The news is grim for supporters of Kemi Badenoch: our heroine has climbed to the top of the Conservative Home website’s monthly cabinet popularity table. This further cements her rating with the bookies as favourite to take over as Tory leader when Rishi Sunak’s race is run – and let’s be honest, that race does not seemed destined to go beyond the mid-distance.
Surely this is a happy turn of events for we Badenochians, you might think? Hardly. She might as well now have a target painted on her back. As one colleague puts it: ‘When you are seen as heir apparent, you are the person standing in the way of all the other people who think they should be the next leader. And that’s nearly everyone, by the way.’
Even over the summer there was a whispering campaign against her getting off the ground
Looking back over Badenoch’s press cuttings for August lends few clues as to why this disquieting turn of events has taken place. True, she has been working away diligently, laying the ground for a trade deal with India, talking up post-Brexit economic prospects and producing some worthy initiatives for supporting high added value manufacturing. Wearing her ‘equalities’ hat, she has also told top civil servants to get Whitehall departments out of the Stonewall diversity scheme.
This is all good stuff, I’m sure, but doesn’t constitute the main reason why Kemi has hit the front in the minds of the Tory grassroots. The rather simpler explanation for that is that Ben Wallace has gone. After topping the member popularity survey for more than a year, the former defence secretary’s return to the backbenches means he no longer features in ConHome’s survey.
So now Kemi leads with a rating of +59, ahead of Penny Mordaunt on +47.5, with James Cleverly in third place on +43.9. For comparison, the July chart had Wallace top on +77.1, Cleverly second on +54.4, Kemi third on +43.9 and Mordaunt in fourth on +43.3.
Friends of Badenoch report that she is very far from obsessed with her personal leadership prospects. But that won’t be true of some of her cabinet colleagues. Even over the summer those of us who place in her our hopes for the future noticed a whispering campaign against her getting off the ground.
Six weeks or so ago the Politico website reported that ‘some civil servants suggest Badenoch is struggling and neglecting parts of her brief. Even her closest allies accept the sheer breadth of her various roles is stretching her thin.’
It claimed that she had also made enemies of people in Sunak’s inner circle by exhibiting a ‘combative and sometimes dismissive approach towards colleagues’. Badenoch’s core supporters were said to be an ‘ever-diminishing group’.
We can now expect much more of this kind of sniping. There will undoubtedly also be efforts by the camp followers of her most ambitious leadership rivals to unearth a crisis within her Whitehall empire that can be used to damage her rather as the crumbling concrete scandal has damaged Gillian Keegan.
Politics shouldn’t be like this, but it is. Once senior figures have convinced themselves that their ascent is in the national interest it is but a short leap to conclude that the end justifies the means.
I remain confident that Kemi will stay cool and steady. But these are tense times. She’s hit the front sooner than is ideal because the pacemaker dropped out early. Our message to the trundlers and trimmers gathering in the pack behind her is simple: you shall not pass.
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