Sir Conor Burns has been a member of the Conservative party since 1986. He was Member of Parliament for Bournemouth West from 2010 to 2014 and is a former trade envoy to the US and former Minister of State for Northern Ireland.
24-7 news and citizen journalism has caused everything to get faster. Columnists with copy to file and commentators with programmes to pad. Yet surely it is ok, sometimes, to go at a speed appropriate to the task ?
“She is too slow. Talent is excluded. We don’t have enough policies. We aren’t making headlines. PMQs isn’t good.”
It is obvious that the early seeds of a leadership story are being quietly planted, watered and nurtured. The speculation has even merited mention on this site – albeit in the more thoughtful and cerebral form of the writings of ConHome’s own William Atkinson.
Any attempt to change our leader now would be madness considering the scale of the (incomplete here) list of challenges we and our new leader now face.
- It is only 6 months since we suffered the worst general election in the history of the Party leaving us with a mere 121 MPs.
- The Conservative Party’s infrastructure is crumbling in many places and non-existent in more.
- Lastly, the sheer enormity of the country’s challenges is arguably even greater, far more complex and of longer-term seriousness than in past generations.
Taking each in turn, these represent an unprecedented challenge for Kemi Badenoch.
With only 121 MPs, providing a functioning opposition is tough. Take out the two Deputy Speakers, Chairman’s Panel, the 1992 Executive, the uninterested and the too grand (and ‘other’) and just filling the shadow Ministerial positions is a struggle. I met one former colleague before Christmas who told me he had 3 shadow positions. Others have been politically exhumed from deserved irrelevance to make up the numbers. Yet on that small group now rests a need to represent the party in areas wider than their own constituencies as well as spearheading policy development.
The Party’s infrastructure has disintegrated. The organisation born out of the post-1945 Woolton reforms and based around the Association model worked brilliantly in the era of mass membership. With declining membership, and repeated efforts by the centre to acquire power and resources, it is broken.
What is left of way too many Associations is Councillor dominated, closed to new entrants, and engaged in an unspoken conspiracy against campaigning.
Too many Councillors use roles for civic prestige or a short-cut route to the candidates list. Whilst some are great (and I have met many in 38 years as a party activist) way too many do not produce regular literature, canvass or support Association fundraising. I know from many tearoom conversations this is almost universal. CCHQ is top heavy and now without enough money. Members feel undervalued with few benefits attached to membership.
Sometimes looking can can inspire. Sometimes daunt. In the period 1975-79 the Thatcher-led opposition was informed in its thinking by Keith Joseph. Margaret Thatcher acknowledged her debt to Joseph by dedicating one of her books to him. He sought to focus on the challenges facing Britain. He concluded were that we were overtaxed, overmanned, under defended and rather poorly educated.
Think what he might conclude looking at today. We have the highest tax burden in living memory, the numbers of working age people who are economically inactive grows every year, our productivity is too low, all parts of our armed forced are stretched at a time of growing danger. And perhaps most of all our system of Government does not seem to work.
That is the task that the Conservative Party members choose Kemi Badenoch to grapple with. She must be given both time and space to do so.
I openly declare an interest. I met Kemi just over 20 years ago. The then Miss Adegoke was as strikingly interesting as she remains today. It was after spending time with her at a CF event that I got in touch with the then Party Chairman to pass on her details telling him he should get her in and put her on the candidates list. I described her then as “the future of the Party.” In 2022 the mere repetition of that story at Party Conference caused the then party leader and her goons to go into meltdown.
However, I do not resile from repeating it. I believe there is something special about her. She is authentic, open and honest. And I can attest from personal experience that one could not have a better friend than Kemi in tough times.
Working with her at Business and Trade she empowered me as Trade Envoy to the US to deliver the State level MOUs. I saw first hand how she engaged with the civil service. She, with respect, made it clear that she was elected and therefore she called the shots. In word, and deed, she reminded senior officials, at home and in the grandest overseas Embassies, that they were impartial between Governments not independent of Government.
