The signs The fact that Kemi Badenoch, who was elected leader of the British Conservatives on November 2nd, was operating on a different level than her rivals came at the party conference in October. While they engaged in cheesy selfies and cheesier merchandise, their team published a 22,000-word pamphlet called “Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class.” It contained a far-reaching theory that linked Ms. Badenoch's favorite issue, tackling progressive identity politics, with an idea circulating on the Tory right: that the “Blob”, a solid nexus of Liberal pressure groups, is thwarting the policies of Conservative governments.

This “new bureaucratic class,” as Ms. Badenoch calls it, includes private sector compliance lawyers, human resources staff, university administrators, NGO Workers and green lobbyists. They owe their comfortable living as a middle class to the demand for ever greater government regulation at the expense of the “old middle class” of entrepreneurs. And this regulation is responsible for an astonishing array of Britain's ills: low growth, high taxes, high immigration, social polarization, low student attainment, a dilapidated health service and the weakening of the nation-state itself. The new bureaucratic class, the authors wrote, is one “new left, based not primarily on nationalization and private sector unions, but on ever greater social and economic control.” It was incumbent upon the Tories to oppose them.