A toxic tinge of Trumpism has infected the Tories in Birmingham – and their would-be leaders

Editorial: The two frontrunners for the Conservative leadership are locked in a bid to out-Trump each other – but if the party is ever to be in government again, it must be guided back to the sensible centre ground

Conservative Party leadership contenders Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch (PA)

Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch, the frontrunners in the Conservative leadership contest, both appear to be flirting with Trumpism in the hope of appealing to party members. Mr Jenrick has claimed that British special forces are “killing, rather than capturing, terrorists because our lawyers tell us that if they are caught, the European Court will set them free”.

He claims that he is merely repeating what Ben Wallace, the former defence secretary, has said – but if so, he is saying it in such a simplified and extreme form as to be unrecognisable. We would describe his comment as wild and irresponsible if we did not think that it was deliberate and irresponsible. It further marks the coarse Trumpification of a once moderate and centrist politician.

Ms Badenoch, too, has yielded to populist politics. Having made the sensible point that withdrawing from the European Court of Human Rights is not a magic solution to immigration policy, she has said she does not rule it out. Similarly, she has half-accepted setting a cap on immigration numbers, suggesting that she feels that she has to match Mr Jenrick’s demagoguery in order to stay in contention.

We are nowhere near suffering from full-blown Trumpian disorder yet in British politics, thank goodness. The former and possibly future US president is still testing new levels of pure invention, conspiracy theory and vitriol without apparent adverse effects on his electoral support.

All the evidence suggests that his kind of reality-detached politics would be unpopular in Britain, but Mr Jenrick and Ms Badenoch seem to think that a form of politics that is at least semi-detached from reality is what is needed to appeal to Conservative members – who have the final say in the party’s leadership election.

We trust that whoever wins the contest has the wit to recognise that winning an election among a tiny, unrepresentative subset of the electorate is very different from winning a general election. There has always been an element of cynicism in successful electoral politics. In the United States, candidates say one thing to win the primaries and something slightly different in the general election.

Here, Sir Keir Starmer provided a vivid case study in saying one thing to win the party and something else to win the country. We assume that Mr Jenrick and Ms Badenoch intend to do something similar – unlike Liz Truss, who sold the party members a “fairytale” and then failed to adapt it to reality when she won.

The evidence so far is mixed, but we have gained the impression that Ms Badenoch is the more authentic of the two leading candidates. She has some star quality and a clearer sense of who she is and what she believes, even if, for someone who presents herself as a straight talker, she has to spend a surprising amount of time explaining that she did not mean what everyone thought she meant.

If she, or Mr Jenrick, or either of the other two candidates, who may yet pull off an upset win, wants a guide back to the sensible centre ground after their away day with Trumpian memes, they could do worse than to study Jesse Norman’s elegant essay published in The Independent.

Mr Norman, the MP for Hereford and South Herefordshire and a former minister, warns the party that it has no automatic right to survive, let alone to be one of the two largest parties. Indeed, the extent to which the Tories in Birmingham are oblivious to the threat from the Liberal Democrats ought to worry the leadership candidates more than it seems to.

Mr Norman sets out “one useful definition of a conservative” as being “someone who regards institutions as wiser than individuals”. This is a style of politics that has become quite alien to the modern Conservative Party. As he says, it means “setting one’s face against referendums… a settled disposition to curb the creeping presidentialism of the office of prime minister… and respecting the civil service and a free press”.

Nothing could be more unlike the tinge of Trumpism that has infected the Tories in Birmingham. Nothing could be more essential to the party winning back those centre-minded, sensible-minded voters that it needs if it is ever to be in government again.