Britain’s Conservatives crashed last year to their worst-ever general election defeat. Then things got worse. Despite installing a young leader, Kemi Badenoch, touted as an original thinker, and the Labour government’s fumbled first year in office, the Tories are a distant third in the polls. Nigel Farage’s nationalist Reform UK has usurped their role as the main party of the right. Badenoch’s first party conference speech did conclude with a worthwhile pledge: to scrap stamp duty on primary residences. But her party has a long way to go to become the reasonable, credible opposition that Britain sorely needs. Much of her emerging platform runs in the wrong direction.

Badenoch said she would take time to reflect before unveiling her policies. Reform’s surging poll performance and the questions swirling around her own leadership have forced her to rush out several proposals that appear half-baked. Talk of creating a US-style “removals force” to deport from the UK 150,000 immigrants a year who do not have a right to remain raises questions over whether Britons, whatever they feel about migration, would really want such a thing, even if it were realistic.

Leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, rather than pushing to reform it, would place Britain alongside Russia or Belarus, and pose a risk to the settlement in Northern Ireland. Repealing the 2008 Climate Change Act would be a betrayal of the leadership the UK, and the Tories, have shown on the green transition, and the jobs and investment it has generated.