Kemi Badenoch is in ebullient form. She promises the Conservative party conference, which begins this weekend in Manchester, will be ‘more fun than usual’. But that does not mean the Tory leader plans to sweep on stage like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns. ‘I won’t be wearing any jumpsuits with sequins on,’ Badenoch says. ‘I won’t be singing “Insomniac”.’ The state of the opinion polls, with the Tories at well below 20 per cent, ought to give her sleepless nights, but she is upbeat.
What, I wonder, is her karaoke song? Her three children ‘are the DJs’ in the Badenoch household and ‘all they sing are Taylor Swift songs’. I push my luck and suggest she could try ‘I Will Survive’, Gloria Gaynor’s anthem for defiant women let down by useless men. She is suddenly animated. ‘I’ve never been an “I Will Survive” fan. I don’t need to sing that! I’m lucky in that I have quite a lot of self-belief. I certainly wouldn’t be here if I didn’t. So reinforcing myself, thankfully, is not something that I need to do.’ This may be ‘Peak Kemi’: combative, authentic, pushing back against journalists or anyone else who tries to put her in the corner, rejecting Gloria Gaynor’s words and yet channelling their spirit at the same time.
Her opponents want to marginalise her. Keir Starmer has declared the Conservative party ‘dead’. Tory dissidents are running a ‘Kemi countdown clock’, counting the days until 2 November when the party rules mean she can be challenged for the leadership. But Badenoch doesn’t even need to be asked about her critics before launching into a defence of her stewardship.
‘I basically inherited a distressed asset and my first job was to just make sure we didn’t go bust,’ she says, comparing the Tories to an ailing business with a new CEO. ‘Most of my first three to six months were spent on that. I just couldn’t get out there much. The opportunity cost was perhaps not doing much media.’
However, Tory MPs complain that she barely troubled the scorers until January and that she has too often left Nigel Farage to make the running. She points to the vacuum Labour created. ‘What surprised me was I genuinely thought that people would not want to hear from Conservatives. You get a government that’s in a two-year honeymoon. But Labour started dissipating very quickly. They had their weird sleaze stories with Lord Alli. We weren’t ready to be answering questions about where we were going. The fact that people wanted answers immediately, I found that surprising.’ Wasn’t this period of silence a mistake? ‘No, because I would rather be out raising every single penny’ rather than doing ‘some nice media interviews’. Couldn’t she have done both? ‘I don’t think people realise just how perilous the situation was.’
Badenoch is right that turning around the situation she inherited – the worst general election defeat in the Tory party’s history – will take time. On the wall of her office in the Commons is a quotation from the philosopher Roger Scruton: ‘Good things are easily destroyed, but not easily created.’ But the Tories are falling further behind Reform. Conference, she knows, has to be a success. The slogan, revealed here, is ‘Stronger economy, stronger borders’. She says: ‘Those are the two problems of our age, stagnant growth and global mass migration.’
‘I basically inherited a distressed asset and my first job was to just make sure we didn’t go bust’
To curb migration, Badenoch is expected to announce on Sunday how the Tories would exit the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), making a specific speech on that issue, just as Theresa May did on Brexit in 2016, ahead of Tuesday’s main address. ‘I need to tell the story of why we’re doing this and how it’s going to happen. I would like people to have time to digest it.’ Badenoch is not yet ready to give the details. But the conclusion is clear – leave, not remain. ‘I need to have a shadow cabinet meeting. I want to walk everyone through it clearly without it being reported in advance.’ This meeting will be on Friday.
Her opening salvo against her opponents is on the economy. The Conservatives will attack both Labour and Reform for wanting to borrow and spend too much, putting the public finances at risk. She also has her own plan for growth that will involve ‘unpicking the Blairite settlement’ and ‘stopping deindustrialisation, which is killing this country’.
The Tories, she says, would begin by abolishing the Climate Change Act 2008. ‘That has to go.’ The Act mandates targets to hit net zero by 2050, which leads, Badenoch warns, to higher costs. ‘Ministers have to do lots of stupid things just to hit the target, even if they are not cutting [worldwide] emissions or even if we can’t afford them or they’re impractical,’ she says. ‘We have to hit a certain number of heat pumps to meet the target, but at the rate we’re going, it’ll take us about 300 years.’
Badenoch explains: ‘I’m not sceptical about climate change. That’s very obviously happening. But there’s been a lot of deception around the net zero agenda and I really want to expose that.’ Net zero has become ‘nothing more than a slogan… We need to do what we can sensibly to tackle climate change but we cannot do it alone. If other countries aren’t doing it, then us being the goody-two-shoes of the world is not actually encouraging anyone to improve.’