This damaging and deliberate conflagration is at the heart of much of the structural problem of Government itself and it is too her credit she has spoken so candidly about asserting the authority of the elected.
So where is this negative briefing coming from? Perhaps some emanates from people around those who would take her place. More from frustration at the position we are in. More exercised by others making noise and taking headlines. Ambition is legitimate. So too is frustration. However, there is ample work to keep many hands busy in our diminished state and people should get stuck in to doing it.
The most absurd criticism is that of PMQs. The ultimate inside the village obsession. William Hauge was brilliant at PMQs but precious little use that was to him in his quest for No10. Mrs Thatcher, by consensus, was terrible but the public gave her a mandate for change and renewing her lease of No10 twice more. PMQs is both tough and irrelevant and whether Kemi savages the dead-sheep Starmer or not will make precious little difference in 4 years’ time.
The greatest albatross around our neck is the total breakdown in trust in us as Conservatives. The public look at our record on tax, on immigration, police forces prioritising politically correct rubbish (often with so-called Conservative PCCs) over actual crime and they despair. They look at 5 Prime Ministers in 14 years (and they bitterly remember Truss). They remember backbiting and Tory MPs daily on the media comforting their conscience or threatening their whips. It was not a happy time.
Only by very publicly accepting that and levelling with the public that we have learned from it can we hope to rebuild trust. The last election seemed to boil down to a proposition that Labour would be even worse than us. Such a song is not for a marching army.
Kemi is prudent to take her time to analyse what went wrong and will, I suspect, need to tell the country and the party some extremely uncomfortable truths in the coming months. Right now, the public are still sort of relieved we have gone although looking on with increasing horror at what has replaced us. That opens a vacuum for protest and one that is being skilfully exploited by the master of protest at the helm of his new political party. It is Kemi’s task to make sure that when the public look for an alternative Government, rather than a protest against the current one, that the Conservative Party is ready.
I remain absolutely convinced that Kemi is the right person for this task at this time. Her quasi-scientific engineers approach of understanding the problem and working towards answers will provide a sturdy platform for the next election when it comes.
Let’s give our new leader the thing she deserves – the time and space to lead us well.
Sir Conor Burns has been a member of the Conservative party since 1986. He was Member of Parliament for Bournemouth West from 2010 to 2014 and is a former trade envoy to the US and former Minister of State for Northern Ireland.
24-7 news and citizen journalism has caused everything to get faster. Columnists with copy to file and commentators with programmes to pad. Yet surely it is ok, sometimes, to go at a speed appropriate to the task ?
“She is too slow. Talent is excluded. We don’t have enough policies. We aren’t making headlines. PMQs isn’t good.”
It is obvious that the early seeds of a leadership story are being quietly planted, watered and nurtured. The speculation has even merited mention on this site – albeit in the more thoughtful and cerebral form of the writings of ConHome’s own William Atkinson.
Any attempt to change our leader now would be madness considering the scale of the (incomplete here) list of challenges we and our new leader now face.
Taking each in turn, these represent an unprecedented challenge for Kemi Badenoch.
With only 121 MPs, providing a functioning opposition is tough. Take out the two Deputy Speakers, Chairman’s Panel, the 1992 Executive, the uninterested and the too grand (and ‘other’) and just filling the shadow Ministerial positions is a struggle. I met one former colleague before Christmas who told me he had 3 shadow positions. Others have been politically exhumed from deserved irrelevance to make up the numbers. Yet on that small group now rests a need to represent the party in areas wider than their own constituencies as well as spearheading policy development.
The Party’s infrastructure has disintegrated. The organisation born out of the post-1945 Woolton reforms and based around the Association model worked brilliantly in the era of mass membership. With declining membership, and repeated efforts by the centre to acquire power and resources, it is broken.
What is left of way too many Associations is Councillor dominated, closed to new entrants, and engaged in an unspoken conspiracy against campaigning.
