Just how new is Kemi Badenoch’s “new leadership”?
Not long ago, an embattled Conservative leader addressed a doubtful nation with designs to revive their party by “telling it as it is”. The country is exhausted with “politicians saying things, and then nothing ever changing”, they bemoaned.
“Politics doesn’t work the way it should. We’ve had thirty years of a political system that incentivises the easy decision, not the right one. … Politicians spent more time campaigning for change than actually delivering it. It doesn’t have to be this way. I won’t be this way.”
Rishi Sunak’s radicalism phase, unveiled in his 2023 Tory conference address, was politically ridiculous. He castigated Keir Starmer, the then-opposition leader and an MP since 2015, as the “walking definition of the thirty-year political status quo I am here to end”.
His peroration concluded: “It is time for a change. And we are it”. The electorate responded: “Yes it is. And you are not.”
Perhaps Badenoch had Sunak’s infamous conference speech in mind when she, addressing Conservative activists this week, berated politicians who promise “the earth but never have a plan to deliver it”.
Unlike Sunak, Badenoch chose not to periodise the decline in our politics in some arbitrary fashion (thirty years) — but she did describe the malaise as “broader than one party, one leader, or one period of government”. She also vowed to tell “the truth even when it is difficult to hear”, and labelled Starmer everything that “is what is wrong with politics.”
The manifest similarities between Sunak and Badenoch’s speeches speak to the former’s failings as much as the latter’s forgery. As was customary with his perennial relaunches, Sunak’s “change” angle was abandoned within weeks: Lord Cameron’s elevation signalled a sudden cosiness with the ancien régime he promised to overhaul. To take a longer view, the ex-prime minister’s failure to detoxify the Tory brand across an eighteen-month premiership casts a long shadow. His unfocused government, in both political and policy terms, means his tenure is difficult to swiftly review and shift from.
Still, Badenoch’s address this week featured more than a trace of reheated Sunakism.
She planned to set out, three months after her election and six months since the Conservatives’ historic routing, a strategy to revive her party. There is no single theory of opposition. But Badenoch appeared to recognise that the redemption of a political force begins as grief ends: with acceptance.
After an electoral upheaval, a political party’s recovery flows first from identifying “Point A” — the position of defeat and the factors informing it. Only then, having come to terms with its failure, can a disregarded outfit plot its path to “Point B” and victory. This journey of “change” provides an opposition party with purpose at a time of relative irrelevance: a map to trust in the harsh wilderness.
More broadly, precedent suggests that a successful party must pace itself through opposition, remain relentlessly introspective and, in the near term, embrace humility. Opposition is arduous and, besides the odd by-election, thankless. Party leaders must find virtue in the dogged graft of it.
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The Conservative Party has held office for 98 of the past 151 years. The last time it was voted out of power was 1997 — generations of politicians ago. That provides a sense of Badenoch’s immense challenge. After three months’ consideration therefore, the Conservative leader confronted myriad pressing questions on Thursday.
On her party’s record, would she inaugurate a clean “Year Zero” approach and admit that the “fourteen years of Tory government” debate is lost? Would she pick and choose achievements, defending some aspects while disowning others? What organising principle would drive this approach?
In the end, Badenoch’s speech fell flat for the same fundamental reason Sunak’s did: the Conservative leader insisted her revelations were new, profound and “difficult”. Closer scrutiny suggested they were anything but.
In September 2023, Sunak rejected any complicity in the “thirty-year political status quo”. On Thursday, Badenoch selected which taboos to smash with telling dispassion. “Mistakes were made”, she said — as if she were conducting some independent audit of the Conservative Party’s record.
Substantively, Badenoch argued that committing to net zero by 2050 without plan represented major maladministration — as did leaving the “European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”. The Conservative leader also condemned her party for promising “that we would lower immigration” and delivering the opposite.
The speech drew its rhetorical force from the false pretence that it is somehow “difficult” for contemporary Conservative politicians to criticise Theresa May or high immigration levels. The lengthy speech trail, the intoned delivery and the solemn glare together suggested Badenoch was traversing territory that no politician — let alone a Tory — has yet dared. Of course, Sunak rolled back the government’s net zero agenda in 2023 and celebrated the “difficult” and “long-term” decision in his subsequent conference address. The failure to cut migration and deliver a “clean” Brexit have been stains on the Conservative conscience for years.
Badenoch addressed points of settled consensus in the Conservative Party — not controversy. Her speech received no discernible backlash; her soft denunciations triggered scarcely a tremor in the Tory party.
Rather, the speech reflected and repackaged a long-held view among Conservative ideological maximalists: that their party failed because it “Talked Right, but governed Left”. Badenoch first adopted this line at her leadership campaign launch, and recently repeated it in an expansive address in the United States.
