Why has the Tory party abandoned the centre-right*? This is the question posed by what Lewis Goodall has called the "Powellization" of the party. When Robert Jenrick echoed Enoch Powell by speaking of us "importing hundreds of thousands of people from alien cultures" Badenoch's response was to defend him, in contrast to Ted Heath immediately sacking Powell in 1968.

But we needn't go back so far to see how Badenoch differs from previous Tories. In 1974 Keith Joseph spoke of "the balance of our human stock" being "threatened". That killed his bid to be leader of the party. And in 2001 MP John Townend made similar remarks to Jenrick's, but was denounced by leader William Hague. There has always been at least an undertow of racism in the Tories (Theresa May called them the "nasty party" for a reason) but its leaders have tried to keep a lid on it. In the 80s and 90s they were helped in this by the fact that immigration was low - mass unemployment being the most effective immigration control the Tories have found.

Now, however, the mask is off. As Goodall writes:

The thinking of the Conservative Party has moved away from any form of liberalism, to a deep and overwhelming nativism and cultural conservatism.

But why has the centre-right vanished as a significant force?

It's not sufficient to claim that the Tories have been radicalized by social media. Those of us who remember the vicious homophobia, sexism and class hatred of the Sun in the 1980s know that the media was never an oasis of liberal civility. It's just that there were elements in the Tory party who were uncomfortable with that.

Nor is it enough to point to Johnson's withdrawal of the whip in 2019 from 21 centre-right MPs such as Kenneth Clarke and Dominic Grieve. That episode was a symptom of the weakness of liberal Toryism, not the cause of it: if it were, liberal Tories would have returned with the disappearance of Johnson.

Instead, I suspect that the centre-right has declined for economic reasons.

One of these is that the class base of its support has diminished.

It's well-known that Tory support is now concentrated among the old and uneducated. According to Yougov, 46% of the over-70s voted Tory in the 2024 general election compared to only 20% voting Labour, with the Tories also having a lead among 60-somethings. And the Tories lagged Labour by 18-42 per cent among graduates whilst leading 31-28% along those with GCSEs or less.

But it was not always thus. In 1983 and 1987 the Tories actually had big leads among 25-34 year-olds, and graduates were more likely (pdf) to vote Tory than Labour simply because having a degree was the path to a higher income, and wealthier people historically have tended to vote right.

So what changed? Quite simply, graduate jobs are not what they used to be. For many, they are not just less well paid but also require longer working hours whilst offering less autonomy; that's one effect of the triumph of managerialists over professionals. And of course, even in a reasonably well-paid graduate job one has little chance of buying a house without the bank of mum and dad. It's no surprise that people who don't own property and have no hope of doing so are disinclined to vote for the party of the propertied.

The class base of liberal Toryism used to be professionals who were prosperous or at least had the prospect of becoming so: think of yuppies in the 1980s. That base has disappeared. Sir Lancelot Spratt was no doubt a Tory but his successors are less likely to be.

This, however, is not the only way in which capitalism has weakened the base on which liberal Toryism rested. The economic stagnation we've seen since (or perhaps before) the financial crisis has given us exactly what Ben Friedman predicted it would - a growth in illiberalism, intolerance and reaction. That's strengthened the far right at the expense of the centre right; there's now abundant evidence that a weak economy fosters the far right.

Stagnation was of course exacerbated by austerity. And Thiemo Fetzer has shown that areas of the country more exposed to this were more likely to support Brexit. "The tight 2016 EU referendum could have well resulted in a victory for Remain had it not been for austerity" he says.

The pursuit of a hard Brexit, however, required the Tories to "fuck business" by miring companies in red tape. This in turn has further weakened the class base of liberal Toryism, because the party can no longer credibly claim to be on the side of business and free markets as it once was**. Small businessmen lapped up Thatcher's anti-union policies, but not so Brexit.

In the mind of Tories such as Cameron and Osborne, however, austerity was not supposed to do as much economic damage as it did. They hoped that the negative real interest rates - what Osborne called "fiscal conservatism, monetary activism" - would fuel a boom in capital spending which in turn would boost productivity and hence economic growth.

But this didn't happen. Business investment fell short of OBR projections in the early 2010s and, partly because of this, so too did productivity: in March 2011 the OBR forecast that this would rise 1.9% a year between 2011 and 2016, but in fact it grew only 0.6%. This shortfall was partly compensated for by increased employment growth, but even so the result was that by early 2016 the economy was 4% smaller than the OBR had projected five years earlier. That's equivalent to around half of annual NHS spending.

Had the economy panned out as expected, we'd have had less bad public services and, quite possibly, therefore, no Brexit and a weaker far-right. The more centrist Tories might still be in charge of the party.

That this didn't happen is not mere bad luck but rather an ideological failure. For decades, the centre-right has presumed (for many it has been an unspoken assumption) that the economy would grow healthily if only the right policies were in place: fiscal conservatism, low taxes, "sound money", freeish markets, the rule of law and so on. For years, this was the case. For the last 20 years, though, it has been wrong. Kickstarting a stagnant economy requires something more than the centre-right has traditionally offered.

Herein perhaps lies a reason why Cameron and his allies failed to make a positive case for remaining in the EU, preferring to rely on "Project Fear": they just had no credible vision for a healthy economy or society within the EU.

Whereas Badenoch can talk (unconvincingly IMO) of the damage done by the "bureaucratic class" (pdf) and Labour of the need to relax planning restrictions, the centre-right is offering nothing. It has become maladapted to the realities of latter-day British capitalism - and like any maladapted species is threatened with extinction.

Which doesn't mean it is condemned to such a fate. The centre-right has down the decades shown itself capable of responding to different times. To do so now, however, requires it to rethink capitalism in an environment that is materially and ideologically hostile.

* Many leftists might think there's nothing especially centrist or liberal about the likes of Cameron, Grieve or Clarke. They'd have a point. I use such terms for want of better.

** As David Edgerton has pointed out, Brexit was the pet obsession of a few billionaires with weak ties to the UK rather than something demanded by wider capitalist interests.