If Kemi Badenoch wonders why her party conference looks and feels like a sideshow, perhaps she should reflect on the Conservatives’ 14 years in power
I believe it is good practice as a columnist to keep track of when you have been wrong, and the thing I have got most emphatically wrong over the past few years is the Conservative party’s prospects. I was convinced that the party that still won elections despite the chaos and instability of Brexit, not to mention the calamities of austerity, could get away with anything. I even believed that if it lost power, as it did last year, the risk of a Tory restoration was still very high.
What I did not foresee was the most successful political party in the democratic world, by some measures, coming so close to extinction this quickly. As the Tory party conference gets under way in Manchester, with rumours abounding over the weekend about diminished attendance, the polling increasingly suggests that Britain’s next general election will be a contest between Labour and Reform. That is quite the turnaround for Britain’s “natural party of government”.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist