Prosper UK

I did say this would happen. I'm just surprised it took so long.

If you hollow out One Nation Conservatism for long enough, something eventually grows in the vacuum. It might not wear the old label, but the instincts reappear because politics, unlike Twitter, is constrained by reality. Voters who want competence, economic seriousness and social cohesion do not simply evaporate because the Conservative Party decides to audition for the role of GB News comment section.

So along comes Prosper UK, billed as a home for the politically homeless centre right. It is not an accident, and it is certainly not a coincidence. When a party is run by ideological purists and haunted by the Boris rump, splinter movements are not betrayal. They are a symptom.

You cannot revive One Nation Conservatism with Kemi Badenoch at the wheel, cheered on by the ghosts of Boris Johnson and his enablers. Badenoch’s project is not electoral renewal but purification, a belief that if the party shouts its beliefs loudly enough the country will eventually apologise and fall into line. That has never worked in Britain, and it is not about to start now.

Prosper UK exists because the Conservative Party stopped believing in coalition politics, stopped believing in duty beyond markets, and stopped believing that governing is about more than fighting yesterday’s culture wars. I argued before that something like this would emerge once the centre right realised it had been written out of its own party. This is the early tremor, not the earthquake, but tremors tell you where the fault lines really are.