MANCHESTER, England — The political tides in the United States and United Kingdom have often moved in tandem.

Margaret Thatcher became prime minister when conservatives returned to power in 1979, a year before the Reagan Revolution. Bill Clinton steered Democrats to the center and claimed the White House in 1992, five years before another young, articulate moderate named Tony Blair brought “New Labour” to 10 Downing Street. And of course, Brexit presaged Donald Trump’s initial election by less than five months.

Yet what I saw at the Conservative Party conference here this week was a party and country lagging behind its American cousins on the right — but quickly and ominously catching up. The Tories may be out of power, and in some polls sliding to a stunning fourth place, but their dismal straits offer lessons for both parties across the Atlantic as well as the mainstream parties in Europe’s two other dominant economies.

To say bluntly what was on most every mind here, it’s entirely plausible that Britain, Germany and France are led by far-right nationalist parties by the end of the decade, and it’s not clear the traditional parties and leaders know how to stop it from happening.

But before we consider that jarring future, let’s dip into the past.

In one respect, the Tory conclave had the “It’s a Wonderful Life” feel of an alternative past in the U.S., had Trump lost the primary or general election in 2016 and created his own populist splinter party.

Republicans before 2016 longed for another Reagan, decorating their conferences with his image and even cardboard cutouts, and surely would have continued to do so had Trump not taken over the party. So it was no surprise that Thatcher’s name was emblazoned on one of the conference forums, her dresses and campaign posters were on display and, yes, there was even a cardboard cutout of the Iron Lady.

Even the venue had the air of yesterday, taking place beneath the bones of Manchester’s renovated old central train station.

Swap out ill-fitting suits and missing collar stays for Barbour and tweed and this could have been a CPAC or RNC meeting in a world where Trump doesn’t define the modern Republican Party.

Beyond the nostalgia for what was — and airbrushing out of more recent, inconvenient party leaders — the Conservative leaders and rhetoric reflected the course Republicans surely would have taken had Trump walked. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch used her speech on the conference’s opening day to denounce identity politics from both flanks, Labour on their left, and the right-wing party that’s supplanted the Tories: Nigel Farage’s Reform.

“I am more than Black, female, and even Conservative,” Badenoch told an overwhelmingly white audience. “I am British, conference, I am British, as we all are.”

It doesn’t require much imagination to envision a Nikki Haley or Marco Rubio delivering their version of that same speech as they jockeyed to lead a non-Trump GOP after 2016.

Yet it’s what Badenoch said next that illustrates how desperate Conservatives here are to catch up with Farage’s Reform, which has made a hardline on migration its calling card. In Britain, of course, Farage didn’t swallow up an existing party a la Trump — he forged his movement under its own banner.

“Yes, Britain is a multiracial country,” Badenoch said. “That is part of our modern story. But it must never become a multicultural country where shared values dissolve, loyalty fragments and we foment the home-grown terrorism we saw on the streets of Manchester this week.”

Badenoch was alluding to the terrorist attack on a local synagogue on Yom Kippur, a tragedy which prompted a show of security that took longtime conference-goers by surprise. Manchester police wielding long guns were ubiquitous, and one of the officers told me that, until last week, his force hadn’t fired a service weapon in the line of duty for 14 years.

The incident has only accelerated the pressure Conservatives feel to keep pace with Reform here and Trumpism abroad, a task Tories have nobody to blame for but themselves, given the soaring migration that took place on their government’s watch following Brexit. The urgency was made clear on the conference’s opening day when Badenoch explicitly modeled her deportation proposal after ICE and even included a Stephen Miller-level quota by vowing to deport 150,000 migrants a year.

But why would Britons who are animated by immigration support the lite beer version of what Farage is offering when they can vote for full-bodied Reform? More challenging for the Tories in the UK’s multi-party system is that their lurch right isn’t cost-free. While they strain to slow the exodus of hard-liners to Reform by proposing an ICE-style crackdown, they lose more of their moderates to the centrist Liberal Democrats. It’s not hard to grasp why the governing party of the previous 14 years is in danger of not even claiming third today when you see how they’re being eaten away from the middle and far-right.

More to the point, Badenoch can attempt a third way-style criticism of the identity politics of both extremes, but the inescapable fact is that many would-be Conservative voters grow more enamored with right-wing identity politics when somebody named Jihad al-Shamie drives a car into pedestrians outside a synagogue and then stabs Jews celebrating the highest of holy days. And if that wasn’t apparent, then the crowds that racist rabble rouser Tommy Robinson are drawing to his rallies — with Elon Musk cameos! — should make it blazingly obvious. Which is to say nothing of the ever more frequent display of the British flag, a topic of frequent discussion here as some argue it’s being used to sow discord.

