Rishi Sunak

Peter Hutchison, Agence France-Presse

At the UK Conservatives’ first annual gathering out of power in 15 years, activists put on a brave face as the party adjusts to life in opposition and grapples over its future. “It feels to me like a mass therapy session,” party member Peter Young, 60, said of the four-day gathering in Birmingham, central England. “We’re all getting together and saying, ‘Mea culpa’. It’s not uplifting,” he said, reflecting on the Tories’ historic defeat to Labour in July’s general election. The Conservatives were dumped out of power after 14 years and reduced to just 121 seats in the 650-seat parliament — the smallest number in their history. The conference is the Conservatives’ first in opposition since 2009 — and it shows.  Crowds feel on the low side and gone are the masses of lobbyists and corporations who now have more to gain from attending Labour’s version.

“This time, it’s members talking to each other, networking, getting to know each other, supporting each other, discussing policy, discussing ideas, the future of the party,” said Tory member Laura Weldon, 39. “And that’s really important and really nice. It’s not depressing at all. It’s actually quite a good laugh.” Injecting life into the event, which ends on Wednesday, is a four-way battle over who will succeed ex-prime minister Rishi Sunak as party leader.  Frontrunner Robert Jenrick, Kemi Badenoch, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat are all addressing delegates. “Obviously there’s a lot of disappointment that we didn’t win the general election,” said 21-year-old Conservative activist Dillon Hughes, clutching a pro-Badenoch poster. “But I think with the leadership contest... it’s absolutely vital that we do get a leader that is going to be strong and very confident to move the party forward in a new direction.” The party faces a dilemma: should it focus on winning back voters who defected to Nigel Farage’s hard-right Reform UK party or aim to regain the support of those who switched to the centrist Liberal Democrats? “I think Reform is a threat,” said Young, adding that the Conservatives “need to be stronger about what they intend to do about some of the main issues that Reform have had the courage to identify”.

Cleverly, a former home secretary and foreign secretary, has the support of Shelagh Lee, a 65-year-old activist from Hampshire in southern England.  She believes he is best placed to bring together a party that has delivered five party leaders and prime ministers since 2016, including three in little over three months in 2022. “It’s obvious that he is a unifier,” said Lee, praising Cleverly’s ministerial experience.Conservative MPs will vote next week to determine the final two candidates. Party members will then select the winner in a ballot that closes at the end of October. Britain’s new opposition leader -- and the person tasked with reuniting the notoriously fractious party and making it electable again — will be announced on November 2. The party as a whole has drifted rightwards in the years since the 2016 Brexit vote, but Badenoch and Jenrick are seen as the more right-wing of the candidates, with Cleverly and Tugendhat nearer the centre. “I think you’d be hard pressed to suggest that any of the candidates are suggesting a return to the centre ground, except as they define it, which curiously enough seems to be pretty right wing,” said Tim Bale, politics professor at Queen Mary University of London. “It’s more a battle for which variety of Thatcherite economics and populist culture war is going to get the nod from members.” Badenoch is seen as Jenrick’s closest challenger, however she endured a disastrous start to conference week when she had to row back from comments appearing to criticise maternity pay as “excessive”.  “Every conservative leadership candidate has to basically achieve a kind of two-step move,” said Robert Ford, politics professor at the University of Manchester. “They need to be as right wing as possible in order to prevail with the membership, but not so right wing that they become unacceptable to their fellow MPs. “The question becomes: which of these do we think are actual true believers, and which of them are being strategic and are actually more flexible and willing to adjust course once they actually secure office.”