The Tories are about to choose a leader once more, and this time cannot allow themselves any self-indulgence. In 2022, they sidelined Kemi Badenoch – far and away the most popular candidate with the party-membership – in favour of a choice between Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. Tory MPs resembled a football manager ‘fielding the reserves’. The resulting electoral meltdown this summer seemed inevitable.
Badenoch clearly doesn’t shrink from a fight
Much has been made of Badenoch’s rather inspiring backstory: the birth in Wimbledon to middle-class parents (father a GP, mother a university professor), the childhood under a grim left-wing dictatorship in Nigeria, and her teenage move to the UK with £100 in her pocket. She is a feelgood politician, one far more likely to point out the virtues of Britain than to give us a tale full of grievance, woe or imperial injustice.
‘I came to this country aged 16 and now I am standing for Prime Minister,’ she said during the leadership election in 2022. ‘Isn’t that amazing?…That is amazing. And I don’t understand why people want to ignore all of the good things and only focus on the bad things and use the bad things to tell the story.’
Badenoch has a bracingly straightforward and commonsensical way of expressing herself, which makes her connect with the electorate as few other politicians can manage (see, for example, her run-in with Labour MP Kate Osborne, which has a directness absent from most waffling ministerial exchanges, or her recent takedown, delivered with lethal courtesy, of deputy-PM Angela Rayner).
There are few soundbites from Badenoch and a complete lack of windy rhetoric. She usually asks for, and gives, precise definitions of things, and sometimes recalls Tony Blair’s description of Margaret Thatcher as going ‘right to the heart of something’ and having a marvellously ‘uncluttered mind.’ Seeing this up against Starmer’s lava flow of abstract nouns and mixed metaphors – ‘bond of respect…Decade of national renewal…insecurity loaded onto the backs of working people’ etc. – would, you imagine, be a little like watching a scalpel go into a mound of blancmange. As she claimed in an interview in February this year, ‘I’m on top of my brief. I will not be tripped up’ – an impression she has done little since to undermine.
She clearly doesn’t shrink from a fight and has, she says, been told by her husband that her ‘capacity to tolerate conflict is too high.’ Confrontations there have certainly been, often with her own side – with Tory MP Caroline Nokes over trans-issues, Brexiteers over EU-legislation, with Speaker of the House Lindsay Hoyle, and opponents on the Left for dismissing people of colour with inconveniently conservative views as ‘Uncle Toms, coconuts, house slaves or house negroes.’ She has even, of late, clashed with Nigel Farage. Yet in each skirmish Badenoch has usually kept her cool and emerged with her reputation enhanced. As writer Simon Heffer put it: ‘She may go in hard, but she makes sure of her ground and facts before she goes in hard – which is something you don’t get from Suella Braverman or Priti Patel.’
Certainly, she has her critics. Nels Abbey in the Guardian accused her of playing to ‘the rightwing gallery’ and trying to ‘ride an anti-woke wave all the way to No. 10.’ But this seems less than just – as early as 2010, when she first ran (unsuccessfully) for Parliament, Badenoch was telling journalist Janice Turner: ‘I hate identity politics’ (and the stuff-and-nonsense online comments allegedly from her younger self, published on this very site, seem to bear this out). Ex-colleagues meanwhile have occasionally described her as ‘aloof’, over-ambitious and lacking a hinterland of interests outside politics. Yet such things were said in her heyday about Thatcher too. Baron Sewell, former chair of the Commission on Race and Ethic Disparities, admits Badenoch can seem ‘abrasive and adversarial’ but also speaks highly of her ‘Thatcher-like determination. “Because I believe this is right, I’m going to do this.” She’s a very no-nonsense person.’
A telling anecdote from Michael Ashcroft’s recent biography of her shows her, while waiting to be interviewed for the Saffron Walden candidacy that she finally won, determinedly self-isolating from rivals and listening to Rocky III’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ on headphones. At such moments, as with Thatcher, you may not exactly like Kemi Badenoch. Yet a large part of you can’t help rooting for her or feeling that a world in which someone like this doesn’t ultimately win out has something slightly wrong with it.
The Tory party cannot make any more mistakes
What’s clear is that the Tory party cannot make any more mistakes. Getting mushy over Tom Tugendhat’s nice, jolly face, St. Paul’s education, and military background – ‘I have served before… Now I hope to answer the call as prime minister’ etc. – will ensure the party’s doom. Thinking they will have an easier, more collegiate time under the comparatively emollient (and unknown) Mel Stride will show the party has learnt nothing at all from their recent defeat.
Robert Jenrick and James Cleverly have their clear supporters, yet neither seem quite to have Badenoch’s edge, her ability to cut eloquently through the waffle or her mass appeal to voters. The old chess rule that the best of all moves is the one your opponent least wishes you to make seems to apply here too; Badenoch is simply the potential leader most likely to terrify the Labour front bench (and the efforts the Guardian have recently put into taking her down would seem to bear this out). Even TV pundit Kehinde Andrews, professor of ‘Black Studies’ (and no friend of hers), predicts grudgingly that ‘in five years Kemi will be the first black British prime minister…I’d put a bet on it.’
Badenoch memorably said to Eurosceptic critics last year, ‘I’m not an arsonist, I’m a Conservative’. Certainly, over the next five years, the party will not need an arsonist as leader – with David Lammy appointed Foreign Secretary and Lisa Nandy Culture Minister (the most inept piece of miscasting since Nadine Dorries filled the role), it seems a slow process of self-immolation has, in the Labour cabinet, already begun.
What the Conservative party will need instead is a nimble and forensic politician with a bit of star quality who, facing a barrage of blather from Starmer and his colleagues, will speak to people in terms they understand and reconnect with the common-sense instincts of Middle England. It will require a leader who can tell an inspiring story to the electorate and give a beleaguered Britain back a bit of self-belief. It will want someone ready to ‘go in hard,’ unafraid to confront their opponents head on and ask the most awkward of questions, with conviction and confidence and completely on top of their brief. It’s high time, in other words – it was time two years ago – for the Tories to stop fielding their reserves and put in place a proper striker. Kemi Badenoch deserves her chance to lead the Conservatives, and the party must not screw it up again.
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