Too many Councillors use roles for civic prestige or a short-cut route to the candidates list. Whilst some are great (and I have met many in 38 years as a party activist) way too many do not produce regular literature, canvass or support Association fundraising. I know from many tearoom conversations this is almost universal. CCHQ is top heavy and now without enough money. Members feel undervalued with few benefits attached to membership.
Sometimes looking can can inspire. Sometimes daunt. In the period 1975-79 the Thatcher-led opposition was informed in its thinking by Keith Joseph. Margaret Thatcher acknowledged her debt to Joseph by dedicating one of her books to him. He sought to focus on the challenges facing Britain. He concluded were that we were overtaxed, overmanned, under defended and rather poorly educated.
Think what he might conclude looking at today. We have the highest tax burden in living memory, the numbers of working age people who are economically inactive grows every year, our productivity is too low, all parts of our armed forced are stretched at a time of growing danger. And perhaps most of all our system of Government does not seem to work.
That is the task that the Conservative Party members choose Kemi Badenoch to grapple with. She must be given both time and space to do so.
I openly declare an interest. I met Kemi just over 20 years ago. The then Miss Adegoke was as strikingly interesting as she remains today. It was after spending time with her at a CF event that I got in touch with the then Party Chairman to pass on her details telling him he should get her in and put her on the candidates list. I described her then as “the future of the Party.” In 2022 the mere repetition of that story at Party Conference caused the then party leader and her goons to go into meltdown.
However, I do not resile from repeating it. I believe there is something special about her. She is authentic, open and honest. And I can attest from personal experience that one could not have a better friend than Kemi in tough times.
Working with her at Business and Trade she empowered me as Trade Envoy to the US to deliver the State level MOUs. I saw first hand how she engaged with the civil service. She, with respect, made it clear that she was elected and therefore she called the shots. In word, and deed, she reminded senior officials, at home and in the grandest overseas Embassies, that they were impartial between Governments not independent of Government.
This damaging and deliberate conflagration is at the heart of much of the structural problem of Government itself and it is too her credit she has spoken so candidly about asserting the authority of the elected.
So where is this negative briefing coming from? Perhaps some emanates from people around those who would take her place. More from frustration at the position we are in. More exercised by others making noise and taking headlines. Ambition is legitimate. So too is frustration. However, there is ample work to keep many hands busy in our diminished state and people should get stuck in to doing it.
The most absurd criticism is that of PMQs. The ultimate inside the village obsession. William Hauge was brilliant at PMQs but precious little use that was to him in his quest for No10. Mrs Thatcher, by consensus, was terrible but the public gave her a mandate for change and renewing her lease of No10 twice more. PMQs is both tough and irrelevant and whether Kemi savages the dead-sheep Starmer or not will make precious little difference in 4 years’ time.
The greatest albatross around our neck is the total breakdown in trust in us as Conservatives. The public look at our record on tax, on immigration, police forces prioritising politically correct rubbish (often with so-called Conservative PCCs) over actual crime and they despair. They look at 5 Prime Ministers in 14 years (and they bitterly remember Truss). They remember backbiting and Tory MPs daily on the media comforting their conscience or threatening their whips. It was not a happy time.
Only by very publicly accepting that and levelling with the public that we have learned from it can we hope to rebuild trust. The last election seemed to boil down to a proposition that Labour would be even worse than us. Such a song is not for a marching army.
Kemi is prudent to take her time to analyse what went wrong and will, I suspect, need to tell the country and the party some extremely uncomfortable truths in the coming months. Right now, the public are still sort of relieved we have gone although looking on with increasing horror at what has replaced us. That opens a vacuum for protest and one that is being skilfully exploited by the master of protest at the helm of his new political party. It is Kemi’s task to make sure that when the public look for an alternative Government, rather than a protest against the current one, that the Conservative Party is ready.
I remain absolutely convinced that Kemi is the right person for this task at this time. Her quasi-scientific engineers approach of understanding the problem and working towards answers will provide a sturdy platform for the next election when it comes.
Let’s give our new leader the thing she deserves – the time and space to lead us well.