MANCHESTER, England, Oct 8, (AP): Britain’s Conservatives used to boast they were the world’s most successful political party. Not anymore. The center-right party that governed the UK for more than 60 of the last 100 years before being ousted in 2024 is embracing Donald Trump -style policies including mass deportations and DOGE-style spending cuts as it battles to remain a contender for power.

The Tories are fighting not just the Labour government to their left, but Reform UK to the right. Nigel Farage’s hard-right party has topped opinion polls for months, trounced the Conservatives in May’s local elections and has welcomed a stream of defecting Tory members and officials. "Yes, we have a mountain to climb,” Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch told party members at their annual conference, which ends Wednesday in Manchester.

"But we have a song in our hearts, and we are up for the fight.” Crowds were thin under the vast vaulted roof of the Manchester Central conference venue, a former railway station in the northwest England city, as delegates absorbed the party’s diminished stature. "It’s not in a great place at the moment, we’re aware of that,” said Neil McCarthy, a member from northern England.

"There needs to be passion, and we need to get the message across that we’ve changed.” The Conservatives have undergone years of turmoil - some of it of their own making, some of it shared by incumbent parties in a world of economic and geopolitical instability. The economic benefits of Britain’s 2020 exit from the European Union, championed by those now running of the party, have been elusive. Prime Minister Boris Johnson won a huge election victory in 2019 but was ousted by the party in 2022 after a string of ethics scandals.

His successor, Liz Truss, sent inflation and interest rates soaring with a disastrous tax-cutting plan that wrecked the Conservatives’ reputation for economic stability. Under Rishi Sunak, the government staggered on until the July 2024 election that delivered the Conservatives' worst-ever defeat. Badenoch, a small-state, low-tax advocate elected leader last year, has shifted the party to the right, announcing policies with a distinct MAGA flavor.