Suddenly the British right feels a political chill. It’s getting cold in Andy Burnham’s shadow, as the Tories and Reform UK struggle to counter a prime minister with a clear vision. Rafael Behr writes that the opposition has become vacant, relying on outdated nostalgia rather than fresh ideas.
Badenoch's 1970s nostalgia
Kemi Badenoch, born in 1980, evokes the turmoil of the 1970s with cautionary zeal borrowed from an older generation. In a speech last week, she accused the prime minister of pining for “endless strikes, rubbish not being collected, bodies not being buried, inflation at 25% and a chancellor going cap-in-hand to the IMF”. This is more incantation than argument, a ritual fondling of beads on the Tory rosary, affirming faith in Margaret Thatcher and warding off socialist devils.
Burnham has done nothing to support the claim that his government is a 70s tribute act, unless you count the appointment of a man named Healey as chancellor and the imposition of price controls on buses. What the prime minister has done is trace Britain’s present malaise to choices made in the Thatcher era. From the threshold of No 10 he delivered the verdict: “Political power was centralised, economic power privatised, large parts of the country de-industrialised, and they still haven’t recovered.”
Burnham's Manchester blueprint
Burnham has spent nine years as mayor of Manchester, leaving it an enterprising capitalist city. He argues that its success is a function of pragmatic partnership between government and business, and that this model can be replicated on a national scale. It is hardly wild dogma to suggest that a strategically minded state can guide the hand of the market. The prime minister believes devolving power will give that hand a defter feel for local needs.
Conservatives might disagree, but it takes wilful denial to pretend that Burnham’s Manchester blueprint is retro-socialism. The prime minister could hardly be more explicit in rejecting the 20th-century central planner’s adage that “the gentleman in Whitehall knows best”.
Opposition flounders
It is normal for oppositions to take time to get the measure of a new prime minister. Keir Starmer was a slippery target in opposition, but in government he made life easy for his enemies by shedding what modest popularity he had accrued almost immediately. Badenoch didn’t have to develop an argument against a prime minister who struggled to explain what he was trying to do.
The Tories were bystanders while Starmer’s government self-immolated, mostly to the benefit of Reform UK and the Greens. Badenoch’s personal ratings have picked up over the past year, reflecting perhaps growing squeamishness on the right about Nigel Farage as a prospective prime minister. But the Conservative vote share has yet to climb as high as the giddy depths it fell to in July 2024, when the party suffered its worst ever general election defeat.
Badenoch's vacuous analysis
Disillusionment with Labour rule has done nothing to revive public interest in a Conservative alternative. Badenoch wasted her first year fretting that the Tories had been too leftwing in office, endorsing the case for defection to Reform UK. She then switched to fiscal parsimony, but has no theory of public service reform. To read her speeches is to inhabit a parallel universe where the obvious causes of dissatisfaction with the state are chronic overfunding and infestation by militant leftwing civil servants.
It is a vacuous analysis, coloured by excessive consumption of radical US conservative content online. British politics has always been shaped by trends across the Atlantic, but the radicalisation of the British right through exposure to Maga influence amounts to cognitive surrender. Political fandom has usurped judgment; craving validation from a foreign power takes precedence over loyalty to the national interest.
Maga heresies against Thatcherism
What British conservatives fail to observe is that Maga politics contains more heresies against the sacred Thatcherite creed than anything Burnham proposes. The US president hates free trade, admires single-party regimes, imposes arbitrary tariffs, and uses his office to extort money from private companies. He acquired power by skilfully manipulating economic and social grievances caused by deindustrialisation – the same trend Burnham identifies as a cause of British discontent.
The difference is that the UK prime minister talks about healing wounds, while Trump keeps them salted with partisan spite. Burnham’s diagnosis belongs in 2026, while Badenoch, craving reenactment of a battle won before she was born, is stuck in the wrong century.
