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I Partied With the Next Generation of the British Right

UK conservatism is changing dramatically, as I discovered when I hung out with some of the right’s youngest, drunkest up-and-comers.

A delegate at the Conservative party conference in Manchester, England. on October 6, 2025.

It was a rainy evening in February at the House of Lords, and inside the peers’ private dining room, the vice chairman of Cambridge University’s Conservative Association, scarcely 20 years old, had already downed a few glasses of port by the time he took the podium. “My lords, ladies, and gentlemen,” Arlo Alexander intoned in a languid drawl that could have emanated from an Edwardian phonograph. “You will, I think, agree with me that we currently on the right in Britain are not too far removed from the warring, squabbling kingdoms of early 10th century England, whose infighting left themselves vulnerable to the heathen—and thus dangerously progressive—Danes.”

I was sitting at a table in the back corner, where I had ended up after innocently agreeing to swap seats with someone. The trade seemed unobjectionable: table 12’s only apparent difference, to me, was that it lay far from the action and contained most of the (very few) people of color in the room. Later, I was told by insiders that I had been duped. “You can’t be at 12!” my disbelieving new friends exclaimed. “Tables 11 and 12 are the absolute dregs!”

From the dregs, however, I had a clear view of the head of the room, where the speech was now in full swing. After the fist-banging and drunken cheering had subsided, Alexander conceded that, in fact, not everyone in the room might agree with him. Yes, there were many old-school, high Tories like himself, who used to dominate such spaces—men who, like him, “still resented Wellington for allowing Catholic emancipation.” But there were also, he pointed out, “members of new and emerging popular movements on the right”—especially at table 1, the most boisterous and boorish in the room.

The vice chairman would not name them, but most everyone there understood the “new and emerging popular movements” to which he was referring. It was the loud presence of Reform UK—Nigel Farage’s far-right insurgent party, formed from the ashes of his Brexit Party, and now, in the lead-up to today’s local elections, polling far ahead of both Labour and the Conservatives in every published survey. And it was not just the rowdy men at table 1. As the evening wore on, it became clear that Reform sympathies were sprinkled across almost every corner of the room.

In the past two years, the Conservatives’ grasp on the British right has steadily slipped as the country’s politics have polarized and a string of scandals under the Johnson, Truss, and Sunak governments bred a sense of betrayal among Tory voters. The conventional story about Reform is that its appeal is bounded—that the party draws from disaffected, downwardly mobile voters in places that the Tories long overlooked. When one thinks of Reform, the stereotypical picture that emerges is filled with lorry drivers and prison guards, of pale, portly men draped in the English flag shouting racist obscenities with beer on their breath. The British establishment, whatever its other troubles, has, the story goes, remained somewhat insulated from the movement.

By that logic, Oxbridge Conservative associations should be the last places on earth where a Farageist insurgency could take root. From Harold Macmillan’s time to Rishi Sunak’s, they have been the breeding ground of the party’s brain trust, training students in parliamentary debate, teaching them how to campaign, and equipping them with the networks to land jobs in government. Around three-quarters of all Conservative Prime Ministers were educated at Oxbridge. To this day, at the Cambridge University Conservative Association’s regular “Port and Policy” events, one can find tweedy Tories trading barbs. (The Labour Association equivalent is called “Pints........

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