The Conservative Party lost 251 seats at the 2024 general election, its worst result in modern history, and came back with 121 MPs and little experience of opposition on its front bench. Kemi Badenoch inherited a parliamentary party smaller than at any time since 1906 and a membership already looking elsewhere. Within eighteen months four of those sitting MPs, Robert Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Andrew Rosindell and Danny Kruger, had crossed to Reform UK, and a wider group of former Conservative figures went with them. A YouGov survey of the remaining members found about half wanted Badenoch replaced before the next election and around two-thirds wanted a formal pact with Reform. At the October 2025 conference the shadow chancellor Mel Stride addressed a half-empty hall.
Badenoch's answer has not been to defend the 2024 manifesto but to discard it, and to replace it with harder positions on almost every front.
The manifesto had reaffirmed the legally binding 2050 net zero target. On 18 March 2025 Badenoch abandoned it, calling it "impossible" and "fantasy politics." Carbon Brief's factcheck found she offered no alternative target and no evidence for the claim that meeting net zero would bankrupt the country; the Climate Change Committee has put the net cost at about £100 billion over 25 years, and the CBI reported the net zero economy growing three times faster than the rest. By January 2026 she had gone further, calling for repeal of the Climate Change Act itself, the law her own party passed in 2019 and that, as a minister in 2022, she had praised for its "growth and revitalised communities."
On the European Convention on Human Rights the manifesto had promised to stay in, legislating only to ignore interim Rule 39 orders. On 4 October 2025 Badenoch made leaving the Convention and repealing the Human Rights Act official policy, backed by a legal review from the shadow attorney general Lord Wolfson KC. Amnesty International accused the party of scapegoating people fleeing persecution. Badenoch's example was the Rochdale grooming case, where two ringleaders used the Article 8 right to family life to resist deportation; one, Qari Abdul Rauf, renounced his Pakistani citizenship to block removal and remains in Rochdale.
The immigration offer hardened in the same direction. The manifesto had promised a binding visa cap, monthly Rwanda flights and full commencement of the Illegal Migration Act. At the October 2025 conference Badenoch instead announced a target of deporting 750,000 people over five years through a new Removals Force modelled on the US ICE agency, with its budget doubled, permanent asylum bars for illegal entrants, and the abolition of the Immigration Tribunal. Her own shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, conceded that some US tactics had separated families and said "we don't advocate that sort of approach."
Welfare followed. The manifesto had banked £12 billion of annual savings from tighter assessments; by the 2025 conference that had grown to £23 billion, including restricting PIP and sickness top-ups to UK citizens, barring anxiety and ADHD from counting as severe conditions, and a crackdown on what the shadow work and pensions secretary Helen Whately called "sickfluencers." The recorded PIP fraud rate is 1.4 per cent.
On the economy the manifesto had offered £17 billion of targeted tax cuts. At the 2025 conference Stride signalled £47 billion of spending cuts and the abolition of stamp duty on primary residences, and Badenoch said she wanted to be "the British Javier Milei," after the Argentine president who has slashed the state. On the NHS, where the manifesto committed unconditionally to free care at the point of use, Badenoch as a leadership candidate had floated insurance-based models and suggested the public might decide the service should no longer be free.
A set of manifesto pledges has simply gone unmentioned: 2.5 per cent defence spending by 2030, 8,000 more police, the Advanced British Standard, National Service at 18, English devolution. Whether the party still holds them and does not campaign on them, or has dropped them without saying so, the record does not show.
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." Since then the direction has been to occupy the ground Reform already holds, on net zero, the ECHR, deportation, welfare and the size of the state, while four sitting MPs have crossed to Reform and around two-thirds of the remaining members tell pollsters they want a pact with it. The next general election, due by 2029, will be the first test of whether that strategy keeps Conservative voters or hands them to the party the leadership is copying.