It is difficult to imagine that the question of Europe will remain dormant indefinitely. At some point, Labour will likely decide that Sir Keir Starmer has completed the task for which he was recruited: restoring the party’s electoral credibility after the Corbyn years. When that moment arrives, Labour may begin looking for a new leader and prime minister, someone who sees politics not as a second career after public service but as a vocation in its own right.

When that debate comes, the issue of Britain’s relationship with Europe is unlikely to stay buried.

In his latest polling, Lord Ashcroft reports that 53 percent of voters now support rejoining the European Union, while only 30 percent remain opposed. The numbers are striking. Nearly eight in ten Labour, Liberal Democrat, and Green voters support rejoining. More surprising still, a quarter of Conservative voters and even 11 percent of Reform supporters now say they would back a return to the EU.

Norma Percy’s recent BBC documentary on the 2016 Brexit campaign, A Very British Civil War, offers viewers a reminder of how that battle was fought. Watching David Cameron and Boris Johnson reprise their arguments from a decade ago is an oddly nostalgic experience. They appear less like statesmen shaping the future than ageing politicians trapped in a debate from another era.

Meanwhile, the economic realities have become harder to ignore. In 2025, UK goods exports totalled approximately $485 billion. Germany exported $1.77 trillion worth of goods. France exported $668 billion. Italy reached $726 billion. Britain is increasingly the outlier among major European economies.

The dwindling group of mostly retired economists who continue to defend the rupture with Europe point instead to the impressive earnings generated by the City of London. Financial services remain a formidable British success story. Last year, they contributed roughly £166 billion to the economy.

The City’s ingenuity increasingly lies in digital financial engineering, including the booming world of cryptocurrencies and other lightly regulated financial products. British entrepreneurs operating from remote jurisdictions around the globe have become adept at navigating this new landscape. Yet many of the scandals emerging from these same corners of the financial world follow a familiar pattern: investors are lured with promises of rapid returns, encouraged to transfer ever larger sums, and ultimately left empty-handed when the operation disappears. Crypto-related schemes feature prominently in many of these cases.

Such activity may register as profit in Britain’s post-Brexit national accounts, but it does little to stimulate growth beyond the Square Mile. The wider economy receives few benefits while businesses across the country remain cut off from their largest and most accessible export markets.

Jeremy Hunt’s recent book, Can We Be Rich Again?, returns repeatedly to the same conclusion. Chapter after chapter, the former Chancellor urges British policymakers to learn from the practices and policies of neighbouring European countries.

He may well be right.

The question is whether Kemi Badenoch is willing to draw the same lesson. Can she move beyond her party’s early enthusiasm for Donald Trump-style politics and resist pressure from Conservatives who believe the path to recovery lies in an ever-closer embrace of Nigel Farage?

Conservative leaders who have transformed British politics have rarely done so by following convention. They succeeded by identifying a political vacuum and occupying it before their opponents could react.

Benjamin Disraeli famously accused Robert Peel of “catching the Whigs bathing and walking off with their clothes.” Peel embraced reforms that many Conservatives considered heretical: electoral reform, protections for young workers, and freer trade. Yet those policies expanded Conservative appeal rather than diminishing it.

The same pattern could be seen under Stanley Baldwin and the early Neville Chamberlain. Their support for council housing, public health measures, and broader social reforms infuriated sections of the Conservative establishment and newspaper proprietors such as Lord Northcliffe. Yet those policies helped secure and maintain power.

Harold Macmillan followed a similar path by accepting many of Labour’s post-war social reforms. Margaret Thatcher, despite her reputation among today’s Brexit enthusiasts, pushed Britain deeper into Europe through the Single European Act. She did so against the wishes of an anti-European Labour Party that, in the 1983 election, campaigned on a platform promising a referendum on leaving the European Economic Community and advocating a vote to withdraw.

To be sure, the question of Britain returning to the decision-making structures of the European Union has, for the moment, been settled. British prime ministers no longer sit around the table each month helping shape the hundreds of decisions that affect the continent. Britain has become an observer rather than a participant, a rule-taker rather than the kind of rule-maker Thatcher sought to be.

Until now, Badenoch has shown little appetite for challenging the assumptions that have guided Conservative leaders throughout the Brexit era. The electoral results suggest that caution has not been rewarded.

Since taking over after the 2024 general election, she has presided over some of the party’s worst electoral setbacks. In April’s local elections, Conservatives lost 563 council seats, many of them to Reform UK and the Greens. Across London, Reform and the Greens captured four councils. Even in Westminster, a wealthy middle-class Conservative stronghold for more than a century, the party held on only narrowly while Labour retained most of the gains it had made in 2022 despite growing dissatisfaction with Starmer.

In Scotland, Badenoch oversaw the loss of 19 Conservative seats. In Wales, Tory representation in the Senedd was effectively halved.

The conclusion is difficult to avoid. She is not doing what every Conservative leader must ultimately do to survive: place more Conservatives in positions of political power.

Instead, her opposition strategy has largely mirrored the editorial priorities of the Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail. The attacks on Starmer are familiar, predictable, and increasingly ineffective.

Might there be another way?

As the only major female leader in a political landscape dominated by remarkably uninspiring men, with the possible exception of the endlessly quotable Green politician Zak Polanski, Badenoch could choose to champion issues that directly affect women.

One possibility would be revisiting the restrictions on European au pairs imposed after Brexit. The term “woke” is now routinely deployed to dismiss almost any policy perceived as helping women, but perhaps it is time for the party that produced three female prime ministers to rediscover a political language capable of appealing to women voters. Labour, after all, continues to be led by men whose political instincts often seem rooted in an earlier generation.

Beyond questions of gender politics lies the larger economic challenge. While the City continues to generate enormous profits, much of British business remains constrained by the barriers erected between the UK and its largest trading partner.

Badenoch need not utter the word “rejoin.” She could instead invoke Thatcher’s example. Thatcher accepted the necessity of sharing elements of sovereignty with European partners because she believed doing so strengthened Britain’s economy and influence.

A Badenoch government could argue for reconnecting Britain to Europe in practical ways while avoiding the ideological baggage associated with reopening the Brexit referendum. It could challenge Starmer’s self-imposed red lines, which currently prevent any serious effort to reduce trade barriers, deepen economic cooperation, or restore easier labour mobility with neighbouring countries.

Such a position would almost certainly provoke outrage among the Johnson-Farage wing of the right. It would be denounced as betrayal. It would be called heresy.

Yet politics rewards those willing to anticipate where public opinion is heading rather than where it has been.

And the polls increasingly point in one direction. More voters every year conclude that Brexit has left Britain poorer, less influential, and economically constrained.

If Kemi Badenoch wants to change the political weather, she could do worse than embrace a genuinely conservative act of political entrepreneurship: recognising a new reality before everyone else does.

Doing so would certainly make a splash. More importantly, it might give the Conservatives something they currently lack—a compelling answer to Britain’s future relationship with Europe.