On her recent visit to Washington, shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves presented herself as the perfect candidate to be the next chancellor in the modern mould: an environmentalist, interventionist and protectionist similar to Joe Biden and Olaf Scholz. Reeves champions what she calls ‘securonomics’, a sister of Bidenomonics with an environmental twist.

But the trouble with Reeves’s approach is that just as she makes plain her direction, much of Europe is heading the other way. Take Finland. Until recently the country was led by Sanna Marin who, with New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, became the face of the international centre-left. Marin was voted out in April’s general election and as of this week Petteri Orpo runs a four-party coalition including the populist Finns party, led by Riikka Purra. It is cutting back public spending, especially welfare payments, and has published an agenda with 12 pages devoted to immigration and integration issues and how to stem the number of arrivals.

The centre-right is already in power in neighbouring Sweden, where 27-year-old environment minister Romina Pourmokhtari is rowing back on the more zealous policies of her predecessors. A rebellion against net-zero targets is well under way in the Netherlands and Scholz is backing away from his earlier pledges. France’s Emmanuel Macron has urged the European Union to stop green diktats. Green parties are losing power and momentum across the continent.

The Ukraine war has shown the need for strong defence. Military budgets are rising everywhere. Sweden and Finland have both applied to join Nato and a landmark was reached this week when US Air Force bombers landed in Sweden for the first time in decades. Poland is emerging not just as a humanitarian superpower, hosting Ukrainian refugees, but as one of Europe’s strongest defence players. It is increasingly regarded by the US as its most important partner in continental Europe.

It’s not hard to see why Swedish voters have moved to the right. Sweden has become the cautionary tale of Europe. Its gangland violence shocks the continent. Bombings and shootings are a frequent occurrence. Sweden’s liberal laws, light jail sentences and refusal to prosecute under-15s have seen children (especially recent arrivals) sucked into a burgeoning underworld. In Norway, ‘the Swedish model’ is a phrase now applied to gang crime. Norway had four fatal shootings last year, compared with 63 in Sweden.

Populist parties are rising across Europe. The Sweden Democrats are part of Sweden’s coalition (although not in government) and Germany’s AfD – Alternative for Germany – is riding on 18 per cent in the polls, rising closer to 30 per cent in much of former East Germany. France’s legislative election last year made Marine Le Pen’s RN (National Rally) party the strongest opposition. She has been campaigning on a cost-of-living platform for some time, so inflation woes have helped her credibility.

After the Brexit vote, the UK became the only country in Europe not to have any populist parties either in parliament or with any significant showing in the opinion polls. The vote to quit the European Union left Nigel Farage without a mission and realigned both the Labour and Tory parties with voters who felt strongly that in a globalised world, a nation should take charge of its own borders.

When Keir Starmer became Labour leader he dropped his opposition to Brexit, pledging instead to make it work. At the next general election, voters will ask how well those Brexit powers have been used. And this is where the Tories may well come unstuck. If you think migration is too high, why vote for a party that used its new power over the borders to let in 1.2 million people last year – while 5.2 million Britons remain on out-of-work benefits? If you’re concerned about the net-zero 2050 agenda, why vote for one of the few parties in the world to write this undeliverable target into law? If you think the tax burden is oppressive, why vote for the party that has just pushed it to an all-time high?

We may well see a Labour government elected by default, with a Starmer administration becoming the great hope for Europe’s out-of-power social democrats. Starmer would be forced into an agenda of both austerity and NHS reform. This is the unavoidable legacy of Big Government conservatism.

But there is an alternative. If the Tories had the nerve to embark upon urgent welfare reform, releasing more people into work, it would lower both inflationary pressures and immigration numbers. If they could stop seeing more state spending as the answer to every problem and embrace a more realistic environmentalism in line with the changing public mood, the electorate might reward them. Proper NHS reform could help push waiting lists down, as promised (they have started to rise again). But even if the Conservatives embraced all this, how much can be done in a year?

Scholz was right in February last year when he said that the invasion of Ukraine represented a zeitenwende, or ‘changing of the times’. But he almost certainly didn’t anticipate that this zeitenwende would apply equally to Europe’s domestic politics. An exasperation with high-spending, high-taxing, interfering government seems to be the emerging theme across the continent. It would be ironic if the Tories ended up becoming a victim of this.