No, please no. Not again. Not again! As the Conservatives gear up to choose their next leader, and bookmakers place odds of 6/4 on Robert Jenrick, and just 4-1 for Kemi Badenoch, one has the most awful feeling of déjà vu. The party have already had their Jeremy Corbyn moment in choosing Liz Truss and their ‘let’s just plump for a manager’ spasm in voting in Rishi Sunak. Neither of those things, as I predicted in 2022, brought them anything but electoral wipeout, and nor did their rebuffing of Kemi Badenoch, their only obvious star.
With their measly 121 seats, what choice do Tory MPs have?
Many of us (and I mean many) have simply been waiting it out for Sunak to lose the election and for Kemi – they’d surely learnt their lesson now – to take over as she should have done before. Yet the Tory party, if those odds are right, are about to self-harm once again. To choose one lousy leader is misfortune; to choose two is sheer carelessness; to choose three hints at a delusional brain-rot which should terrify us all. It seems the Tories have looked at Keir Starmer, decided that two terms of him would be better than one, and are preparing to hurl themselves off Beachy Head.
While Tom Tugendhat, though surely a shoo-in for shadow Foreign Secretary, seems out of the picture (odds 33-1), let’s look at how the other three candidates fared at party conference in Birmingham last week. James Cleverly, who made a decent enough Home Secretary, certainly has pleasant qualities: a slight twinkle in the eye, as though he can’t bear to take himself seriously for much longer than he has to, and a winning smile that would thaw out most on the doorstep. He is probably the nicest of the three, the one you’d choose to sink a Lowenbrau with or visit Pizza Hut on a 2-for-1.
Unfortunately, none of this comes over in his public speaking. Time seems to slow down when Cleverly orates, a little something in you dies. He appears – onstage at least – to have no sense of pace, and a leaden note of ‘Have. You. Got. That?’ seems to pervade everything he says.
Apart from dwelling on his military past, namechecking the NHS, Ronald Reagan, Thatcher and Macmillan, his speech was essentially a collection of hoary old cliches with filler-sentences in between. We got ‘the future, not the past;’ ‘tomorrow can be better and together we can make it better;’ ‘by our actions, not just our words;’ ‘not in the rear mirror but at the road ahead,’ and ‘Our best days are ahead of us’. ChatGPT, assuming it didn’t come up with this bilge, might well have served him better.
Presumably MPs have decided they’ll have a quieter, more emollient time with Cleverly at the helm – he’s no slouch, you imagine, at making political friends – though it may be, after the next election, very much quieter than they wish. The voters will not forget that, when it came to it, Tories put their own short-term ease before the chance – the obligation, in fact – to get Starmer out.
Then there’s Robert Jenrick. Until recently no one had heard of him. Wasn’t he that guy who lost weight and said something about immigrants or something? But it seems, now Suella Braverman’s scarpered, he’s the right-wing candidate of choice. Jenrick has been described by Gareth Roberts, cruelly though not inaccurately, as looking like ‘a 12-year-old sent off on his first day of big school…, carrying a briefcase,’ and as ‘one of those men who will always look like a little boy, and I’m afraid that matters.’
But at Tory conference, we got an Iron Jenrick. Speaking to us – ‘My friends!’ – he told us how much he admired Margaret Thatcher, Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus, and sprayed out a stormcloud of abstract nouns – ‘sacrifice’, ‘love’, ‘duty’, ‘respect’, ‘decency’ ‘patriotism’. For uplift, he gave us a surreal image of how the whole nation could ‘rise’ (perhaps like a well-yeasted Bath bun). Using a nifty scattergun technique, he identified threats on all sides. Whatever you’re against, Robert ‘Iron’ Jenrick is damn well against it too. Illegal migrants. Net Zero. The European Convention of Human Rights. Bloated foreign aid. Trans-ing kids. Flaky, unpatriotic academics. There were so many dog whistles in Jenrick’s speech you waited for a Collie to hurtle past.
The Tories would be insane to choose him as leader – nothing would be a greater gift to those who want, once again, to characterise them as the ‘nasty’, callous party. But given their track record, there’s every chance they will. Of course, Reform have changed the political landscape, and their potential to split the vote is a threat the Tories must grapple with. But faced with a choice between Farage and Farage-with-soda, the Right will surely want to take it neat.
Then there’s Kemi Badenoch, and at last the second-hand on my watch began to move at normal speed again. In a no more than competent speech – on matters such as broken Tory promises, how the party had ‘stopped acting like Conservatives, and acted like managers’, and how much ‘fun’ they would have with the Labour front bench with her as leader – she nonetheless connected with the audience as the others rarely had.
Kemi’s faults are now in plain sight: the refreshing self-belief that treads, at times, perilously close to over-confidence; her tendency to get slightly drunk on candour and knock into the odd traffic-bollard; the tendency at times, facing criticism, to get tetchily defensive, when it might be wiser just to listen. All these, surely, are not defects dreamt up by her opponents.
Kemi’s faults are now in plain sight
Yet pity the politician without human failings, and Badenoch’s virtues – charisma, directness, clarity of thought, common sense, her ability to make people pay heed when she talks, and her unique ability to speak the same language in which most of us think, eclipse the lot. She has strong brand recognition with the public, many of whom feel, rightly or wrongly, that she’s got Britain’s back. Badenoch – ‘Rewire, reboot, reprogramme’ – is the only contender one can describe as a true radical. She seems to understand the need for structural change – the Civil Service, the more wayward of the quangos – before any wider progress can be made.
In other words, Kemi is a gamble, but one worth taking. With their measly 121 seats, what choice do Tory MPs have? What have they got to lose? Most of us are sick of being led by loons, non-entities, compromise candidates and decline-managers, even if the party are not.
Time’s now running out for the Conservatives – this is the third of their three strikes. The dustbin of history awaits them, a gleeful Farage standing by. If they talk to themselves, show contempt for the public and make a self-indulgent choice yet again – then who will forgive, who will forget, and who will honestly weep at their passing?
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