Report: Badenoch is trying to match Farage step for step – but it’s a dance of death for the Tories | Polly Toynbee

A report from The Guardian — Opinion focuses on “Report: Badenoch is trying to match Farage step for step – but it’s a dance of death for the Tories | Polly Toynbee” and sets out the main development contained in the supplied source material.

The available account reports that at conference here in Birmingham I’ve found a growing swell of opposition to the leader – and a vision of the Conservative party to come You can walk all the way from Somerset to Sussex without crossing a Tory-run constituency, if you wish. The report also notes that You could also travel through each of the counties of Wiltshire, Hampshire, Dorset and Surrey without setting foot in Tory lands. They are now mainly Liberal Democrat, and there’s not one Tory MP in all of Oxfordshire. Is Kemi Badenoch bothered? Everything she does seems cleverly designed to keep those places lost to her forever as she woos Reform voters, unsuccessfully. The more she leans right, the more she repels home counties moderates. Those Reform voters are not coming back, psephologists say. Without reclaiming the old “blue wall”, there is no hope, ever, of a Tory majority, say both profs Tim Bale and Rob Ford and just about every political authority you care to ask. Polly Toynbee is a Guardian columnist

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