Death of the centre right: Across western democracies, populists are ravaging traditional conservatives

Britain’s Tories are not alone. Sam Freedman examines how the new right turned against managers, civil servants and professionals

- Sam Freedman

Without Googling can you name the shadow secretaries for defence, health and transport?

If you got all three you've done better than almost all the MPs I've asked in recent weeks. Several baffled Labour backbenchers didn't even know who they were once I'd revealed the names. (It's James Cartlidge, Edward Argar and Gareth Bacon, if you're wondering).

The Conservative party has been irrelevant before and recovered. There weren’t many household names in William Hague’s 1997 cabinet, either. But back then they were up against a Labour party with a charismatic leader, record levels of approval, a stonking poll lead and a thriving economy.

Now they're facing a government already at Rishi Sunak levels of popularity and suffering their own poll slump. And yet in the recent local elections the Tories secured an equivalent national vote share of 15%. It is Reform, and the Liberal Democrats, benefiting from discontent with the government.

It's probably of little solace to Kemi Badenoch that her fate is mirrored around the world. Everywhere the centre-right is dead or dying.

Just two G20 countries are led by representatives of their traditional centre-right parties: Friedrich Merz of Germany and Shigeru Ishiba of Japan. Neither has a majority and Merz has already fallen behind the radical right AfD in some polls. Of course Donald Trump is technically a Republican, but his takeover of the party has changed it completely. He and his entourage of comic-book villains are more extreme than most of Europe's radical right parties.

In some countries, such as Canada and Australia, the traditional centre-right party at least remains the main opposition, but in many, including France, Italy and Austria, they've been blown away by parties to their right. Ireland is now the only European country without a radical right party threatening the centre.