The famous former Manchester United footballer, Gary Neville, caused a stir this week by saying “the Union Jack flag being used in a negative fashion is not right” and lamenting the division being “created by angry middle-aged white men, who know exactly what they’re doing.”

Well, one of the middle-aged white men whom Neville clearly had in mind, Farage, emphatically does know what he’s doing. And he responded with a rejoinder video that has already racked up over 1.5 million views on Twitter. The Reform leader said Neville was insulting the sort of Brits who watch the athlete-turned-telecaster on Sky Sports — the same people “who pay his wages” — rather than faulting the real source of division: an “evil, crazed, mad Islamist.”

To say that Farage’s counter-attack on a Man U legend moved more quickly into the British bloodstream than, say, Badenoch vowing to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights is like saying images of Trump at that McDonald’s drive-thru got more attention than Kamala Harris’s campaign-concluding speech on the Ellipse. In other words, the Tories are using conventional weapons against Farage’s nuclear warheads.

Revealingly, the old guard is trying to mimic some of the same language that has vaulted Farage to the de facto leader of the opposition.

When The Guardian reported that top shadow minister, Robert Jenrick, had complained that he “didn’t see another white face” when he visited an area in Birmingham, lamenting he didn’t want to live in such a country, one of his Conservative colleagues defended him. “We’re a majority white country,” said Claire Coutinho, a shadow minister whose parents were Indian immigrants. “If you walk through an area and don’t see a single white face, it is a sign that integration has failed.”

Privately, Tories sound a lot like those less-than-MAGA Republicans explaining that, look, voters want this from us. As one Conservative told my colleagues this week, “The Overton Window has shifted” on immigration.

Yet that doesn’t mean they’re fully comfortable with the shift.

Sitting for separate interviews in the POLITICO Pub during the conference, two of the party’s most prominent shadow ministers shied away from the ICE comparison when it was posed directly to them.

“The way they do their border security is for them,” said shadow housing secretary James Cleverly, alluding to Americans.

“America’s model is very different,” said Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary.

Interviews with former members of Parliament turned up more hope than much of a plan. Farage wasn’t offering realistic solutions and, once faced with the real prospect of him as prime minister, surely Britons wouldn’t elect such a character — right?

“The big problem that Reform has is that, while they can definitely benefit from exasperation with the whole scene of the moment, by the time we come to the next election, it’ll be a job of work to do, and I don’t think that they will have demonstrated that they either have the team or the ability necessary given the scale of the challenge,” Michael Gove, the former minister in a series of Conservative governments, told me.

Jillian Mortimer, who lost her seat in last year’s Tory wipeout, said Farage’s coalition was just too incoherent to last through a general election.

“They’ve got left-wing labourites supporting socialist economic policies and those on the far-right because of immigration,” said Mortimer.

To my ear, after 10 years of watching Trump, it all sounded quite familiar.

The most realistic assessment was the one that Democrats in the U.S. should pay heed to: that the only way to defuse populism is for traditional parties to show an interest in and aptitude for the issues voters want addressed. And for all the talk about making the economy work again, voters here couldn’t be clearer that it is identity (and therefore immigration) that they’re focused on.

If Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer is able to bring order to the immigration process, that could drain some of the energy out of an issue that right now would vault Farage to Number 10.

“It depends on whether this government can make any progress,” is how Mark Harper put it when I asked him if immigration would be as central in the next general election, likely in 2029, as it is now.

As he pulled a frothy, pre-noon brew from the POLITICO Pub tap, Cleverly, who lost on the final ballot to be party leader in the Tories’ general election defeat last year, acknowledged that “disillusionment in the public is a real problem” across western democracies.

There is, he said, “this real desire for simple answers to complicated questions,” and populist parties like Reform here or the AFD in Germany or the National Rally in France are offering simple answers.

And when the mainstream parties ask the inevitable “how,” the answer is “by wanting it harder,” Cleverly said. “But wanting it harder, mate, is not a policy. That’s where it falls down.”

Looming over the conference — the demanding Ghost of Christmas Present to Thatcher’s inviting Ghost of Christmas Past — was Farage.

And his answer to the proceedings, to Cleverly and company’s demand for hard answers and specifics, was succinct.

“I really enjoyed the official highlights of the Conservative Party conference this year,” Farage posted beneath a montage video of all the empty seats here.