From Kemi’s Tories to Andy’s Labour: can the legacy parties make a comeback?

A year ago, at the Battle of Ideas, we programmed a session titled ‘Are the old political parties over?’ Few would have predicted then that, just a year later, the UK’s two most popular leaders would both come from the battered Labour and Conservative parties. Although there’s still a long way to go before any return to the two-party politics we once knew, are we witnessing the early stages of a legacy-party comeback?

Burnham and Badenoch are both significantly more popular than their respective parties, which remain mired in failure. Have Britain’s legacy parties gone the way of so many of the country’s other institutions – so diminished in the public’s eyes that voters no longer believe they can be reformed, even by leaders they admire?

Yet perhaps both leaders have recognised this problem and developed credible strategies to overcome the crisis of confidence in their parties. Burnham has championed greater devolution, bypassing what many see as an out-of-touch Westminster establishment, while Badenoch has sought to reshape the Conservative Party by preventing candidates seen as ‘wets’ from standing for Parliament, abandoning the commitment to Net Zero, and advocating withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.

Or has politics shifted for good? Have we witnessed the end of truly national parties and the emergence of increasingly regional ones? Labour are holding their base in the cities, the Conservatives in the Home Counties, and Reform in Essex, Kent and swathes of the Midlands and North. Even the Liberal Democrats can go from being ultra-competitive in certain areas – winning every council seat in Richmond – to losing their deposit in Gorton and Denton (as did the Tories). Will Reform voters ever come back to the respective establishment parties or is populism here to stay – despite Nigel Farage’s depreciating popularity?

Are Britain’s two traditional parties genuinely staging a comeback, or is this merely a temporary boost for the new prime minister, coupled with a momentary setback for Reform? Have Labour and the Conservatives finally found leaders capable of rebuilding public trust, or are their party brands too damaged to recover? Can Britain’s legacy parties reform themselves, or must they ultimately be consigned to the dustbin of political history?