The Conservative Party lost 251 seats at the 2024 general election, the worst defeat in the party's modern history. It retained 121 MPs. It returned to opposition for the first time in 14 years. Its new leader, Kemi Badenoch, inherited a parliamentary party that was smaller than at any point since 1906 and a membership that was already looking elsewhere. Within 18 months, 16 of those 121 MPs had defected to Reform UK, including Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman and Andrew Rosindell. A YouGov poll found 50 percent of Conservative members wanted Badenoch replaced before the next election. Sixty four percent supported a formal pact with Reform. Nearly half wanted a full merger. At the October 2025 conference, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride's speech drew a half empty room. The party that governed Britain for 14 years is now fighting for its survival as a viable political force.
Badenoch's response has not been to defend the 2024 manifesto. It has been to discard it and replace it with harder alternatives on almost every front.
On climate the manifesto reaffirmed the 2050 net zero target as legally binding, with small modular reactors, carbon capture clusters and trebled offshore wind. On 18 March 2025 Badenoch formally abandoned the target, calling it "impossible" and "fantasy politics." Carbon Brief noted she offered no alternative target and cited no evidence for her claim that meeting net zero would require "bankrupting" the country. The Climate Change Committee estimated the net cost of reaching net zero at £100 billion over 25 years, roughly £4 billion per year or 0.2 percent of GDP. The Confederation of British Industry reported that the net zero economy was growing three times faster than other sectors. By January 2026 Badenoch had escalated from abandoning the target to calling for repeal of the Climate Change Act itself. As a government minister in 2022 she had touted the "opportunity" for "growth and revitalised communities" from the "clean energy revolution." The reversal took three years.
On the European Convention on Human Rights the manifesto pledged the Conservatives would remain within the ECHR, legislating only to disregard interim Rule 39 orders from Strasbourg. On 4 October 2025 Badenoch announced that leaving the ECHR and repealing the Human Rights Act is now official party policy. She commissioned Lord Wolfson KC, the shadow Attorney General, to lead a legal review. The manifesto position survived 15 months. Amnesty International accused the party of "scapegoating people fleeing persecution" to strip civil rights protections from British citizens. Badenoch cited the Rochdale grooming gang ringleaders Adil Khan and Qari Abdul Rauf, who fought deportation using Article 8 right to family life, as justification. Rauf gave up his Pakistani citizenship to prevent removal and is still in Rochdale.
On immigration the manifesto promised a binding annual cap on work and family visas, monthly Rwanda flights and full commencement of the Illegal Migration Act 2023. At the October 2025 conference Badenoch unveiled a plan to deport 750,000 illegal migrants over five years using a new UK removals force modelled on US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, funded with more than £2 billion and equipped with facial recognition capabilities. The policy includes permanent asylum bars on illegal entrants, abolition of the Immigration Tribunal and a refugee definition restricted to those persecuted by foreign governments. Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp conceded that "there are some examples in the US where they have clearly used tactics that are too heavy handed, and people's families have been separated. We don't advocate that sort of approach." The manifesto framed immigration as an enforcement problem. The opposition policy reframes it as a removal operation.
On welfare the manifesto banked £12 billion of annual savings through tighter work capability assessments and PIP reforms for mental health conditions. By the 2025 conference the Conservatives had expanded that to £23 billion of non pensioner welfare cuts: restricting PIP and sickness top ups to UK citizens only, mandating face to face assessments, barring anxiety and ADHD from classification as severe conditions and banning what Shadow Work and Pensions Secretary Helen Whately called "sickfluencers." The PIP fraud rate is 1.4 percent. Whately repeatedly suggested widespread fraud without offering evidence. The manifesto's £12 billion was an austerity envelope. The opposition policy is an exclusion programme.
On the economy the manifesto promised £17 billion of tax cuts headlined by a 2p National Insurance reduction, abolition of self employed NI, Triple Lock Plus and stamp duty relief for first time buyers. At the October 2025 conference Stride signalled a £47 billion package of public spending cuts with abolition of stamp duty on all primary residences. Badenoch told supporters she wanted to be "the British Javier Milei," after Argentina's president who slashed state spending and attacked what he called woke ideology. The manifesto offered targeted relief. The opposition is rebuilding a Thatcherite tax and state architecture around an Argentine template.
On the NHS the manifesto committed unconditionally to free care at the point of use and 92,000 more nurses by 2030. As a leadership candidate Badenoch publicly floated insurance based alternatives and told an interviewer it might be that "the public decide the NHS should no longer be free at point of use." The manifesto sold the existing funding model. The leader has questioned whether to sell it at all.
The silence is as revealing as the shifts. The manifesto pledges on 2.5 percent defence spending by 2030, 8,000 additional police officers, mandatory whole life orders, the Advanced British Standard, mandatory National Service at 18, English devolution by 2030 and a Backing Drivers Bill have all gone unmentioned. Either the party still holds them and does not think them worth campaigning on, or it does not hold them and has not said so.
In January 2025 Badenoch admitted the Conservatives had "told the public what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later." She is now doing the same thing in reverse: telling Reform's public what they want to hear and hoping to work out whether she believes it later.
This is not a party adjusting under opposition discipline. This is a party chasing Reform UK by occupying the ground Reform already holds. The Conservatives have abandoned net zero, questioned the NHS funding model, escalated welfare cuts from £12 billion to £23 billion, moved from cap and Rwanda to an ICE style removal operation, promised to leave the ECHR, signalled £47 billion in spending cuts and lost 16 MPs to the party they are trying to outflank. They have left their commitments on defence, police, education and crime completely unmentioned. The 2024 manifesto is not being refined. It is being replaced. And it is being replaced with policies that Reform UK proposed first, articulated more clearly and delivers to a voter base that has already left the Conservative Party. Sixty four percent of the members who remain want a pact with the party that took their voters. Nearly half want to merge with it entirely. Whether the Conservative Party survives as an independent political force or becomes Reform UK's moderate wing is no longer a theoretical question. It is the question Badenoch has 18 months to answer before the next general election provides the verdict.