The Tory failure to deliver easily-promised decreases in immigration has left the party’s right flank consistently exposed for the last 14 years, allowing Nigel Farage’s Reform UK to capture large parts of the usual Conservative base. In this leadership race, the commitment and record of each candidate on reducing immigration may be the most important single element of their CV. The membership will be unforgiving to those who show what they perceive as mealy-mouthed commitments to reducing immigration — or, for that matter, a weak record in office.

Regardless of what attracted them to other parties, the voters who left the Conservatives — in whatever direction — were driven primarily by the same fundamental failure. Not that Rishi Sunak’s party was too left-wing or too right-wing, but that there was too large a difference between its pledges and its actions. The Conservatives’ primary problems in government were simply a competency crisis and an inability to keep promises.

But this betrayal stretches far beyond 2019, as James Vitali has pointed out. ‘Over the past fourteen years,’ he writes, ‘the Party has pledged to the public that it would reduce the size of the state, grip immigration, roll back identity politics, drive up productivity and secure better standards of living for everyone in our United Kingdom. It has failed on each one of these commitments.’

As a key ally of Boris Johnson, a darling of Brexit and a self-described ‘friend’ of Nigel Farage, it would be reasonable to assume that Patel would have a natural appeal to the right of the party, those who are tacking towards Reform rather than away. But it is a measure of how important the immigration credentials of the next leader are that her campaign is, essentially, dead in the water already. In this case, it is by the consequences of her own actions.

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Tom Jones writes at The Potemkin Village Idiot.

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