Visitors to the annual conference of Britain’s Conservative Party in Manchester, England, were greeted this week by an exhibit of memorable outfits worn by Margaret Thatcher, an icon of the right who served as prime minister from 1979 to 1990. There were old letters from her and a gauzy film about her improbable rise to party leader in 1975.
It was all meant to celebrate the 100th anniversary of Mrs. Thatcher’s birth this month. But it became an apt metaphor for her exhausted, eclipsed party. The Conservatives these days feel like they are history.
Sixteen months after being swept out of power by the Labour Party, the Tories trail not only Labour in the polls but also a surging anti-immigrant party, Reform U.K., which comfortably leads the polls. In a recent estimate of how they would fare in an election, the Conservatives were projected to end up as the fourth-largest party in Parliament, behind even the Liberal Democrats.
Their only consolations are that the Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, is also slumping badly, and that Britain is not likely to face a general election until 2029. The Conservatives’ embattled leader, Kemi Badenoch, made much of Mr. Starmer’s struggles in her speech at the conference on Wednesday.
“My goodness, they have made a hell of a mess,” she declared of Labour, saying it had delivered a “doom loop” of low growth and higher taxes. “Never in the field of human history have so many been let down by so few.”
But Ms. Badenoch faces a quandary in trying to restore her party’s credibility while fending off Reform’s threat from the right. She made a familiar pitch that the Conservatives were the party of fiscal responsibility, in contrast to the pie-in-the-sky promises of Reform and the limp, debt-swelling performance of the Labour government.
In her most eye-catching announcement, Ms. Badenoch proposed to abolish “stamp duty,” a tax Britons pay when they buy homes above a certain price. But she also proclaimed a new “golden rule”: Half of every pound saved by her government from lower spending would go toward cutting the deficit; the other half would go to reducing taxes or to other measures to stimulate growth.
The problem, analysts said, is that this message sounds a lot like the austerity policy pursued by a previous Conservative prime minister, David Cameron, in the 2010s. Voters who have abandoned the Tories for Reform often lean to the left on economic issues, even as they are very right wing on immigration. A message of economic prudence, analysts said, would not resonate with them.
“Are there any voters left in the segment that the Conservatives are targeting?” said Jill Rutter, a senior fellow at U.K. in a Changing Europe, a research group. “For a party that views itself as a natural party of government, it is a long way from ever getting back into power.”
In Manchester, the symptoms of Tory distress were everywhere. Attendance at the conference was sparse. Twenty Conservative local councilors defected to Reform, a mini-exodus that led Reform’s leader, Nigel Farage, to gleefully declare on social media, “The Conservative Party is finished.”
So deep are the Tories’ woes that political analysts speak openly about the death of a party that has governed Britain for roughly two-thirds of the party’s existence, which dates to 1834. Some ask whether Reform will engineer a takeover of the Conservatives, a scenario that both Ms. Badenoch and Mr. Farage dismiss.
Immigration is another Achilles’ heel. Reform has turned a surge in migration in the years after Brexit against the Conservatives, branding it a “Boriswave,” after the prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson. Mr. Farage has vowed to deport up to 600,000 undocumented migrants and require even people who have received a right to residency in Britain to apply for new visas.
While Ms. Badenoch trumpeted her party’s plans to deport 150,000 people a year with a new authority, modeled on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency in the United States, other party leaders expressed remorse for the surge in arrivals under previous Tory governments.
“It was a mistake; it should never have been allowed to happen,” said Chris Philp, a senior Conservative whose brief includes immigration policy. “And under new leadership, we pledge it will never happen again.”
Ms. Badenoch’s future as leader has been in doubt almost since she was elected last November. But as with Mr. Starmer, who entered his party’s conference last week under a cloud, Ms. Badenoch has survived to fight another day — or in her case, until local elections in May, when analysts say another heavy defeat for the Tories would probably prompt a leadership challenge.
Perhaps she can take comfort from the nostalgia about Mrs. Thatcher that pervaded the party’s meeting. The short film about the woman who become known as the “Iron Lady” pointed out that after Mrs. Thatcher knocked out Edward Heath in 1975, she endured a dismal first 12 months as party leader.
Edward Phillips, a Conservative local councilor from Ipswich who watched the film, said it suggested that today’s Tories should give Ms. Badenoch more time to prove herself. But he added that there were limits to the historical precedent.
“This isn’t the 1980s anymore,” Mr. Phillips said. “You can’t take the policies of the 1980s and put them into the 2020s. Kemi has to develop policies that are right for the 2020s.”
Mark Landler is the London bureau chief of The Times, covering the United Kingdom, as well as American foreign policy in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. He has been a journalist for more than three decades.
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