Kemi Badenoch is not much good at Prime Minister’s Questions. To which you might retort: so what? Everyone knows the weekly bout of mouth-to-mouth combat between prime minister and leader of the opposition is a theatrical ritual. The typical voter deplores it as a load of yah-boo, signifying nothing. Only a small minority of the public tune in on a consistent basis.
Mrs Badenoch’s problem is that PMQs is taken seriously by two audiences that should be important to the Tory leader. One is made up of Westminster reporters and commentators. Their verdict about who has “won” PMQs influences the overall judgment about whether a leader has forward momentum or is going nowhere. The other critical audience is made up of MPs. They crowd into the chamber for a ringside seat at the prize fight. A robust performance by a leader energises them, while a flop disheartens. More often than not, the Tory leader sends her side away feeling deflated. They were led to expect better from someone who was marketed on the basis that she had a zesty and combative personality. “She was hired because it was thought she would kick ass,” remarks a Conservative veteran. During the Tory leadership contest last autumn, one of the claims made for her by supporters was that she’d rattle Sir Keir Starmer. He leaves his encounters with the Tory leader looking distinctly unrattled.
Used well by the leader of the opposition, PMQs is an opportunity in parliamentary primetime to make themselves relevant to the national conversation, prosecute their case against the government and showcase themselves as a potential prime minister. After nearly five months in the role, Mrs Badenoch is still struggling to get the hang of it. Where she needs to be fresh, agile and rapier-like, she is nearly always a predictable, clunking blunderbuss. She tends to be a bit better when she concentrates her fire on one topic, but often takes a wildly scattergun approach. There have also been quite a lot of occasions when she has appeared surprisingly ill-prepared. Given the many troubles crowding in on the government, and given that the Labour leader is not the most sizzling performer in this format, she lands a blow on him much less often than Conservative MPs would like. As her most recent joust with Sir Keir illustrated, one of the Tory leader’s handicaps is that she has yet to find a way of framing questions about tax, spending and growth that he cannot simply swat aside by responding “they crashed the economy”, while scorning her for being a policy-free zone “carping from the sidelines”.
It has become painfully obvious to Tory MPs that the prime minister isn’t losing any sleep worrying about Mrs Badenoch. With a grim spring financial statement coming up and a tricky vote on reductions to disability benefits to follow, the prime minister is more troubled by incoming brickbats from his own side than he is by the leader of the Tory party. Muttering about her performances seems to be getting to Mrs Badenoch. At a recent PMQs, she responded to ridicule from the prime minister by accusing him of “being patronising”. That he is, often dismissing her for failing “to do her homework”. But it is a mistake for the Tory leader to complain in this fashion because it concedes that she can be patronised.
She is not the worst I have seen. That would be Iain Duncan Smith when he led the Tories in opposition in the early years of this century. Infamously croaky, IDS’s frequent humiliations at the dispatch box contributed to his rapid demise as Tory leader. Westminster folklore remembers William Hague as a master gladiator. He took the role in the wake of a landslide defeat for his party – so in circumstances not that dissimilar to those in which Mrs Badenoch finds herself. Though up against Tony Blair when that Labour prime minister was in his pomp, Mr Hague often got the better of their clashes because his sallies were sharply crafted to expose his opponent’s weaknesses, and came salted with a lot of wit. The jokes were sufficiently well-designed and landed to get Labour MPs to laugh with him at the expense of their government. This kept up Tory spirits when all else seemed bleak for the party. That helped him survive in the job.
Being poor at PMQs is hazardous to Mrs Badenoch’s political health because nothing else is looking good for her either. The latest poll of polls has the Tories languishing at 22 points. That puts them third behind Labour and Reform with a vote share even lower than it was at last July’s election. Donors closing chequebooks or defecting to Reform have triggered morale-sapping job losses at Conservative HQ. Once a darling with Tory members, Mrs Badenoch’s standing among them has dived to the point where the ConservativeHome league table places her behind most of her (almost entirely unknown) shadow cabinet. On Thursday, she launched her party’s campaign for the May local elections. With 1,600 council seats in play, along with six mayoralties, she declared that the contest would be “extremely difficult” for her party.
That’s not a rousing message to put fire in the bellies of what is left of the Tory activist base.
It is true, of course, that any leader would face a monumental challenge rebuilding the party in the wake of the most calamitous defeat in its long history while fending off Nigel Farage’s bid to become the primary voice of the right. Supporters plead that it is too early to judge Mrs Badenoch. “She’s still learning the game,” says one sympathetic senior Tory. More restive Conservative MPs retort that five months is enough to decide that she’s a dud. They are beginning to speculate how long she has left before their notoriously regicidal party decides to try something different.
She likes to present herself as someone who will tell hard truths “even when it is difficult to hear”. Yet one of her failings has been to shrink from a full and frank acknowledgment of the host of reasons that inspired so many voters to so loathe her party. She has criticised predecessors for breaking their promises to lower immigration and chastised their approach to Brexit while declining to repudiate Brexit itself. That’s been about it for atonement. She has flinched from recognising that Boris Johnson debauched standards in public life nor has she expressed regret for cheering on Liz Truss as she blew up the national finances. The Tory leader has not offered the comprehensive, deck-clearing, line-drawing apology to the country that is required before voters are likely to be willing to give the Conservatives a hearing.
Her attempts to attract attention come tinged with desperation, as when she made the Truss-ish declaration to one rightwing audience that the survival of “our country and all of western civilisation” depends on the revival of the Conservative party. If that is really the case, “western civilisation” is in more trouble than I feared. It sounded like wilful contrarianism, rather than a considered position, when last week she made the assertion, without evidence, that it will be “impossible” to achieve net zero by 2050.
The existential anxiety for Conservative MPs is how to resolve the acute strategic dilemma facing their party. She evinces next to no interest in the kind of voter who defected from the Conservatives to Labour or the Lib Dems. “If you’re going to panic, panic about the Lib Dems, for God’s sake,” says one Tory MP. Moving closer to Farageiste positions and associating her party with Donald Trump’s Maga movement is unlikely to be attractive to centrist voters. If shifting further right is designed to win back voters attracted to Reform, it is failing. She has sometimes played into Mr Farage’s hands by starting fights about which of their parties has the fewest members and whether or not politicians should do reality TV shows. I’d say he won both of those little spats. Some Tories are now openly saying that they should strike some kind of Faustian bargain with the Reform leader to “unite the right”. Mrs Badenoch sets her face against that, but will find the pressure ratcheting up unless she can convince fellow Tories that she possesses a viable route map to recovery.
As for PMQs, you can say that being adept at that ultimately did a fat lot of good for William Hague. He still led the Tories to an election defeat. But Mrs Badenoch might note that at least he survived long enough to get to fight one.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
