The year following his tribunate, Gaius Gracchus’s political enemies seized upon the unrest as a pretext to declare martial law and move against his supporters, ultimately resulting in his death. Besieged on the Aventine Hill, his last words were reportedly the wretched lament of “Whither shall I, unhappy wretch, betake myself? Whither shall I turn?”

It’s a question Kemi Badenoch must have asked herself. Her electoral prospects look slim: the Red Wall is shaping up as a Reform–Labour battleground, she has barely a foothold in Scotland, is under siege from the Lib Dems in affluent commuter towns, and faces a Reform challenge almost everywhere else.

However, a new report may offer her a way forward. Published by the Conservatives Together pressure group and titled “Rebuilding the Rural Vote”, the report urges the Tory PM to concentrate on securing and holding 70 key rural seats.

Endorsed by Grant Shapps, the report criticises the party for relying on “assumptions of inherited loyalty” and putting in “minimal effort” to maintain support in these areas. It attributes the party’s recent losses to its neglect of “less traditional” rural concerns, including housing affordability, environmental issues, and the selection of non-local candidates. In an op-ed, Shapps highlights the report’s recommendations of “the lack of modern campaigning techniques and the selection of non-local candidates”.

The slide of rural seats away from the Conservatives has been evident since 2019. Since Brexit and the shift to new agricultural and trade policies, around 8,000 farming businesses have shut down — a decline of over 5%, bringing the total to 141,000. This is compounded by concerns over Britain’s free-trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand, which will progressively open the UK market to increased imports of beef and sheep meat.

This erosion of rural support has begun to reshape the political map. Last year, the unthinkable happened: Labour surged ahead across a number of rural constituencies, and internal Green Party polling even predicted — correctly — that they could wrest two such seats from the Conservatives.

The shires are the heartland of the Tory Party. But at the last election, they were reduced to just 83 rural seats, compared to Labour’s 114, with the real winners proving to be the Liberal Democrats, who won 44. With his party’s success in the shires replicated at the last set of local elections, Ed Davey said the results showed the Lib Dems were now “the party of Middle England”.

The Tory Party retains rural strongholds in Yorkshire and the Humber and the South West. But even these may not be safe — both East Yorkshire and Greater Lincolnshire turned turquoise at the last set of local elections. Polling by More in Common found high levels of concern for climate change, and strong support for the Net Zero target, with over half supporting new onshore wind and solar farms being built in their local area. Given that Ed Miliband’s Net Zero plans will see huge swathes of Britain’s green and pleasant land turned over to green energy, that commitment is about to be sorely tested.

To retreat into the Blue Hedge may offer a temporary sanctuary, but it is no strategy for revival — only for survival. The Conservatives could hunker down in their remaining rural bastions, relying on cultural affinity and decades-old loyalties, but that would be a slow march into political irrelevance. The report’s recommendations — from fast-tracking local candidate selections to doubling down on hyper-local campaigning — risk accelerating the shift, recasting the party as little more than a regional outfit clinging to its last patches of safe turf. Without a broader, future-facing offer that resonates beyond the hedge, the party would be conceding the national stage to its rivals.

For the Conservatives to retreat into a narrower, rural base would mark a fundamental shift in the party’s function within British democracy. A party that once sought to be a national force would drift toward geographic — and therefore ideological — isolation, no longer aggregating the will of the nation but merely echoing the anxieties of its most loyal enclaves. Instead of acting as a bridge between governed and governors, it would become a feedback loop of ever-narrower concerns, ceding the national stage to those better able to reflect and respond to the complexities of the electorate. Just as Gaius Gracchus found himself encircled, lamenting his isolation on the Aventine, the Conservative Party risks becoming a stranded remnant in the political wilderness.

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Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot.

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