Badenoch last leader of the Conservatives as a viable party of government?
Badenoch, the combative Conservative leader.
In their worst-ever by-election result, the Tories lost more than 75% of voters who backed them in the 2024 general election. They won less than 2% of the vote, and lost the deposit they paid to enter the contest.
The 2024 general election was the Conservatives’ worst result in their almost 200-year existence, but it was also the biggest rejection of a sitting government in British electoral history, the largest fall in vote share since the Great Reform Act of 1832 shaped the modern electoral system.
0Enoch Powell, almost three decades before Margaret Thatcher, Powell advocated an aggressive restructuring of Britain’s economy through privatization of national industries, devotion to free trade, and control of the money supply. He opposed Britain joining Europe, long before it did so, and he was vehemently anti-immigration.
These three issues would remake the party — and ultimately destroy it.
Like Powell, Thatcher was a devotee of the economist Friedrich Hayek.
She read The Road to Serfdom at university and famously thumped a copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty onto the table at a policy meeting, declaring: “This is what we believe”.
Will Dunn Bloomberg April 24, 2026
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