Kemi Badenoch has a capacity, not often evinced by Sir Keir Starmer, to illustrate what she is saying by reaching out for the vivid and unforeseen example. When I interviewed her for ConHome in December 2017, the year she was elected to Parliament, I asked her to name her heroes.
She replied: “I always name Airey Neave and Margaret Thatcher.”
A majority of Tory MPs would most likely say Thatcher, but Neave was wonderfully unexpected. How had Badenoch even heard of him, let alone made him one of her heroes? He was murdered by Irish Republican terrorists on 30th March 1979, nine months before she was born.
She regards his escape from Colditz as “probably the coolest thing any British politician has ever done”, but her attention was first drawn to him by a documentary which showed his crucial role in 1975 in getting Thatcher elected by Conservative MPs as Leader of the Opposition.
Badenoch has often thanked the “white middle-aged men” who helped her to become an MP. Like Thatcher before her, she shows that the Conservatives are not just a party of white middle-aged men.
But just now her life is being made difficult by a white middle-aged man who has set out to destroy her leadership before she can really get going.
Nigel Farage, at the head of a start-up company called Reform, hopes to corner the market in disappointed voters who feel let down by both Starmer and Badenoch.
“I want to feel good about being British, you want to feel good about being British,” he declares in the manner of a cashiered major in the saloon bar.
One must admit Farage is quite good at this. His imitation of a cashiered major is faultless: the clothes, bonhomie, simplistic pronouncements and undertone of pain are perfect.
Here is a politician who steps forward as the tribune of the unjustly spurned because he is one of them. History affords other examples of this phenomenon, and so does the United States.
Badenoch should not allow Farage to put her off her stride. She was wrong, as Henry Hill demonstrated on this site yesterday, to challenge him about his dodgy membership figures.
Of course the cashiered major’s figures are dodgy. What else would one expect?
Badenoch’s task is to show that the Conservative Party is better able than its rivals to work out what the nation needs, and to assemble, preferably within itself, the coalition needed to provide it.
These are difficult tasks. It is easy to say the state is doing too much, extremely difficult to say which functions should be cut.
There are no short cuts to happiness, and Badenoch is right to avoid offering them. In the coming months the party’s policy commissions will start to work out what needs to be done.
These deliberations should as far as possible be shared with the voters, and can only be implemented with the voters’ approval, declared at the next general election, or perhaps at the one after that.
Leaders at their greatest (i.e. not very often) find ways to take the nation into their confidence and obtain its consent for harsh but necessary measures.
In the arduous life of a Leader of the Opposition, it would scarcely be human to refrain from taking the occasional cheap shot at one’s rivals.
Badenoch is a naturally cheerful person, much given to laughing at life’s absurdities, including the compulsive attempts by journalists to trip her up. Her ebullience is an attractive quality.
But her best chance of success in four years’ time lies in demonstrating her Thatcherite seriousness of purpose. By sticking to her guns, she can show up Starmer’s frivolity.
The present Prime Minister is so terrified of taking responsibility that he has devoted what might have been his honeymoon to an interminable series of lamentations about the sins of his predecessors.
He stands exposed as a man who won an election, but is frightened by the choices needed to govern the country.
So too Farage, a gifted but essentially frivolous insurgent.
When Badenoch was interviewed for the Christmas issue of The Spectator she remarked:
“People keep saying ‘Where are your policies?’ I feel like I am going to be opening a restaurant in four years’ time and people are demanding to see the menu right now. Trying to get people to be patient, I think, is one of the big challenges. People want instant gratification.”
Instant gratification is not on the Badenoch bill of fare. Patience will be required, and an ability to see past pollsters and saloon bar orators to what the nation actually needs.
Neave’s brilliant wartime exploits did not lead on to a brilliant political career. He entered the Commons in 1953, but in 1959 suffered a heart attack, after which Edward Heath, at that time Chief Whip, is said to have told him he was finished.
Patience was required. In the Commons Neave was, in the words of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography,
“A close observer, a keen listener, unflamboyant, and ready to learn…cautious, methodical, patient, even slow; yet…also decisive, self-sufficient, and independent-minded.”
Neave understood the parliamentary party and its discontents: knowledge no Conservative leader can afford to ignore. Badenoch realises she needs people like him in her team.
Her refusal to be rushed into policy-making on the hoof, or indeed on the Today programme, should be respected as a sign of the seriousness required of her.
Starmer puts on a great show of moral seriousness. By offering the nation the real thing, Badenoch can beat him.