She’s critical of the Climate Change Committee, the quango that dictates policy, whose plans to reach net zero will cost Britain £319 billion over 15 years, according to some Tories. ‘We’re the only country in the world that is compliant with the Paris Agreement [on climate change]. The Climate Change Committee wants us to eat insects and less meat,’ she claims. ‘Our farmers get all these regulations put on them, we import more meat from elsewhere and dirtier products while closing down our industry. We’ve got to be ruthlessly focused on the prosperity of British citizens. We can’t look after the whole world.’
Badenoch also attacks the government’s double-speak over climate change. She wants bills ‘which do what they say on the tin’. She explains: ‘Like many Labour policies, they put a lot of bad stuff in a bill and then they give it a nice name. The Climate Change Act sounds like it’s tackling climate change. It doesn’t. The Employment Rights Bill sounds like it is helping people into employment. It’s just the opposite.’ What should they be called? ‘The Bankrupt Britain and Deindustrialisation Act. That’s what’s happening right now.’
She is especially concerned by Labour’s failure to exploit Britain’s own energy assets such as North Sea oil and gas. It is an issue she discussed with Donald Trump at the recent state dinner at Windsor Castle. ‘All he wanted to talk about was oil and gas.’
Trump, who publicly urged Starmer to exploit the North Sea, praised a speech Badenoch gave in Aberdeen (where Trump owns a golf course) making the same case. He told her: ‘I hear me and you agree on so many things.’ Energy supply, she says, will be key to fuelling the growth the country needs. ‘Countries that have cheap energy are growing. Countries that don’t are stagnating. We’ve got to get cheap energy.’
Badenoch’s plan for a ‘fun’ conference includes promoting open debates between party members on the stage. She hated the ‘straitjacket’ as a minister where ‘you had to read lines’. She encourages candour from her shadow cabinet: ‘I think people should just speak freely, no matter what the consequences are. I don’t mind people straying a little bit off piste.’
‘I’m not the sort of leader who needs everybody to agree with everything, just the core things that matter’
She must have been delighted, then, that Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary, has been so forthright with his opinions. ‘Yes. But most of them are my thoughts repackaged,’ she says, like a lioness cuffing an overly exuberant cub. ‘I don’t mind that he says what he thinks. The advantage of having a leadership contest is that you’ve kind of already said what you think. Repeating it, which is what Rob tends to do, is not new information.’ Swipe.
Badenoch’s real ire, though, is reserved for those Tories who prefer media peacocking to hard campaigning. She has no time for MPs ‘who want to go on I’m a Celebrity’; she wants people who ‘want to get shit done’ and ‘know to hold their nerve’. Badenoch’s positioning on migration and the environment will be seen by some as futilely chasing after those voters who have moved on to Reform and failing to win back centrist One Nation Tory voters who are tempted by the Lib Dems in seats in the south. ‘Not at all,’ she counters. ‘Being One Nation is about making sure that we are delivering a country that is cohesive and coherent. It’s not about holding on to a particular ideology because times change. A lot of people who you would have called hardcore One Nation are saying: “I think we need to leave the ECHR.” Even Lib Dem voters are talking about this.’
Badenoch is keen to have veteran Tory centrists back in the Commons. Penny Mordaunt would be welcomed back. ‘Penny is great,’ Badenoch says. ‘I like her a lot. I’m not the sort of leader who needs everybody to agree with everything, just the core things that matter.’ But she won’t be listening to those who want her to purge renegades on the right. She has no plans to kick out Liz Truss, who recently expressed sympathy with the former English Defence League leader Tommy Robinson. ‘She’s not a member of parliament. She doesn’t have the Conservative whip. But we also don’t do Stalinist purges. She made mistakes but I can’t fix the things that Liz did or Rishi or Boris or Theresa did. I need to talk about what I can fix.’ Former leaders warned her that the job was going to be ‘absolutely hellish’ and that ‘people will try to smear your reputation, ruin your life, make your family unhappy’. It may get worse before it gets better but she is not given to tears. ‘The 7/7 memorial was the last time I cried. I’m not a big crier. I cry at death.’
A big challenge looming for Badenoch is the local elections next May. The Tories are expected to lose seats in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments and haemorrhage councillors. If the results are bad will she quit, as the party chairman Oliver Dowden did in 2022 after two crushing by-election defeats? ‘I don’t think that’s why Oliver resigned,’ she says (it was assumed to be a move to damage Boris Johnson). ‘The bottom line is, I believe that I was elected to do a job and I’m going to do that job.’ Does that mean she won’t resign under any circumstances? ‘Ask me that after the locals.’
If the economy continues to stagnate and Labour fails to get a grip on migration, then more voters may well be susceptible to Badenoch’s pitch. But first she must show she can land blows on the men who stand in her way. Next week she enters the ring for the fight of her life.
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