Kemi Badenoch could probably already have served a truncated term as prime minister had she made different choices. Back at the turn of the year, key figures inside the secretive group behind the commissioning of giant MRP polls that indicated how badly the Tories would lose under Rishi Sunak hoped she might indicate her willingness to take over in response.
Instead, she played things safe, staying resolutely loyal to the then prime minister and not ‘playing the game’. So the bid to replace Sunak before the election ran out of steam and those involved cast around for an alternative right-wing champion, which they found in the form of Robert Jenrick.
The immediate task facing Badenoch is to make a memorable first impression
Who knows how many Tory seats a six-month Badenoch premiership full of punchy right-wing home truths could have saved? Yet had she gone for it she would probably by now be looking at the highlights of her brilliant career via the rear-view mirror.
This quality of self-possession – some would call it stubbornness – surfaced again at the outset of the Conservative leadership contest that she has just won. Several well-wishers told her she had to match Jenrick’s eye-catching immigration policy pledges or face a high risk of being eclipsed by him as the leading candidate on the right. Her reply was that while it may or may not prove possible to win, she was determined to try and do so on her own terms: general principles must come first, only to be followed later by properly-engineered policies which would prove durable in the face of many countervailing pressures.
Today we have learned that her ‘I’m an engineer’ pitch worked. She has indeed won on her own terms. Mrs Badenoch finds herself leader of the opposition facing a Labour government performing a high-speed masterclass in the art of losing friends and alienating people. In stock market terms, she has bought into a share priced artificially low and with heaps of upside potential.
And yet the Tory firm is undeniably in one heck of a mess. It would be wrong to refer to the 120 fellow Conservative MPs she now leads as a ‘band’ because that would imply unity and coherence. In fact, her best result during the multiple parliamentary leadership ballots saw her win the support of just 41 of them. She has told friends that she wishes to take her parliamentary party ‘on a journey’ which will turn the bulk of them into a reinvigorated fighting force.
Those of us who have followed her rise these past few years are already well versed in the Kemi brand. As she recently told Sky’s Sophy Ridge: ‘I’m very blunt, very forthright. I’m very confident as well. I’m not a wallflower.’ Yet polling conducted just three months ago by BMG Research found that only 49 per cent of the electorate had even heard of her (though this still placed her seven points ahead of Jenrick).
The immediate task facing Badenoch, then, is to make a memorable first impression on the many millions in the population who, in the words Tony Blair, only follow politics ‘as a distant, occasionally irritating fog’. Not being a wallflower is incontestably an advantage here. So, frankly, is being a black woman at the helm of a party much better known for its identikit men in grey suits.
Even the people who haven’t the foggiest about political minutiae have spotted that Britain is in a mess that seems to have been getting progressively worse for many years. They will have clocked that there is a vacancy for a ‘next big thing’ in politics and, if early polling is to be believed, already decided that Keir Starmer isn’t it. Seldom has a debut battle at Prime Minister’s Questions been so eagerly awaited as the one coming on Wednesday.
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