Narratives Targeting Political Enemies: The Case of Post-Brexit Tory Leaders in the United Kingdom (2016–2022)

The outcome of the 2016 Brexit referendum has reinforced political polarization in the United Kingdom. Brexit identities, as either "Leavers" or "Remainers," have duly replaced, for a time, party identification as one of the main dividing lines between British voters. The Conservative Party, at the heart of the Brexit crisis, seems to have fuelled those divisions for political gain. Various Conservative leaders have indeed indulged in the process of enemy making to establish their ethos and strengthen their (Brexit) credentials. Through a corpus-based critical narrative analysis of keynote conference speeches, this article proposes a comparative study of how storytelling enabled recent Tory leaders to make the most of the Brexit divisions by creating enemies to rally against and to defeat. The ambition of this paper is to shed light on the evolution of the Conservative Party's electoral strategy but also to contribute to the fields of both narrative analysis and of peace and conflict studies by discussing the concept of "enemy narratives" and assessing how they relate to the notion of "enemy images."