After Keir Starmer’s notable speech on immigration, I suggested he was teeing up for “a command performance in the traditional ritual suicide of a British political consensus: opening the Overton Window real wide and then hurling oneself out of it.”

Today, Leader of the Opposition Kemi Badenoch gave a wide-ranging speech on lawfare. She addressed mounting concerns over how a growing thicket of legal commitments and procedures is obstructing — and potentially endangering — democratic government. But is she doing the same thing?

Despite saying that the UK needs “not just words — change”, the closest the Tory leader came to an explicit commitment on the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) was saying: “I do believe that we will likely need to leave”. As per the standard operating procedure of this leadership, the actual substance of this agenda will have to wait for a review.

That is not, in itself, indefensible. The path to quitting the Convention is strewn with landmines, and it is perfectly sensible to want to know what they all are.

But while Badenoch has explicitly commissioned a review on how to leave (or at least, the consequences of leaving), the man she has asked to lead it, Lord Wolfson, is an explicit opponent of doing so. He will doubtless be diligent, but it seems very likely that his eventual report will make life harder, not easier, for any Conservative leader trying to extricate Britain from the ECHR.

Perhaps that is the point. Using reviews to put off difficult decisions is by now an historic tradition in Westminster. It was a recurring trope in Yes, Minister in the Eighties. And that itself was inspired by the famous diaries of Richard Crossman, a Cabinet minister under Harold Wilson and later editor of the New Statesman, whose diaries were published in the Sixties.

As leader, Badenoch is in a very difficult position. She won last year’s contest by explicitly refusing to make any policy commitments; this not only allowed people to project their preferred politics onto her, but also let her consolidate the Left of the party after James Cleverly got knocked out, leaving her as the anti-Robert Jenrick choice.

Tactically effective as that approach was, however, it has real drawbacks now. Many of her supporters rowed in behind her precisely because they didn’t like the Shadow Justice Secretary’s position on things like the ECHR. Had Jenrick won, he could at least have claimed a mandate for the policy changes he campaigned on. Conversely, none of Badenoch’s backers made any such commitment because she never asked them to.

In theory, if Wolfson has been or can be won over, a review by a learned sceptic could be a useful instrument for shifting the balance of opinion inside the party. But if not, it risks leaving Badenoch alienated from both wings of Tory opinion. Worse, it could reduce her constitutional programme to “just words”.

Such moments mark a specific point in the death of a consensus. The situation is now getting so untenable that politicians are forced to rhetorically concede the premises of those demanding change. In reality, that means the country cannot control immigration. But there is still too much elite or institutional resistance to delivering change that the person wanting to lead the charge is left impotent.

The Conservatives have been here before. It was clear in the Seventies that the post-war settlement was failing, but the Tories’ early attempt to take on the power of the trades unions ended in humiliating defeat. As Phil Tinline explained in his history of how consensuses die, both they and the nation were too in thrall to the old taboo against unemployment to do what was necessary to win.

Is Badenoch really ready for the sheer scale of institutional power with which she’s picking a fight? It’s not clear she’s thought through the depth of feeling around our absurdly expansive interpretation of “the rule of law”. If she hasn’t, the woman hailed as the next Margaret Thatcher may end up instead the next Edward Heath.

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Henry Hill is Deputy Editor of ConservativeHome.

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