Dr. Ranj Alaaldin is the Director of Conservatives in Foreign Policy and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He has held positions at Oxford University, the Brookings Institution and the World Bank.
It is the oldest reflex in politics: when the numbers turn ugly, change the manager.
The Conservative Party has had five leaders since 2016, each removal justified by the failures of the last. Yet, the reflex is being indulged again now, by those urging Kemi Badenoch to fall on her sword barely eighteen months into the job.
The would-be regicides have it exactly the wrong way around. Kemi has not failed the Conservative Party –– the party cannot afford to fail her. The case for keeping her in post through the next two general elections rests on three principles the party has spent a decade forgetting: consistency, clarity and courage.
Consistency first. The Conservative brand was not undermined by any single leader but by the convulsive removal of its party leaders. Each removal produced a fresh manifesto, a fresh cabinet, a fresh set of slogans and, ultimately, a fresh round of voters concluding that the party stood for nothing in particular.
Manchester United supporters (like myself) will recognise the pattern. Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, the club has chewed through Moyes, Van Gaal, Mourinho, Solskjaer, Rangnick, Ten Hag and Amorim — each appointment justified by the failures of the last, and each time, the problem turned out to be deeper than the manager. A squad cannot absorb a new philosophy every eighteen months, and neither can a political party.
Clarity is the second principle, and here Badenoch is doing something her predecessors never quite managed: telling the country exactly where she stands, on the terms she chooses, in language an ordinary voter can repeat. As party stalwart and veteran Lord Francis Maude put it, parties recover the trust of the electorate gradually and by defining themselves by reference to their beliefs, not by reference to their opponents. Politics is not a linear spectrum on which the Conservatives can recover by out-Reforming Reform; Kemi has rightly avoided chasing Nigel Farage on rhetoric as that is precisely how the party surrendered the right in the first place.
Kemi has stayed committed to the fundamental principles that has long defined the party: on the Equality Act, she has been clear that it is a legislative thicket strangling productivity and growth, and clear that the ECHR is no longer a guarantor of liberty but a charter that protects foreign criminals more reliably than the British public it was meant to serve. She has been clear that net zero in its current form is unaffordable and undeliverable and steadfast in identifying the long-term, if not existential threat that Islamism and sectarian voting presents for the fabric of our country.
This stands in contrast with Keir Starmer, who cannot define what a woman is, has U-turned on every major issue from the winter fuel payment to Chagos and the two-child benefit cap. Reform, meanwhile, cannot make up its mind on where it stands on Russia and the welfare system and offers giveaways and policies no Treasury would underwrite.
Courage is the third principle, and it is the one that Kemi’s detractors often misread. As the great Margaret Thatcher once put it, “if you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing”, and Kemi is willing to unequivocally say in public what much of the country believes, that antisemitism, mass migration and national security are intertwined; that the welfare bill is unsustainable and that universities, charities and the civil service have been captured by a narrow left-wing worldview.
To the charge that the local elections were a catastrophe, the answer is simple: local elections at this stage of a parliament are a notoriously poor guide to the next general election. The Conservatives lost more than 1,300 council seats in May 2019 and won an eighty-seat majority seven months later. Labour surged in the 2012 locals and still lost in 2015. But Lee Cain and others miss the more important point: the doomsday, leader-slaying, defeatist mindset is not the cure for the party’s decline. It is one of its causes. It is also possible that political trauma of some kind is impairing our ability to recognise the nascent signs of renewal.
Voters will return to the party but only if there is something worth returning to. The surest way to lose the electorate is to repeat the mistake of believing that a different face at the despatch box will save the party. Let Kemi finish the job of rebuilding and rehabilitating the party, and to give voters a reason to come home.
Dr. Ranj Alaaldin is the Director of Conservatives in Foreign Policy and a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute. He has held positions at Oxford University, the Brookings Institution and the World Bank.
It is the oldest reflex in politics: when the numbers turn ugly, change the manager.
The Conservative Party has had five leaders since 2016, each removal justified by the failures of the last. Yet, the reflex is being indulged again now, by those urging Kemi Badenoch to fall on her sword barely eighteen months into the job.
The would-be regicides have it exactly the wrong way around. Kemi has not failed the Conservative Party –– the party cannot afford to fail her. The case for keeping her in post through the next two general elections rests on three principles the party has spent a decade forgetting: consistency, clarity and courage.
Consistency first. The Conservative brand was not undermined by any single leader but by the convulsive removal of its party leaders. Each removal produced a fresh manifesto, a fresh cabinet, a fresh set of slogans and, ultimately, a fresh round of voters concluding that the party stood for nothing in particular.
Manchester United supporters (like myself) will recognise the pattern. Since Sir Alex Ferguson’s retirement, the club has chewed through Moyes, Van Gaal, Mourinho, Solskjaer, Rangnick, Ten Hag and Amorim — each appointment justified by the failures of the last, and each time, the problem turned out to be deeper than the manager. A squad cannot absorb a new philosophy every eighteen months, and neither can a political party.
Clarity is the second principle, and here Badenoch is doing something her predecessors never quite managed: telling the country exactly where she stands, on the terms she chooses, in language an ordinary voter can repeat. As party stalwart and veteran Lord Francis Maude put it, parties recover the trust of the electorate gradually and by defining themselves by reference to their beliefs, not by reference to their opponents. Politics is not a linear spectrum on which the Conservatives can recover by out-Reforming Reform; Kemi has rightly avoided chasing Nigel Farage on rhetoric as that is precisely how the party surrendered the right in the first place.
Kemi has stayed committed to the fundamental principles that has long defined the party: on the Equality Act, she has been clear that it is a legislative thicket strangling productivity and growth, and clear that the ECHR is no longer a guarantor of liberty but a charter that protects foreign criminals more reliably than the British public it was meant to serve. She has been clear that net zero in its current form is unaffordable and undeliverable and steadfast in identifying the long-term, if not existential threat that Islamism and sectarian voting presents for the fabric of our country.
This stands in contrast with Keir Starmer, who cannot define what a woman is, has U-turned on every major issue from the winter fuel payment to Chagos and the two-child benefit cap. Reform, meanwhile, cannot make up its mind on where it stands on Russia and the welfare system and offers giveaways and policies no Treasury would underwrite.
Courage is the third principle, and it is the one that Kemi’s detractors often misread. As the great Margaret Thatcher once put it, “if you set out to be liked, you would be prepared to compromise on anything at any time, and you would achieve nothing”, and Kemi is willing to unequivocally say in public what much of the country believes, that antisemitism, mass migration and national security are intertwined; that the welfare bill is unsustainable and that universities, charities and the civil service have been captured by a narrow left-wing worldview.
To the charge that the local elections were a catastrophe, the answer is simple: local elections at this stage of a parliament are a notoriously poor guide to the next general election. The Conservatives lost more than 1,300 council seats in May 2019 and won an eighty-seat majority seven months later. Labour surged in the 2012 locals and still lost in 2015. But Lee Cain and others miss the more important point: the doomsday, leader-slaying, defeatist mindset is not the cure for the party’s decline. It is one of its causes. It is also possible that political trauma of some kind is impairing our ability to recognise the nascent signs of renewal.
Voters will return to the party but only if there is something worth returning to. The surest way to lose the electorate is to repeat the mistake of believing that a different face at the despatch box will save the party. Let Kemi finish the job of rebuilding and rehabilitating the party, and to give voters a reason to come home.