Welcome to The Fight for the Right, The i Paper’s new opinion series exploring the ideas, personalities and parties battling to shape the right of British politics.

An imposing bronze statue of Sir Robert Peel, Tamworth’s most famous son, stands guard outside its town hall, commemorating his enduring contribution to Britain’s political tradition.

Upon becoming prime minister in 1834, Peel wrote to his constituents in the Staffordshire town, setting out his vision for updating and organising the feuding Tory party into an efficient and coherent political force. His “Tamworth Manifesto” effectively laid the foundations of the modern Conservative Party, which went on to become the most electorally successful political party in the Western world for the next two centuries.

Inside the town hall, adorned with a painting of Peel in his pomp, his 21st-century political descendants are an endangered minority. If the birth of the Conservative Party can be traced to Tamworth, is it entering its death throes here?

The omens are grim. Just five years ago, Tories filled 26 of the borough council’s 30 seats. Today, they are reduced to a rump of three. They failed to win any of the 10 seats up for grabs in this year’s elections – not even coming close in a single contest – as Reform candidates swept all before them to turn the council into a Labour-Reform battlefield.

What should be terrifying Tory strategists is this. On the face of it, the Conservatives have been here before in Tamworth – in 1999, they were reduced to two seats to Labour’s 27 before beginning a steady recovery the following decade. But that was a different age. The political geography was simpler. Voters were offered a binary choice with Labour. Today, the party is under pressure from all directions, which makes recovery all the harder.

The Conservative wipeout in May mirrors its disastrous national performance at the 2024 general election, when Rishi Sunak led the party to its worst defeat since the party’s foundations were laid in the Tamworth Manifesto. Labour captured the town’s once safe parliamentary seat with a 1,382 vote lead. In 2019, the Tories had piled up a majority of almost 20,000.

For all the recent plaudits for Kemi Badenoch’s leadership style, her party’s electoral woes have deepened across the country. Nationally, it is polling around 20 to 22 per cent – even lower than its backing of 23.7 per cent in 2024 – leaving it still in the doldrums as it tries to put the memory of the Johnson, Truss and Sunak years behind it. Among the under-25s, it fails to attract even 10 per cent support.

When Badenoch took over two years ago, the Tories still held 5,158 UK council seats. Today, the number has shrunk to 3,858, a drop of more than half in a decade, with the Liberal Democrats looking set to pass them to become the second biggest force in local government.

The collapse in numbers matters profoundly as councillors supply many of the footsoldiers that drive a party machine at local level. Even in the era of social media and targeted online advertising, doorknocking and leafleting remain crucial to electoral success.

Tory membership is also plummeting, with the most recent figures suggesting it stood at around 132,000 two years ago, a drop of almost 60 per cent since the turn of the century, and an ominous trend for the party: it needs engaged activists to pay their subs, stand for office and canvass voters. What’s more, half of members admitted spending no time on the campaign trail at the last election.

An analysis in 2020 suggested that around 40 per cent of members were aged 65 or more, while more than one-half were based in constituencies in London and the South East of England.

The result is local parties that are hollowed out and struggling for impact in areas where the Conservatives used to weigh their votes rather than count them. One former parliamentary candidate who left over the party’s rightwards shift says: “Even in supposedly stronger local areas, you’re lucky if 30 people are there for big decisions.”

Tim Bale, professor of politics at Queen Mary, University of London and author of several books on the Conservatives, does not provide much joy for Tory chiefs: “I suspect that, electorally, they’ve hit rock bottom – at least in this Parliament. Around one in five voters are still prepared to give them a chance, which is effectively their core vote, albeit one that will shrink over time given so much of it is now made up by relatively elderly people.”

Badenoch’s most immediate task is to revive a grievously damaged brand. She has to find a formula for rebuilding support in Reform-friendly Midlands towns like Tamworth, as well as their equivalents in the East and North of England, while winning back the middle-class, socially liberal voters whose defection handed such “blue wall” seats as Wokingham, Cheltenham and Guildford to the Liberal Democrats.

So far, Badenoch has tried to recapture Reform territory by hardening her positions on immigration, welfare and net zero. But that risks alienating those socially liberal voters in the South.

The Tamworth Conservatives declare on their website that they are an “active local association” but its local news section has not been updated for 15 months, and across Staffordshire the party, which lost 43 of its 53 seats in last year’s county council contests, is struggling to make its voice heard. The picture is repeated throughout the urban West Midlands, where historically the Tories could count on a reservoir of middle and working-class voters, with the party coming fourth this year in Birmingham and third in Coventry and Wolverhampton.

The Conservative Party has a tradition of regenerating itself after the worst of setbacks. Few people expected it to win the 1992 election after Margaret Thatcher’s defenestration in 1990 and I recall a fellow political correspondent betting me, at the height of Tony Blair’s popularity, that there would never be another Tory government. I collected my money when David Cameron moved into Downing Street. Boris Johnson managed to assemble a commanding majority just months after Theresa May’s administration collapsed under the weight of Brexit squabbling.

Yet, history does not always repeat itself. Badenoch faces a momentous hill to climb as allegiances shift rapidly on the right of politics.

She needs to demonstrate that the party is reviving by the time Tamworth and 151 other councils go to the polls next May. It is a challenge she must meet – or the once resilient party fashioned in Staffordshire by Robert Peel could fade further into the history books.