The Conservatives are embarking on another purge

With the Conservatives languishing at 19 per cent in the latest YouGov poll, Kemi Badenoch has decided she knows what her party's problem is. It's appeal is too broad.

So, according to both Conservative Home and the Spectator, a new purge of its membership and elected representatives is underway. 

Oliver Dean writes on Conservative Home:

In a move which properly began last Friday, Badenoch announced that only those who back the Conservatives’ commitment to scrapping net zero and leaving the ECHR will be approved as parliamentary candidates. Anyone who won’t fall in line will be blocked, or have the whip removed altogether.

And he has worked out why those 14 years of Conservative government were such a disaster. It was because of Liberal Democrat infiltration:

One of the most enduring puzzles of the 14 years of Conservative rule was that, too often, it would talk right but govern left. It would big itself up, but falter at close to every opportunity. 

The gap was not an accident. It was the product of a parliamentary party which had, over the years, taken in a number of MPs that were too wet for their own good. That had adopted their Liberal Democrat values and changed the colour of their rosettes to sky blue. 

It became so persistent a problem that one can only label them as an infestation amongst the Conservative benches.

"Infestation"? I think we're getting a glimpse into the seething darkness of the writer's unconscious there.

Meanwhile Steerpike in the Specatator is troubled that:

the likes of Amber Rudd, former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and former West Midlands mayor Andy Street remain in the party.

 I have lived to see the Conservative Party - the Conservative Party - putting ideological purity before the ability to win elections.

All this, of course, is good news for the Liberal Democrats, who gained dozens of seats from the Conservatives at the last election because people had come to see them as too extreme. Becoming more extreme isn't going to help the Tories fight back there.

Let's leave the final word to Adam Bienkov:

The thing about Kemi Badenoch's purge of any Conservative member to the left of Enoch Powell is that she's so close to a Tory revival if she only realised it. All she needs to do is to lead a party that is not obviously mad and wait for Reform to crumble, but she can't even manage that

— Adam Bienkov (@adambienkov.bsky.social) 14 July 2026 at 09:44