Almost a year since the general election and the few new Tory MPs elected in the party’s historic drubbing last July are unhappy, to put it kindly – whether it is about a lack of engagement with leadership, the old guard clocking out, or misplaced focus while the party seems to be on a death spiral. 

The frustrations of the 2024 intake should give Kemi Badenoch cause for concern: they are a political bunch with ambition to get away from opposition and into government, and now represent a fifth of her parliamentary party. 

One new Tory tells me: “The intake is younger and in a rush, radicalised by party and broader state failure. We can’t understand the happy drift to irrelevance.”

Imagine it for yourself. After battling through your candidate selection process, surviving a rough campaign for your seat, and somehow managing to scrape through as one of the 26 – well, now 25 – new Tory MPs, you arrive in a Parliament that feels static.

Soon after becoming an MP, you are already into a new Conservative leadership contest. Kemi Badenoch is elected with the support of only a third of MPs; it is quite likely you did not back her (she only got the public endorsement of two MPs from the 2024 intake, including one who moved to her after Priti Patel was knocked out), but there you go.

During her campaign she speaks of a plan for change. You wait to be shown anything more than the five point presentation her chief of staff Lee Rowley shows you at a meeting of the backbench 1922 committee, but it doesn’t arrive. You still have never met CCHQ’s Rachel Maclean (apparently director of strategy) to be let in on any kind of such political strategy.

It means, a new Tory MP tells me, that “people are really fed up”.

“The atmosphere is terrible. Kemi appears to be choosing to do nothing and hoping that will avoid things going wrong when actually doing nothing is still a choice – and it is one that almost guarantees nothing gets better.”

Your party then loses nearly half the seats it contested in May’s local elections and week after week polling puts you firmly in third place, usually between 16-18 points.

Colleagues who have been around and in government for years have tapped out and are not engaging so each member of the 2024 intake is given a job and put on every parliament related duty going.

Whether it is being placed on most bill committees (they eat up your Tuesday and Thursday), whips bench duty where you sit for hours taking notes (while other whips are in the chamber anyway waiting to speak) or PPS roles where you sit on the second row in the chamber (the uncomfortable bench is collapsing) and can’t talk about the subject matter you’re privy to, with full groupings being sent to delegated legislation committees and chopping up your day – all while trying to get yourself established in a constituency where you more likely than not now have a fragile majority.

“The focus on us constantly being in or around the chamber is getting mad now and we are wasting time, energy and resources. There are five Reform MPs and all of us, but who is getting more cut through? And it is not from them showing up to Parliament,” one new MP tells me.

Another adds: “The party chairman’s advice was to bed in over the first six months, make yourself known locally, but it has been near impossible while we are kept here Monday morning through to close of play Thursday.”

A third says: “There is a lot of parliamentary duty when the party needs to be communicating with the public.”

It is not anger at having to work hard, but a questioning of what cause the hard work is all for right now. “It’s more that they feel badly led,” the same MP tells me. “The new intake are furious.”

The often shared sentiment is that there is “no sense of urgency” and a “malaise” when it comes to Badenoch’s LOTO and swathes of the shadow cabinet.

“It is frustrating when you feel like you’re working every hour and you see other people not bothering. Move out of the way if you don’t want it,” they tell me.

The 2024 intake are even garnering the sympathy of those in the shadow cabinet they complain of: “We are sort of relying on the new MPs’ energy to keep us going.”

But instead of chamber fodder, many in the intake want to be utilised politically: “You have lots of new faces, without baggage, unburdened by the past. Use us to help create some sort of political vision.

“Opposition is all we’ve known and we can try to use that fight we have.”

Another adds: “We could stop looking so angry about things and instead be optimistic, upbeat, and actually make voters feel good about themselves when they hear about you.”

There is an argument for including a selection of them in bigger ministerial roles, perhaps even in shadow cabinet. One current shadow cabinet minister says: “They are an impressive crop of hardworking, political people. A lot of whom are showing more drive than some of my current colleagues. We could be bold and move some of them up.”

But the leadership’s slow pace has increasingly frustrated people, especially when it comes to the series of commissions launched to gradually develop policy positions.

One new MP tells me: “The party faces existential challenges and the country is teetering on bankruptcy and broad civil disorder – and we are doing policy reviews.”

They say the reviews have left open a policy void that is being filled by the new intake engaging with thinktanks and other political thinkers.

A group of MPs to the right of the party had dinner this week, organised by Bradley Thomas of the new intake, with David Starkey where they discussed his idea of a Great Repeal Act to restore popular sovereignty. Nick Timothy still has connections to Onward where he was chairman of the Future of Conservatism project, and continues to run The Conservative Reader weekly newsletter with Gavin Rice, who took his old job at the thinktank – and Timothy penned an epic substack on new economic thinking that got people talking last weekend. Jack Rankin has done events with the IEA on the future of the right and spoken to the Prosperity Institute about free-market economies. Katie Lam has done events with Looking For Growth, the modern vigilante group who take it upon themselves to clean the tube of graffiti, alongside traditional thinktanks like the ASI – and recently hired one of their former researchers. 

But the last time they tried to wade into policy as a group was around party conference when 22 of 26 signed an open letter by the NextGen Tories group, only for its organisers to receive a telling off from the whips, fearing the new intake might keep moving as a bloc.

Chief Whip Rebecca Harris has given strict rules, or as one MP eloquently put it “a bollocking”, for the 2024 group not to talk about the state of the party to the press. But there is frustration that, with seemingly no option for dialogue internally, there is a need to express concerns another way.

If party leadership continues to frustrate the 2024 intake, they may start moving as a bloc again, and Badenoch may just come to regret it.

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