OK, I’m calling it. Kemi Badenoch is going to win. And I write as a Rob Jenrick voter.
How do I know?
Well, for 21 years I had to get reselected by our activists as a Euro-candidate. I may not know much about much, but I reckon I have an insight into how our members think. And, unless I have completely lost my touch, Kemi will not just win, but win big. A YouGov poll shows her with a 52-48 lead and narrowing; but I am going to stick my neck out and say that the eventual result will be closer to two to one in her favour. (Feel free, obviously, to bookmark this article and have a good laugh in two weeks’ time if I am wrong.)
None of this affects my vote.
Rob has the fierce hunger that Opposition leaders need. He has thought more deeply than any other Conservative MP about how to fix our immigration system, and deserves much more credit than he has had for resigning over that issue.
Regular ConHome readers will recall that, six weeks ago, I suggested a series of party reforms to be undertaken immediately by a new Leader of the Opposition, including appointing Jacob Rees-Mogg as Party Chairman. Rob had obviously been thinking along similar lines.
Although the polls of voters at large are mixed, on balance they show Rob doing better against Starmer, especially among Reform supporters. This matters, because it was the Reform surge, not any swing to the LibDems, that put so many LibDems in the House of Commons. Their vote remained more or less where it was, but they benefited from a divided Right.
Not that I expect any of this to convince our members.
They like Kemi’s energy and anti-wokery; and they like the idea of Labour MPs, who have never had a female or ethnic minority leader, grinding their teeth in frustration. I don’t disagree. We have two fine candidates. I just happen to think that one is likelier to win.
Anyway, whoever emerges as successful will face a serious problem. How do you sell free-market policies to an electorate that, though it dislikes the disease of excessive statism, recoils in alarm from the only possible cure, namely lower spending?
Each of the finalists has made one issue their own: immigration for Rob, identity politics for Kemi. But within a year or two, let alone by the next election, the only thing that will matter will be restoring growth in the aftermath of Labour’s calamitous changes to our tax system and labour laws.
And here we run into a problem. Voters feel that nothing much works in Britain. They resent the fact that taxes keep rising without any commensurate improvement in public services. These sentiments contributed to the Conservative defeat in July.
Yet they also evidently feel, with Ralph Waldo Emerson, that a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds. According to every measure of public opinion, voters want even higher public spending, and support further nationalisations – including of Ticketmaster. Because it is human nature to anchor to the status quo, any proposal to return the size of the state to closer to where it was in February 2020, before the lockdowns, will be portrayed (and will be widely decried) as a return to a Dickensian sweatshop economy.
True, there are other ways to boost growth. If GDP increases, the state can be reduced in proportionate if not absolute terms. This is more or less what happened under Margaret Thatcher when, contrary to almost universal belief, public spending rose every year – albeit more slowly than the private sector.
The trouble is that even this involves unpopular choices, such as abandoning Labour’s new workers’ rights, deregulating childcare, building airports and, above all, dropping the net zero target.
So, we are stuck in a doom-loop.
Voters want more growth but oppose all the policies needed to achieve it. Their attitude will finish the present administration just as surely as it finished the last. Can the Tories ensure that they are the beneficiaries?
In the late 1970s, when we were in a similar predicament, a great deal of the heavy lifting was done, not by the Conservative Party, but by the wider conservative movement – by business organisations, think-tanks, columnists and others who had understood that we needed a smaller state, and who could make that argument more easily than MPs could.
But, even with that advantage, it took the Winter of Discontent to convince people that we could not spend our way out of trouble.
I happen to think that we are in for something similar before the next election. But the Opposition leader needs to be prepared either way.
She will need to position her party as the beneficiary of Labour unpopularity without scaring voters away by sounding too harsh – and, at the same time, without closing off the option of serious retrenchment after the election.
It’s a hell of a tightrope to walk. And, if we slip, it won’t just be the Tory Party that goes plummeting down; it will be the country.