“Talked Right, but governed Left” reflects the sort of simplistic, ideologically comfortable conclusion that failed opposition leaders have historically embraced. It is the definition of an easy answer. It effectively absolves the new Tory leadership of, (1), responsibility for the election result and, (2), its duty to assess the party’s deeper-lying malaise.
Undoubtedly, the last government’s outcomes — in various areas — corresponded little with Conservative instinct. But the reason surely has more to do with competence than liberal capture, (as was the suggestion of Badenoch’s recent US speech).
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Late last year, Badenoch promised to pursue “thoughtful Conservatism” and reject “knee-jerk” analysis as Tory leader. But across several speeches and rather more PMQs showings, she has yet to demonstrate true intellectual leadership by saying something genuinely new — either about her opponents or her mode of conservatism.
Badenoch’s grievances are familiar. Her style — the long windup and edgy demeanour — are eerily reminiscent of her predecessor. There is no organising principle dictating the fights she picks, or hints as to the political direction she plans to lead her party. Rather, the Conservative leader’s primary consideration — if we are to read intent into her actions — is to make progress by relentlessly mauling Starmer.
Her pugnaciousness is futile, however, because her criticism has not been earned. Badenoch is still hostage to the legacy of the government in which she served. Her fundamentally half-measure criticisms of Conservative governance, expressed this week, risk merely reinforcing Reform and Labour arguments — with a less than proportional impact on her own gravitas.
Nor are Badenoch’s interventions well targeted. Her combative, headline-grabbing mode of politics played well among the Tory selectorate — who admired her stringent and unapologetic adherence to principle. But Badenoch’s rolling rows don’t exactly speak to the strict discipline and competence that many more senior Conservatives consider necessary to the party’s electoral reassembly. Badenoch’s job is to reconfigure her party’s reputation for aimless performance. She would be well-advised to perform less aimlessly.
Opposition, like government, is all about trade-offs. You cannot be both restless and disciplined; or chaotic and introspective. You cannot continue to make noise, at similar levels to the party’s pre-election iteration, and signal change.
Badenoch’s leadership, in the strictest definition of the word therefore, has been incoherent.
She has proudly stated that she will not be unveiling policy for the foreseeable future; but has also called for the reintroduction of an illegal migration deterrent, criticised all the revenue-raising measures in the budget and suggested that the pensions triple lock could be means-tested.
When delivering a speech, Badenoch presents as stoic and measured; but has already found herself baited into rows by Nigel Farage this parliament. She stresses “change” — but peruse the Conservative frontbench: Priti Patel, the shadow foreign secretary, served loyally under Boris Johnson. Chris Philp, the shadow home secretary, was demoted by Liz Truss for his role in the mini-budget. Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor, was the only Sunak loyalist loyal enough to do media during the election campaign.
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The public, it is often stated, only tends to listen to the party of opposition fleetingly. But Labour’s travails suggest Badenoch is due an early hearing. It has come too early.
The slightest sense of incoherence risks undermining Badenoch’s wider message and conforming to the public’s preconceived, sceptical expectations. Suffice it to say, the Conservatives are not rebuilding in a political and social environment sympathetic to their plight. The public, as conditioned over the last parliament, simply expects Tory politicians to behave incoherently. If the electorate sees a new Conservative leader reverting to type, any interest could well be shot.
The pensions controversy, in particular, epitomises Badenoch’s pitfalls as a political operator. Whatever one’s views on the triple lock, her comments to LBC overshadowed her first major speech as opposition chief. It reflects an increasingly common theme: the message Badenoch delivers, and the one she intends to deliver, can be orders of magnitude apart.
Moreover, the electoral toxicity of the pensions remark suggests the Conservative Party’s existential precariousness has yet to dawn on Badenoch. Centre-right think tank Onward’s report into the general election, published in September, argued a new leader would need to “focus on winning back these older, more natural voters first” to stabilise the party base — with the spectre of Nigel Farage looming. But Badenoch has wasted little time taking a saw to the already-knackered branch on which her party sits.
She may well believe that the pensions triple lock is unsustainable (she would not be alone in that regard); but Badenoch’s LBC comments represent the sort of risk Conservative politicians should be avoiding. For an opposition leader, sometimes staying shtum is the right option — if only to ensure your headline message registers as intended.
Badenoch’s speech on Thursday argued the Conservatives have learnt from their mistakes — but this message is undermined by just about everything she said before and has uttered since.
To take a longer view, the Conservative leader’s psychology precludes her from even considering the possibility she made an error — let alone learning from them. That, more than anything this parliament, could well damn Badenoch’s chances.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on Bluesky here.
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