Kemi Badenoch's European nightmare

A while ago, this column advised readers to bet on the Conservatives winning the most seats at Britain's next general election. The odds at the time were 13/2. Now? 3/1, and shortening. Don't mention it.

Their leader Kemi Badenoch might soon be overpriced -- more on which in a minute -- but underpricing her was the real offence. It should have been obvious that people would tire of big government under Labour. Voters want tax cuts even at the expense of public services, and have done for a year. This is politics at its most thermostatic: the ruling idea sets off a counter-reaction. (Notice that "austerity" has not been cited as the national ill for a while.) The Tories' poll rating is still in the sewer but it might just lag their better, underlying numbers on economic trust.

So, what's all this about overcorrection? Well, one issue has undone talented Conservatives before: Europe. There is reason to think it shall again.

Scarcely one voter in three believes it was right to leave the EU. That figure has not moved for four years. A plurality favours much closer co-operation with the bloc, even if that entails accepting its rules. Total re-entry would be provocative. But imagine that Andy Burnham offers a fudge, such as single market membership. A fragmented left would at once consolidate behind Labour. The right would have to defend an unpopular status quo, citing -- what? -- Britain's freedom to set lighter AI rules than Brussels, just as voters come to fear AI. If indeed Burnham did clinch a half-in deal with the EU, the Tories seem set to promise to reverse it in office. Could anything be sillier?

Foreign affairs never decided an election, Tories will argue. But the UK-EU relationship is different. It is inseparable from economic management, which is the paramount issue for voters. Some of the business leaders now despairing of Labour would endorse the single market.

Also, in two anglophone democracies of late, Canada and Australia, conservatives have lost winnable elections due to their association with the American right. That is, a foreign entity. A man of Burnham's demagogic gifts can frame Badenoch's anti-EU line as American servility. She is not Maga, no, but she is not not Maga. She made her name in US-flavoured culture debates. She got into a mess over the Iran war, reflexively backing America until that became untenable, at which point she backed off with a clumsiness that was hard to watch. If she defends pure Brexit, for the sake of US trade and perhaps AI frontier-model access, Labour should rejoice.

Britain has settled into a routine that should trouble Badenoch. Labour proposes some accommodation with the EU, the right alleges betrayal and . . . almost no one cares. Last week, Burnham outdid all the post-2016 prime ministers in calling Brexit a mistake that should at least be softened. His poll lead held. The Tories are right that voters don't think much about the issue, but that means Burnham can do a lot without risk. Forget the next parliament. The time to torture the Tories is now. He could trade single-market access for rule-acceptance, sector by sector, Swiss-style, and dare them to oppose it. Their political prize for doing so would be, what exactly? A better third or fourth position in long-lost Red Wall seats?

And this is just the politics. The larger problem with the status quo is that it is bad in practice. Badenoch's most appealing trait is a sort of engineer's innocence. She seems to care about getting to (what she sees as) the right answer on a given subject. Most politicians let electoral calculation, tribal feeling or ideological priors muddle the cold act of problem-solving.

In private moments, the engineer in her must ask what the hardest of all possible Brexits has achieved. Essentially no European democracy chooses to be as cut off from the EU as Britain. Even Turkey is in the customs union. Switzerland, where independence is the national ethos, is three decades into a rolling negotiation with Brussels, in which it mostly gives ground. Norway, with mineral wealth galore, is in the Schengen visa-free zone. Most of the western Balkan states have candidate status.

You have to think of the EU in terms of general relativity: as a mass that bends space-time around it, forcing smaller entities into its orbit. Britain won't resist the gravitation indefinitely, because it can't. This is why the subject of Europe never goes away here. A place in the middle-to-outer orbit is destined to materialise. The question is whether Badenoch confronts it now, at a time of personal strength, or under duress later, when the untenability of hard Brexit becomes plain.

As the election approaches, she will have a voter in mind: an upper-middle earner who feels fleeced under a Labour government but recoils from Nigel Farage. That person might vote for a Conservative platform that offers no particular thaw with the EU. But not one that proposes to reverse an ongoing thaw. It would reek too much of dogma, of wilful disruptiveness.

If Badenoch is shrewd, she will let Burnham do the hard work of easing Brexit, then accept it as a fait accompli at the election, and win on the tax burden instead. If not? If she defends the status quo, or what would then be the status quo ante? Sell the bet at 2/1.