Matthew Jeffery is an experienced global talent and recruitment leader, with more than 25 years advising boards and C-suite executives on workforce strategy, skills, and productivity.
Last week Andy Burnham sought to give the country hope and in doing so, seized the political agenda. That makes this week’s Conservative Party Conference critical for both the party and Kemi Badenoch. Kemi needs to reawaken the Conservative Party, fire up Conservatism and seize the agenda back. But before she wows us with a compelling vision of the future in her Conference speech, she needs to bury the past. Fourteen years in government ended in humiliation.
There is no point sugar-coating our record.
We didn’t just fail to deliver what we promised. Too often we delivered the opposite. We promised to control immigration and presided over record levels. We promised lower taxes and hammered people with higher ones. We promised a smaller state and bloated it, promised less regulation and added more. We blew it!
Brexit should have been the starting gun for a revolution in Britain’s competitiveness: lower taxes, cheaper energy, faster planning, lighter regulation and an all-out assault on everything making this country too expensive and too difficult to invest in. Instead, we won our economic freedom and then bottled what came next. We had the chance to turn Britain into the most competitive economy in Europe and squandered it. Worse, we gave Brexit’s enemies the ammunition to say the whole thing had failed. We didn’t just waste Brexit. We put Brexit itself in danger.
And let’s kill one Tory myth while we are at it. We were not thrown out because Britain rejected Conservatism. We were thrown out because millions of our own voters stopped believing we were Conservatives. Let’s be honest, we governed more like Liberal Democrats wearing blue rosettes than Conservatives. Truth hurts!
Perhaps the deepest failure was this. Conservatism stopped expanding ownership. A generation ago Conservatives talked about a property-owning democracy. Today millions of people work hard, pay their taxes and own almost nothing: not a home, not meaningful savings, not shares, not capital. We spent years managing decline when we should have been helping people acquire a stake in Britain’s success.
Then came Liz Truss. Britain desperately needed growth, lower taxes and a more competitive economy. But radicalism without credibility is not Thatcherism. Truss took some fundamentally Conservative ideas and managed to make them politically toxic. She handed Labour a weapon they will use for years: mention tax cuts and they say “Liz Truss”; talk about growth and they say “Liz Truss”; challenge the size of the state and they say “Liz Truss”.
One disastrous ‘mini’ Budget did more than destroy a premiership.
It allowed the Left to portray the very idea of lower taxes as economically reckless. That is an extraordinary legacy for a Conservative Prime Minister and Kemi should have no hesitation in burying it this week. Kemi needs to make the break brutal and unmistakable. ‘Truss’ is an attack line we need to neutralise once and for all. Kemi needs to be bold and say there is no place in the Modern Conservative Party for Liz Truss and put clear blue water between us and her.
The result? Millions of Conservative voters looked at fourteen years of broken promises and said: enough. Some stayed at home. Millions went to Reform. Don’t sneer at them, lecture them or call them traitors. They didn’t fail the Conservative Party. The Conservative Party failed them. We made promises to them we never kept. We lost their trust. If we want those voters back, there is only one answer: earn them back. Give them a Conservative Party worth coming home to. And Kemi needs to be brutally honest this week. We failed you. We are sorry. She needs to draw a line in the sand, show we have learnt our lessons and demonstrate we are a new Modern Conservative Party, focused on the future. After this Conference, we don’t apologise again. The future is what matters.
But the politicians who defected to Reform are different. They didn’t just lose faith in the Conservative Party. They walked out and then tried to destroy it. Fine. They made their choice and we should make ours. Kemi needs to reaffirm. No deals. No convenient reconciliations. No prodigal sons suddenly rediscovering their Conservatism when the political weather changes. The voters who left are welcome back. The politicians who defected are not. The door is shut. Stay gone. And at the next election, we must fight like hell to take every one of their seats.
That brings me to Andy Burnham. Conservatives may detest almost every socialist proposal he makes but we would be foolish to pretend he has not raised the bar. His Conference speech was emotional, engaging, human and relatable. He talked about his family, where he came from and what shaped him and connected that story to his argument about what has gone wrong with Britain. There was something of the man next door about him. You did not have to agree with his politics to understand what he believed or why he believed it.
That matters. Politics is not an Oxford Union debate where the person with the cleverest rebuttal wins. People want to know who you are, what drives you and whether you have any idea what their lives are actually like. Burnham understands that. He wraps his politics inside a story about people, family, place and country and that makes him a much more dangerous opponent than Conservatives would be wise to admit.
