blunt about what Badenoch is missing. "There's a set of the electorate that don't feel the party has spoken to them for at least 10 years," he said. "There is no route to a Conservative majority that does not involve winning back seats in Oxfordshire and Surrey and other parts of the home counties." Those are the seats the Lib Dems took in 2024. Those are the voters Badenoch's current strategy does not address.

Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary, University of London, sees the calculation clearly: stop Reform from running away with the right, then wait for Reform to implode and for the Labour government to stumble. "It is a risk, but what else have they got?" he said. But he sees no clear path to recovery. "They seem to be overstating the extent to which voters think even Badenoch is a good thing. She's still in negative territory. They have gone from a situation in which they got 24% of the vote in 2024 and they're now, at best, on just over 20%. If this is what success looks like, I'd love to know what failure is." The conference will be upbeat. The party will project unity. But the numbers will not have changed.