The storm gathers. The darkening clouds of Labour’s rule loom on the horizon, and yet those entrusted with the defence of Britain’s sovereignty, prosperity, and freedoms stand paralysed, mouths agape, devoid of strategy, devoid of will. Kemi Badenoch is not the problem—she is merely the latest, most visible symptom of a party that has surrendered before the fight has even begun.
Giles Dilnot, writing in Conservative Home, offers excuses for this dereliction of duty. He whispers soothing words to the weary faithful: “Patience,” he implores. “Do not announce policy too soon, lest the enemy steal it or take time to attack it.” What wretched cowardice is this? Does he not see that Labour does not need to steal Conservative policies? Labour will not repeal Net Zero mandates. Labour will not abandon the Refugee Convention. Labour will not dismantle the bureaucratic empire of DEI. Labour will not relinquish its grip on the courts, on the regulators, on the permanent state. Why would they? They are in command. They hold the field, and the so-called Conservative Party is in abject retreat.
The defining failures of the past two decades are plain to any who still possess the courage to see. Our economy is lifeless beneath the weight of punishing taxation, inflicted not by Labour, but by supposed Conservatives. Our justice system serves not the people, but the judges, who wield international law against the will of Parliament. Our borders remain open because those in power would rather appease foreign courts than defend British sovereignty.
And hanging over all, like a great, suffocating shroud, is the grandest folly of them all: the Net Zero doctrine. Our national grid is on the brink of collapse, not by accident, but by design. The Conservative Party, in its eagerness to be seen as “modern,” “progressive,” and “forward-thinking,” has shackled the nation to an energy policy dictated not by engineers or economists, but by activists and bureaucrats. We have dismantled the very infrastructure that kept Britain moving—replacing it with a fantasy built upon the unreliable whims of wind and sun.
Nothing can be built because of the NIMBY veto. Nothing can be done because of unaccountable judges. And now, nothing can be powered because we have abandoned the sources of energy that built this nation. We were once a land of steel, of coal, of enterprise and industry. Now we are a land of flickering lights and rolling blackouts, governed by those who believe wind turbines and solar panels will fuel the economic might of the future. It is a madness that would be laughable were it not so ruinous.
The only remedy is a full-scale reversal of Blair’s constitutional vandalism and the ideological capture that has ensnared our institutions. Parliament must once again be supreme over foreign courts, over quangos, over bureaucratic inertia. The apparatus of state must be torn down and rebuilt—not merely reformed, not tinkered with, but purged of the rot that has taken hold.
Yet we are told to wait. We are told that the time is not right, that policy must remain a secret until the last moment. It is not simply Badenoch’s failure, but the failure of the entire Conservative machine—a party that has become a hollowed-out shell, unable to articulate what it believes, let alone act upon it.
And so, the people turn elsewhere. They look to Reform, a party whose policies may be crude, whose platform may be incomplete, but which at least dares to stand for something. It has a direction, however ill-defined. The Conservatives, by contrast, are utterly adrift.
Labour is not failing because it lacks competence; it is failing because it represents a dying order. A major political realignment is coming, the unfinished business of Brexit, the long-awaited reckoning for those who have squandered Britain’s sovereignty and prosperity. There is a race to define what comes next, and the British people will not wait another four years for the Conservative Party to decide whether it intends to lead or to perish.
The time for silence has passed. The time for cowardice has passed. This is not the moment for a timid rearguard action, for another round of technocratic tinkering. It is the hour of decision. The party must stand and fight—or be swept into the dustbin of history, where all who lack conviction eventually belong.
Verbal Alchemy 