MAIL ON SUNDAY COMMENTARY: Forget the petty exemptions. Kemi and Farage must save us all from prosperous Starmerism

Instead of worrying about how many members it has, the Tory Party should start thinking – very urgently – about serving the millions of voters who have remained loyal through its recent bewildering series of personality changes and defections the wardrobe.

For while Conservatism is weak electorally, a dogmatic and incompetent Labor government is making a mess of the country’s leadership – with effects that, unfortunately, could take years to clear up.

Wealth creators and workers, parents, householders and, yes, pensioners, the calm and sensible, who make up the natural and sensible majority, are forced to watch as Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues make catastrophic mistakes, break promises and pursue insane utopian goals . , pausing only to offer each other peerages they previously claimed to be against them on principle.

At one end of this wobbling, hissing, screaming, political jalopy, these advocates of Net Zero and a sneaky return to the EU are plotting to ruin our economy and sabotage our hard-won national independence.

At the other end, a chancellor is gleefully destroying jobs and killing growth by further taxing labor and everything else that moves – the latest target, as reported in yesterday’s Daily Mail, being foreign holidays.

The high street is already showing signs of falling consumer spending – an unsurprising result of such an approach.

And where do all these taxes go? They are pocketed by already well-compensated public sector workforces, often with huge pension commitments.

Somehow it doesn’t seem to result in good schools, effective law enforcement, strong armed forces or a satisfactory NHS.

Predictably, a government that sees business as a source of taxation rather than a creator of wealth has begun to find that it has less wealth to tax. Eventually, he will run out of other people’s money.

Normally, this predictable event would signal the return of a Tory government with a basic understanding of economics to sort things out.

But as things stand, such a return is not inevitable.

July’s general election created a colossal number of Labor MPs as many Tory voters treated the poll as a referendum on the Conservative Party and thus inadvertently gave Starmer a much larger majority than his actual support in country. This does not have to go on indefinitely.

A recent poll showed Nigel Farage’s UK Reform on 22 per cent blowing down the Tories’ throats on 23 per cent, while Labor is fast becoming as unpopular as it deserves to be on 29 per cent .

This means that there is a large anti-labor majority in the country. But cut in this way, it could easily let Labor in again.

Our first-treat-the-post system has many merits, including the power to become a lead that the public no longer likes.

Anyone who doubts this should look at the proportional representation systems on the continent, where no one seems to get kicked out and it can take months to build a government so divided against itself that it can hardly nothing.

But when third parties become important, the British system can lead to unfair results, like the one in July.

Both Kemi Badenoch and Farage need to understand that their rivalry is no petty private popularity contest.

The public doesn’t care how many members it has. People care about the fate of a nation, its economy and the well-being of all.

Badenoch and Farage’s duty, far above party advantage, is to save the nation from Starmerism.

Everything they do, from now on, should be dedicated to this goal.