According to the leader of the Conservatives, any failure to renew her party means that “our country and all of Western civilisation will be lost”.
Even by Kemi Badenoch’s own standards of hyperbole, it is a bold claim; unfortunately, fewer and fewer of those she needs to help her on this mission of renewal seem to be attracted to the current brand of Conservative evangelism. It won’t help anyone get to see a GP.
Admittedly, she has only been leader for a little over three months, the Conservatives have just suffered the worst electoral drubbing in their history, and the next general election is years away. But she has made a faltering start.
Plainly, she is a conviction politician, and has a more forbidding task of reconstruction ahead of her than for any leader since Edwardian times. So she need not be criticised lightly.
Most worryingly for her, and anyone who cares for the future of society, her party has been overtaken in popularity by Reform. She and her colleagues, for they are, after all, supposed to be a team, should have made more political capital out of the government’s shortcomings. She has sometimes proven a flop in the Commons, but she is not the first leader of the opposition to have been overwhelmed in that way, and ascendancy in the chamber doesn’t buy a golden ticket for No 10.
Ms Badenoch was speaking at the London meeting of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC), a kind of international party conference for what might be politely called the radical new right – Trumpian, anti-woke, climate-change sceptics and “patriots” all. Lively as their esoteric proceedings are, they are not helping the Conservatives get in touch with the average British voter.
Given that the ARC was holding its second festival of the bizarre in Britain, I’d imagine Ms Badenoch wanted to be at the centre of the circus, rather than yield the role to Nigel Farage, and she is a sincere, albeit misguided, believer in many of the shibboleths of the new right – and evidently energised by the Trump phenomenon. Even so, seeing her submerged in this arena suggests that her leadership is too much focused on stoking distrust, creating division and exploiting grievances – and that is, at best, a distraction.
Her main problem is, quite simply, that Mr Farage’s current vehicle, Reform UK, is rather better at populism than she and her party are. Mr Farage has a track record second to none in British politics at spotting bandwagons and stirring hatreds, and Ms Badenoch is an amateur by comparison.
She is a net zero sceptic; Mr Farage cheerfully dismisses the entire science of climate change. She is critical of the Brexit deal that Boris Johnson’s Conservative government negotiated; Mr Farage wants to rip it up.
Where Mr Farage is reckless enough to promise to reduce migration to net zero, slash taxes and abolish the NHS, Ms Badenoch is still working out her policies. She needs to fill the gaps in before too much longer; and while she tries to outflank Reform UK she continues to alienate more moderate, progressive, pro-European often former Conservative members and voters.
So the real challenge lies in policy. With some credible, popular key proposals that “add up” and offer a credible platform for a future government, Ms Badenoch could still yet fulfil her dream of “Renewal 2030”. Easier said than done, obviously, but the present travails of the government (and the administrations she served in) give some fairly obvious pointers as to what not to do: break manifesto promises solemnly made, hike taxes, and appear to target groups in society who enjoy widespread public sympathy, such as the family farmers.
Ms Badenoch’s party lost the election as badly as they did because they lost control of the public finances, couldn’t grow the economy, didn’t live up to their promises on the public services or on immigration, made only token efforts to “level up” and, most painfully for the Tories, neglected the defence of the realm. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss should take their considerable share of the blame for that.
Ms Badenoch seems ready to face up to those shortcomings and admit mistakes; but she also needs to take a look at the real-world consequences of Brexit. She is a “true believer” who, as trade secretary, negotiated UK entry to the Trans-Pacific Partnership – but even she would have to acknowledge that, for most people, Brexit has been a terrible mistake. A little more humility might help.
Still more grievous, Ms Badenoch is simply wrong about the threat to Western civilisation and its values. The immediate threat to the West does not arise, as Ms Badenoch and JD Vance say, from liberal politicians, including moderate Conservatives at the European level, but from Vladimir Putin and his hard-right allies – well represented at the ARC and around the White House.
Few have done more to undermine the American constitution than Donald Trump; most conspicuously when he placed himself at the head of an attempted insurrection on 6 January 2021, a day that continues to live in infamy. He is a convicted felon, and lives in a deluded world where Covid can be cured with disinfectant and where he’s done more for Black Americans than Abraham Lincoln.
Ms Badenoch is in bad company at the ARC, and her apocalyptic visions feel remote from the more quotidian concerns of the British people. Of course, voters have concerns about immigration and integration, but they also want their leaders to talk about the economy, about public services, and about the threat to our security posed by President Putin, and his friend President Trump, who is rapidly diluting America’s commitment to Nato and European security.
Ms Badenoch should be calling that out, albeit diplomatically, rather than trying to ingratiate herself with those happy to sell out Britain and the rest of Europe.
The public is yet to be convinced by Ms Badenoch. She is beginning to be noticed, and listened to – but not always for the right reasons. She must know that her party tends to be impatient with its leaders.
