In her maiden Commons speech in 2017, Kemi Badenoch, quoting Woody Allen, said that democracy was like sex: “If it’s not messy, you’re not doing it right”. Seven years on, Conservative politics could hardly be messier.
Touring the studios on Sunday, the Business and Trade Secretary urged those Tories plotting to oust Rishi Sunak to “stop messing around”. She had, she told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg, phoned Sir Simon Clarke, who last week called for the PM to be replaced, and advised the former levelling up secretary to “stop what he was doing”.
It is not that Badenoch thinks Sunak is a winner; she absolutely doesn’t. She is also, reportedly, a member of a WhatsApp group cunningly named “Evil Plotters”. But — arch Tory in-jokes aside — she definitely doesn’t want yet another leadership contest before the general election. She has correctly calculated that the winner of such a race would then be blamed for the Tories’ subsequent defeat and, thus contaminated, be quickly replaced themselves as leader of the Opposition. It is not remotely in her interest for the loose-knit faction of rebels to succeed in driving Sunak from No 10.
Since her break-out campaign for the top job in 2022, when she had been a minister for less than three years, Badenoch has played a deft strategic game. She sat out the second leadership contest of that year, deducing that Sunak would prevail and that her powder was better kept dry. You can tell how firmly her eyes remain on the prize by her conspicuous absence during the most intense period of the Horizon IT scandal following the broadcast of ITV’s drama series, Mr Bates vs the Post Office.
As a foe of ‘wokery’ Badenoch’s credentials are clear — yet she does not pander to the Right
Though sole shareholder of the PO, she has barely been visible, leaving the gruelling media and parliamentary sessions to her departmental junior, Kevin Hollinrake. Only with the sacking of its chairman, Henry Staunton, on Saturday did she resurface.
Witness, too, her careful ideological positioning as the voice of the so-called “soft Right” rather than of the fire-and-brimstone populism favoured by Suella Braverman. As one of her supporters put it to me: “She really does not want to be seen as the British Trump”.
This means striking a careful balance between headline-grabbing performance and tactical caution. As a culture warrior and foe of “wokery”, Badenoch’s credentials are clear. In her party conference speech last year, she said: “I tell my children that this is the best country in the world to be black — because it’s a country that sees people, not labels.”
Yet Badenoch does not always pander to the demands of her natural allies on the Right. In May, for example, she declined to ignite a bonfire of EU regulations, promising to abolish 600 EU-era laws by the end of 2023 rather than the 4,000 originally pledged. When challenged, she replied: “I am certainly not an arsonist.”
This agility has been rewarded by admiration from unexpected quarters. The Left-wing feminist Julie Bindel, impressed by Badenoch’s robust position on gender ideology, has called her the “only real grown-up in the room”. Tom Tugendhat, the minister for security, and a likely One Nation leadership candidate, describes her as “a good friend”.
Though she undoubtedly has work to do with her parliamentary colleagues, some whose noses she has put out of joint, her position among Tory members — who will pick the next leader — is stronger than ever.
According to the regular Conservative Home survey, she has a favourability rating of plus 64 per cent among the rank-and-file, top of the table (for comparison, Sunak languishes at minus 25 per cent). She is also the bookies’ favourite, ahead of Penny Mordaunt and Braverman.
Her clear objective is to safeguard this advantage and spend as little political capital as possible this side of the election; tricky, given how often she is likely to be pressed on her ambitions before then. When Kuenssberg asked her this very question, she replied: “You never really know until you are in the moment”.
This does not even count as a non-denial denial. Her interviews at the weekend amounted to a firm statement of her medium-term intentions, thinly disguised as a loyalty oath.
Having watched Keir Starmer resurrect Labour in a single parliamentary term, she believes that she could do the same for the Tories after Sunak’s expected defeat later this year. But for that audacious plan to stand even a whisper of a chance, she needs the rebels to hold their fire for now. Whether they will oblige is, of course, another matter entirely.