Kemi is formidable when arguing politics. We know that. What I want to see in Birmingham is more of Kemi the person. Show us some emotion about what has happened to this country and show some passion about what Britain could become. Kemi, tell us what you believe, why you believe it and why it matters to you. Kemi, please ditch the autocue, look at the hall and speak from the heart.
And Kemi, talk to the country in plain English. Life is savage out there. People are losing their jobs. Two-income families are ending the month with nothing left. People who thought they were comfortably middle class are checking their bank balance before filling the car and putting things back at the supermarket. It is working harder and having less, losing your job in your fifties and discovering nobody wants you, graduating with £50k of debt and top grades only to end up behind a coffee machine, doing everything right and still having no hope of buying a home. It is cancelling the holiday, turning down the heating and dreading the next bill. This is what getting poorer feels like. And the most brutal part is looking at your children and wondering whether Britain will give them a worse life than it gave you.
Get angry about that, Kemi. Really angry. I don’t mean another carefully constructed attack line followed by applause. I want to hear the temper in your voice. I want to see the frustration on your face. If your voice cracks, let it crack. If the emotion catches you, don’t hide it. Show us that what is happening to this country doesn’t just offend your politics. It bloody well hurts. Because people don’t need another politician calmly explaining Britain’s decline to them. They are living it. They need to know that you feel it too, that you are furious about it and that you intend to change it.
Burnham’s speech was refreshing because he concentrated on building his own vision rather than taking swipes at the Conservatives or Reform. I disagreed with much of it but I came away knowing what he wanted people to believe in. Kemi and the front bench must give us that same clarity, with a far better answer for Britain. By all means land the occasional blow but if each day’s media headline is reporting an attack on a political opponent, we have wasted the opportunity. I want people talking about the country Conservatives would build, not merely the parties we would beat.
And Kemi this week you need to tell Britain to stop being embarrassed by wealth creation. We have developed the extraordinary habit of demonising the very people we desperately need more of. The top 5 per cent of Income Tax payers contribute around 46 per cent of all Income Tax. One taxpayer in twenty pays almost half the bill. So what exactly do we think happens when entrepreneurs, investors and high earners decide they have had enough and leave the country? We don’t make Britain fairer. We make Britain poorer. These are the people who risk their money, build businesses, create jobs, invest and generate the taxes that fund the services everyone else relies upon. Kemi should say it proudly: Britain should be the best country in the world to create wealth and get rich. We should attract wealth creators, nurture them, celebrate their success and fight to keep them here. Stop driving away the people who help pay Britain’s bills.
Give us something to fight for.
Conference shouldn’t be another parade of announcements that disappear a few days later. Show us the bones of the next Conservative manifesto. Show us what a Kemi government would actually do with power and give the country time to understand it, argue about it and believe in it. Who knows when the next election is. It could be as early as next year! Burnham wants his own mandate.
I support leaving the ECHR and scrapping Net Zero targets. But on the doorstep, hardly anyone talks about either. They talk about bills, jobs and whether their children have a future. Kemi, this week make the connection. Kemi, explain why these policies matter to their lives, their security and their prosperity.
Kemi, don’t wait to unveil the big ideas. Put them on the table now. Fight for them now. Build the mandate now. So, what would I love to hear this week? Bold manifesto ideas like these.
Look through those ideas and one word keeps appearing: ownership. Burnham offers more power to the state. Kemi should offer more power to the individual. Turn renters into homeowners, workers into shareholders and savers into investors. Make Britain a nation of owners again. Call it the Ownership Society. But after Truss, radicalism must come with a receipt. Bank the savings. Then cut the taxes. Be radical. Be bold. And never forget – sound money makes everything else possible.
Britain faces a choice: more power and ownership for the state, or more homes, shares, savings and capital in the hands of the people.
If Burnham is offering a bigger state, Kemi must offer bigger lives.
Burnham has made his pitch. Now make yours. Kemi, this is your moment. Don’t waste it. Every leader gets a window and nobody knows when it will slam shut. Lose the next election and there is no second go. The party moves on. Claire Coutinho or Katie Lam may well pick up the torch, another rebuilding job begins and everybody suddenly discovers the radical ideas they wished Kemi had pursued. There is no prize for the tax you nearly cut, the vested interest you nearly confronted or the brilliant policy you were too frightened to announce. Don’t discover radicalism when it’s too late. Be bold. Take risks. Pick fights. Give us something worth fighting for. For God’s sake, don’t play safe. Seize the moment. Set this Conference and party afire to go out and win.