Kemi Badenoch has only been Conservative leader for two months. The next general election is likely to be held in 2028 or 2029. Yet there have been persistent rumblings that she must set out clear policies if she is to win back support from voters who left the Tory fold. In The Financial Times, Robert Shrimsley warned that Badenoch “does not have as much time as she thinks”, and that “she does not have the luxury of leisure to figure it out while a grateful nation waits and watches”.
Announcing specific policies at this stage would force Badenoch to create an army of hostages to fortune
Shrimsley has previously won a prize for satire, so perhaps this was an unannounced return to the genre. But the idea that the leader of the Opposition should be announcing detailed policy plans at this stage of the electoral cycle is absurd. It is unnecessary, as the amount of attention voters are currently willing to grant the Conservatives is tiny; but it is also actively dangerous and potentially counter-productive.
The circumstances of January 2025 are not those in which the next general election will be fought. Although the Labour government has performed more strongly in vacuous and repetitive oratory than in terms of delivery of public policy, we have begun to see a direction of travel: higher taxes, economic stagnation, a stifling but unshakeable belief that a larger and more interventionist state is the solution to Britain’s problems. Conservatives can guess with some confidence the areas in which there will be ideological clash, but no-one can be expected to know the details.
Increasing National Insurance contributions for employers was clearly going to have a negative effect on jobs, and the Conservatives have been right to say so. But expecting Badenoch to devise an alternative taxation scheme now which she would not be in a position to implement until 2028 or 2029 is to encourage fantasy economics, or else invite a proposal so weighed down by caveats that it becomes meaningless.
Announcing specific policies at this early stage would also force Badenoch to create an army of hostages to fortune. As any politician should know, the internet never forgets. A politician only needs to hint that he or she is mildly inclined towards a course of action for that to be framed somewhere as what Sir Keir Starmer would call a “cast-iron” guarantee. The public mood does not allow a change of heart or a review of evidence. To think again is to show weakness.
It is especially important for Badenoch and her top team to avoid this because they have, rightly and with spirit, criticised the government for setting a match to many of the promises it made in its own manifesto. Even though Starmer recognised the hazard of detailed commitments and gradually trimmed the Labour party’s policy platform, issues like winter fuel payments, the pledge not to raise taxes on “working people”, compensation for WASPI pensioners and the repeal the Northern Ireland Troubles Act 2023 have shaken the government’s image.
Voters are justified in seeing an administration that does not do what it has said it will do. This is another blow for the already-low level of public trust in politics and politicians, and it is a fate Badenoch and the Conservatives must avoid. This is especially true since the party’s renewal must include an acknowledgement that the previous government fell down in this regard, most notably on immigration.
What Badenoch must do over the coming months, and has started to do already, is articulate a vision of the kind of Britain she wants to create. We know she favours lower taxation and free markets, and that she believes that the state “should do fewer things, but what it does, it should do with brilliance”. She has criticised enshrining environmental targets in statute – a mistake of the last government which its successor shows no desire to change – as “trusting regulation rather than innovation”. It is simply not credible to look blank and claim not to know what Badenoch stands for.
Sometimes it pays to learn from the past. When Margaret Thatcher made her first party conference speech as leader in 1975, she had been in post for nine months. Her address is worth reading, especially in this context: it is a determined and rousing performance, which drew on her fundamental principles. In more than 40 minutes, however, Thatcher made only one concrete policy commitment, to overturn then-social services secretary Barbara Castle’s abolition of hospital pay beds. That was not the fulcrum on which Thatcher’s election victory four years later would turn.
A blizzard of pledges would do nothing but harm. Badenoch should follow her own advice to do less but to do it well. First come the principles, the overarching philosophy, the vision of a future Conservative Britain. Then, as the general election comes closer, certainly once we pass this parliament’s halfway point, the “what” needs to be buttressed by a “how”. Keeping a measured pace is not a luxury, but a necessity. Kemi Badenoch will not be coerced by the notional timetables of others. If the Conservatives want to get this right, they must be thorough. The party will only get one chance.
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