Yesterday, Kemi Badenoch made a speech.
Competing with a Prime Ministerial visit to Ukraine, Yvette Cooper’s announcement of specific and limited local rape gangs inquiries, an unravelling ceasefire in the Middle East, speculation over Suella Braverman’s future, and the death of one of my girlfriend’s favourite directors, less attentive readers may have missed it. If so, you can watch it here or read it here.
Badenoch had three tasks with this speech: to reset her struggling leadership amid a growing chorus suggesting she is failing; to show the public she understands just why they booted us out of government so spectacularly six months ago; and to convey that she has a plan to blunt Reform’s rise and prevent our party from being pushed into third and electoral oblivion.
Readers, at ConservativeHome, we are critical friends of the Tories. We have no set editorial view. Our only guides when writing are our consciences, our interests, and that line that has defined our role for the last twenty years: we are independent of—but supportive of—the Conservative Party. I have been a party member since I was 15 and a Tory since I could think. I want us to win.
The hardest articles to write are those where I feel driven to suppress my own feelings, blunt my criticisms, or pander to those with more power in this party than myself. It feels untruthful, unprincipled, and unhelpful. But Badenoch made clear in her speech that the best thing we can do is to tell the truth. I will follow her lead and be honest: she failed on all three of those jobs.
If saying that irritates her bigger supporters, opens me to charges of disloyalty or divisiveness, or is held against me in a future quest for a quasi-mythical safe seat, then so be it. But this speech encapsulated everything that seems to be misfiring about her leadership, down to sharp replies in the press Q and A that threatened to overshadow the whole occasion.
At best, she provided a cogent critique of Labour’s failings, and a clear outline of Britain’s structural difficulties. At worst, it seemed a prolonged exercise in failing to offer anything new or engage with voters. The general gist was that however bad the last government was, the new one is worse, and Labour’s lack of a plan is a helpful distraction for the absence of one of her own.
Badenoch remains committed to not announcing anything new for the foreseeable future, so the speech consisted of familiar elements. Exhortations to tell the truth in the spirit of Thomas Sowell, a broad overview of various long-standing national problems like productivity and housing, tales of woe from her McDonald’s days, and a promise of change under our new leadership.
Leaving aside that the latter was nicked from Labour’s election campaign, in the absence of fresh content, the speech served to point out various things going wrong with Britain – a country she was part of governing only six months ago – without providing any remedies. I’m not asking for 100-page policy papers, but the smallest hint of what she would do differently.
As such, it was redundant on the issues where trust in our party has collapsed. Despite a cry of “no ifs, no buts”, her section on immigration only amounted to a general disdain for high numbers and calls for more integration, with no clear apology for the Boriswave. The NHS was only mentioned via her campaign to ban puberty blockers. Waiting lists? What waiting lists?
Badenoch had more to say on living standards. “We are all getting poorer,” she strikingly began. Ever-higher taxes for ever-worse services, a “shrinking group of people…working to support an ever-growing number of those who are unable or unwilling to work”, sky high energy costs from vulnerable supplies, unaffordable housing, and an unsustainable debt pile.
This led to a helpful litany of Labour’s woes: higher mortgages, job-destroying taxation policies, business treated “as a cash machine” and a “burden to be tolerated rather than celebrated”. Allied to calling out Bridget Phillipson’s pandering to the unions as the vandalism that it is, Badenoch was sharp in hammering home just how trust in Labour is breaking down.
She explained how Labour are making the same mistakes we did: announcing big ambitions without the policy or strategy to make them work. But that meant trotting through a litany of Tory cockups: launching Brexit without settling how to use our freedoms, backing Net Zero based on back-of-a-fag-packet calculations of its cost, and a hopeless addiction to human quantitative easing.
None of these were unreasonable. But they are statements of the obvious, aimed more at tickling Telegraph readers’ bellies than engaging with the seven million who abandoned us in July. Does Badenoch understand how hated we are? She must go beyond milquetoast criticisms of governments in which she served by offering a meaningful denunciation and apology.
As Rachel Cunliffe highlights, Badenoch is held back by an unwillingness to personally apologise. She claimed “the difference between me and Keir Starmer is that he doesn’t believe he’s ever made a mistake”. But she will “acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes”. Note there what Cunliffe labels “the rhetorical slight of hand, the switch from first person to third”.
Badenoch is happy to blame her party. But she is unwilling, as a lady who is physically incapable of making gaffes, that she was complicit in them. That robs any mea culpa of the impact she might hope for. When she spoke of her own record, it was only of her victories in standing up to postmasters or deploying her “common sense” against trans extremists.
Rather than making clear that “the Conservative Party is under new leadership,” Badenoch came across as Continuity Sunak. Her speech most reminded me of his conference address from 2023, when he complained about the failings of his predecessors. At least he had a few policies to announce, underwhelming as they were. When he spoke of “change,” he could point to something.
To misquote Margaret Thatcher, if you have to tell people that you’re change, you’re not. This is not 1975. Badenoch almost seems frustrated by how badly Labour are doing, since it robs her of the two years of sitting back and writing Stepping Stones 2 to which she feels she is entitled. But time is the one thing she really doesn’t have. Does she realise the existential threat that we face?
Thatcher did not become leader after our worst-ever result. She was not pushed into third by another party within three months. Does Badenoch get that if the public hate Labour, they hate us more, and that the beneficiary of this will be Reform? Does she realise that there is currently more chance of her being Nigel Farage’s future deputy than of her occupying Number 10 in her own right?
For all her boasts about her McDonald’s workload, Badenoch appears uncommitted to the hard work of leadership. Robert Jenrick, Rupert Lowe, and Farage all seem far more excited about taking the fight to Labour. If voters have noticed Badenoch, one suspects that it will have been for her one-woman war on sandwiches, or in her futile fight with Farage over memberships.
I hate to be so gloomy. But I would rather provide readers with an honest assessment than pretend yesterday’s speech was a success. Badenoch did have one win yesterday with the announcement of a partial rape gangs inquiry. She successfully put pressure on Starmer with her amendment, allied to the poasting of Elon Musk and the bulging postbags of Labour MPs.
A few more wins like this, and the public might start to respect Badenoch’s ability to put pressure on the Government even with the limited parliamentary resources she possesses. Her best asset now is that she remains an unknown quality to most voters. She still has a chance to learn from friendly critiques, and to start cutting through with voters on the issues that matter.
Doing so will require putting herself out there. She needs to be in public and in the media as much as possible. More GB News and BBC Breakfast, more social media, columns attacking Labour and offering alternatives every other day: these are the ways that she will get noticed. She should make a big speech on the NHS as soon as possible, like her one on immigration last month.
If she doesn’t, the whispering campaign against her leadership will get steadily louder. I have only just turned 25 and already lived through and covered far too many Tory leadership contests. Our sixth leader in eight years must be given a fair hearing. But that also means we should be honest about where she goes wrong. Our party’s plight is far too dire not to be.