To no one’s surprise, this week’s election results make miserable reading for the Tories, and the attacks on Kemi Badenoch have now begun. In an article in The Spectator, William Atkinson lambasts her as ‘an active barrier to the party’s saving itself,’ adding that she ‘had her chance to prove herself and has been found wanting.’ Meanwhile, there are stories in the press of senior Tories angling for her close rival, shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick, to take over as head of the Conservatives. Badenoch herself was prepared for this, declaring in advance that the results would be ‘challenging’ but denying they would be a comment on her leadership:
‘We had a historic defeat last year, and it’s going to take some time for us to get back on track. I am working to rebuild public trust…but as we saw with previous oppositions, it took 14 years, 13 years and 18 years to come back.’
She may well be right, but will her colleagues give her the benefit of the doubt?
The Tory party has descended into an awful promiscuity
One should ponder, for a moment, the lamentable situation that Badenoch – the party’s sixth leader in eight years – inherited when she took on the role last November. Has any opposition leader had it worse? Not only had the Conservatives recently gone down to their worst defeat ever, leaving her with a mere 121 MPs. They were also deeply disunited: in the last MPs’ vote on who they wished to lead them, she had, with her 42 supporters, just one more than closest rival Robert Jenrick, and five more than James Cleverly (37 votes) – in other words, nearly twice as many Tories didn’t want her as those who did. On top of this, she has a brand-new threat to deal with: a rival right-wing party under Nigel Farage that is now outflanking her own in the opinion polls and local elections. But it’s the enemies on her own side she needs to worry about most.
In the past few years, the party seems to have descended into an awful promiscuity. MPs appear to suffer from a strange, collective delusion that, if they merely change their leader, the public will come running and their seats will be safe. Increasingly, they remind you of a middle-aged man in crisis, anxious to reassert a charisma he once had. He grows a new moustache, hoping it will make him look like Clark Gable (when friends say ‘Super Mario,’ the tache swiftly goes). He buys floral shirts and grows a natty little goatee (no one cares). He gets one of those late-in-life ear-piercings and notices that everyone around him seems to be trying not to snigger. Finally, the penny drops one day: it’s not so much the images themselves but the constant, frantic changes of appearance – and the desperation they reveal – that are turning him into a figure of midlife contempt.
Here, the Conservatives now find themselves. You would think that having six leaders in nine years would sober and shame them. But no: less than a year after their historic wipeout, some are now casting about for number seven. For them, you see, it’s not the Tory MPs themselves – their own unrelenting disloyalty, impatience and lack of basic discipline – that are turning off the public. It’s their leader, who’s making tiresome noises about the Party needing to take a full audit of itself, work out exactly what went wrong a year ago and offer something better to the electorate. As Roy Jenkins once said to Labour, ‘We exist to change society. We are not likely to be very successful if we are horrified by any suggestion of changing ourselves.’
Looking at the behaviour of some Tories since Kemi Badenoch was elected last year, you can see Jenkins’ point. When an MP wins a leadership contest and two of her competitors refuse to serve in the shadow-cabinet – perhaps hoping to line themselves up for the job should she fall – the public notices.
When an unnamed ‘senior source’ (the mind boggles) writes an article a mere three months after her election, attacking her as ‘irrelevant, ineffectual and out of her depth,’ and describing the members who voted for her as ‘boomers who love hearing their opinions said back to them by a woman of colour to prove they’re not racist,’ it tells you something.
When a month or so later, there are revelations in the press of a Conservative plot to ‘bury [Badenoch] in disaster from the local (elections), keep the pressure on, then f*** [the Conservative party] conference,’ the electorate curl their lips in quiet disdain. It was said by Tory home secretary David Maxwell Fyfe, in the early 1950s, that ‘loyalty is the Tory party’s secret weapon.’ Since then, disloyalty has become its public festering sore.
This is not to say Kemi Badenoch hasn’t made missteps. There have been botched PMQs sessions and an ill-advised tiff with Farage in December over Reform membership numbers. There are too many stories of her lateness now to dismiss them. And it’s baffling that, in a culture which so values punctuality, she continues to upset others and forfeit their goodwill in such a needless way.
Other Tories criticise her over-hugging of Donald Trump’s administration, or her unwillingness to deal with the ‘Liz Truss problem.’ Her stated aim to withhold policy decisions for two years and hold a long consultation with the party about Conservative values is admirable, but in the circumstances allows others, dangerously, to pull ahead and set the debate (compare, for example, with Tony Blair’s dynamism in opposition, dumping Clause IV – one of his party’s shibboleths – within a year of being selected).
Yet she is, most agree, slowly but steadily getting better – as recent PMQs have shown – and her announcement that any government under her would abolish the concept of ‘non-crime hate incidents’ suggests her policy-purdah is not set in stone. The direction of travel, however clunkily it’s started, is basically the right one.
The mutterings, though, continue. There are those who speak of the inevitability of a Tory-Reform pact if Labour are to be seen off in 2029, and talk up Robert Jenrick, with his leaked talk of ‘coalition’, as a more Reform-friendly candidate. They may be right, but should Jenrick mean it literally, who do they honestly imagine would be the senior partner? Politicians of a certain age will recall the SDP-Liberal Alliance in the 1980s, and the fun Spitting Image had with a miniaturised, squealing David Steel sitting on David Owen’s lap. They should shudder at the memory, for a mini-me Jenrick bouncing along in a snickering Farage’s outside pocket will be too much for cartoonists to resist. Kemi, for all her faults, seems to believe in her party and wishes to rebuild it. Others, it seems, would have it slowly sliced away. What part of Farage’s stated aim to ‘destroy’ the Conservatives do they not understand? It’s been said repeatedly over the last decade that the Tories appear to have a death-wish. Never has it seemed quite so literal.
The Conservative party, William Hague once said, is ‘an absolute monarchy, moderated by regicide.’ But, as author Ben Riley-Smith pointed out, the Tories’ ruthless ‘ability to shape-shift’ and topple unwanted leaders could also become a dangerous vice: ‘When the itch had been scratched once, it proved harder to resist doing it again (and again).’
Perhaps it’s time some Conservatives took a long hard look in the mirror and – always the first step to recovery – admitted that addiction to themselves. Then they can begin the long, hard climb to regaining public respect, which no mere change of leader – especially their seventh in under a decade – can ever hope to bring them.
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