The unstoppable rise of Kemi Badenoch

The old socialist Ian Mikardo used to say that a political party was like a bird in that it needed a left wing and a right wing in order to fly. The guiding principle of Rishi Sunak’s mini-reshuffle seems to be that the Tory party needs a Blue Wall and a Red Wall in order to sustain a parliamentary majority.

The appointment of Chelsea and Fulham MP and former George Osborne protégé Greg Hands as party chairman is about the most Blue Wall thing ever. Giving him the plain-speaking Ashfield MP Lee Anderson, a former coal miner, as deputy, could hardly be more Red Wall.

So Sunak stands in sharp contrast to his ill-fated predecessor Liz Truss in drawing his top team from all strands of the party rather than just favouring his own natural supporters.

Yet the danger in making promotions based on party management considerations is that the public doesn’t pick up any coherent signal at all from an event such as a reshuffle. Anyone in Downing Street who believes that yesterday’s simultaneous minor rejig of Whitehall departments will win the approval of voters must be smoking strong stuff. On that score, the PM might as well have announced that paper-clip management was being merged with staplers and hole punchers in order to create a single coherent stationery department: no-one cares.

All of which leaves a single noteworthy happening in his personnel and portfolio tinkering: another instalment in the rise and rise of Kemi Badenoch. Yesterday’s elevation to heading a new super department combining trade and business represents her third cabinet promotion since the summer leadership contest. First, Truss put her in charge of the International Trade portfolio, then Sunak added the women and equalities brief and now she has the wider business department too.

Given that the one limiting factor in her own leadership bid in the summer was that she had not served in the cabinet at all, this makes her the minister most likely to take over as leader should the current one fall. The bookies agree with that assessment, placing her ahead of the likes of Penny Mordaunt and Ben Wallace in the betting, with only Boris Johnson ahead of her in the rankings.

This is a perilous position for any politician to find herself in. Ambitious colleagues are likely to nurse resentments and there is always the possibility of the leader himself becoming fed up of hearing an underling constantly talked up as the next big thing.

There is even a theory circulating among some senior Tory MPs that Badenoch’s latest promotion is deliberately designed to land her with a series of difficult or intractable problems in order to take some of the shine out of her rising star. She will have to play an enhanced role in sorting out the current wave of strikes and the EU retained law legislation; Badenoch must also help construct a law banning trans conversion therapy that doesn’t also risk criminalising therapists and parents who wish to raise the possibility with vulnerable young people that changing gender might not be the key to their future happiness.

Is Sunak so Machiavellian as to wish to hamper a possible replacement? More likely he simply realises that in a party so ridden by factions as the Conservatives are in Parliament, he needs properly to accommodate a talented minister with a large supporter base on the back benches.

Badenoch fans, such as I, should not be too fearful of her burning out. Currently she is in the happy position of being seen as the Queen over the water without even having to be over the water. Her leadership campaign of July has already gained almost mythic status, with many Tories now regarding her as the one true advocate of whatever particular combination of ideas they happen to believe in themselves.

If the Conservatives are turfed out of office in 2024 then she will be the one to beat. Even the blond bombshell himself may struggle to do that.