How Kemi Badenoch’s Tories can rebuild Britain

The Conservatives finally have a new leader. But Kemi Badenoch must be under no illusions: after the disastrous July election, we have a mountain to climb and a revolution to undo. But we can remain hopeful, because we have been here before – and found a way out.

In 1974, the Conservative prime minister Edward Heath, having taken Britain into Europe, blown up the economy and been humiliated by the miners, was defeated by Labour’s Harold Wilson. The future of the Tory party was in doubt. Surveying the wreckage, Sir Keith Joseph, who had served in Heath’s cabinet, had a revelation: ‘I had thought I was a Conservative, but now see that I was not really one at all’.

Joseph’s eyes were opened primarily by reading the Anglo-Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek, who converted him from the post-War Keynesian consensus to free-market economics. And Joseph, in turn, converted Margaret Thatcher, who replaced Heath as Conservative leader in 1975.