The latest official estimates show that the population of England and Wales rose by 706,900 from mid-2023 to mid-2024.

That’s the second highest rise on record (the highest was the previous year and the third highest the year before that). Needless to say, almost all of the increase is due to net immigration.

On the same day as the ONS data release, the Home Office confirmed that 898 migrants arrived on small boats, which, as Guido Fawkes points out, pushes the running total for 2025 past the 25,000 mark.

Unsurprisingly, Nigel Farage is all over these figures, but, as usual, the Conservative response has been underwhelming. It’s not that the Tories’ best communicators haven’t spoken out. Examples include Robert Jenrick on the small boats, Neil O’Brien on the open borders judiciary, and Katie Lam on the issue of indefinite leave to remain. That last one is especially urgent: unless we act fast to curtail the entitlements that migrants can access from the welfare state, the burden on taxpayers will be crippling and permanent.

The points are well made, but as always the message is undermined by the Conservatives’ record in government. After all, there’s a reason why the post-Covid surge in immigration is called the Boriswave. Its unprecedented scale is the direct result of the decisions taken since 2019 by Boris Johnson and his successors.

But what can Kemi Badenoch — out of power and barely clinging on as Leader of the Opposition — do about it now? Hasn’t she already admitted that mistakes were made? Yes, but following last year’s landslide defeat she had to say something and so far it’s no more than the minimum.

Still to come is her review of British membership of the European Convention on Human Rights — the result of which is expected to be released at the party conference. But even if she does recommend withdrawal, it wasn’t the ECHR that caused most of the Boriswave, but the unforced errors of her predecessors.

Badenoch should not imagine that the loss of two out of every three blue seats in 2024 represents a settling of accounts with the voters who trusted the Tories in 2019. That would be to confuse punishment with reconciliation. To achieve the latter, the Tories need to make amends. The most useful thing they could do right now is work out how they went from promising to take back control of Britain’s borders to unleashing the most extreme wave of immigration in modern British history — a so far incomprehensible course of events.

This may sound like a public inquiry, but that’s not the intent. There’d be no need for lawyers, quasi-judicial procedures and outrageous expenses. Nor would the object be to extract Blair-style tear-streaked apologies. Rather, the sole plan would be to understand what went wrong — in the hope of history not repeating itself.

As a party exercise, there’d be no summoning of civil servants, but Tory prime ministers, ministers and advisors who were in the room when the key decisions were being made would be invited to participate. Would the biggest names like Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak show up? I don’t know, but if they want a serious role in the future of the party then they should be judged on how seriously they take their responsibility for the past.

As for Kemi Badenoch, would she be willing to take the risk of reopening old wounds and possibly embarrassing current colleagues? Perhaps not, but the point about truth and reconciliation is that it comes at a cost.

If the Tories want to draw a line under their 14 years in government, then it needs to cut deep.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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