Kemi Badenoch likes a good Thatcher comparison. The current Tory leader is presently reading Patrick Cosgrave’s account of the Iron Lady’s rise to the top.
It was another book – John Ranelagh’s Thatcher’s People – that recorded how in one 1970s Conservative policy meeting, a speaker started to argue that the party should adopt a pragmatic middle way. Thatcher removed her copy of Hayek’s Constitution of Liberty from her handbag, slammed it down on the table and declared, ‘This is what we believe.’
This morning was Badenoch’s attempt to do something similar. Appearing at the Arc conference in London, the Tory leader used a 1,700 word speech to set out her vision to some of the 4,000 attendees assembled from across the globe. It was the kind of big picture, Manichean address which Badenoch relishes: lots of talk about the West in peril, free speech in decline and a crisis of confidence in national institutions.
She cited recent surveys showing Brits under-30 would favour a dictator as leader and refuse to fight for King and country. Blaming politicians, Badenoch railed against the ‘media class’ and ‘a Parliament obsessed with trivia presiding over stagnation’. ‘I believe that loopholes in liberalism have been found and easily exploited’, she said, citing how the ‘rule of law’ and ECHR have ‘been hacked’ and ‘weaponised by those who wish to erode our national identity.’
The benefit of these big-set piece speeches is that they allow Badenoch to showcase her credentials as a thinker. The drawback is the need to mix domestic concerns with international talking points. Thus, in a few lines the speech jumped from blaming ‘fiscal weakness’ for ‘the decline of the Roman Empire’ to insisting that ‘our country is not racist. We don’t need to apologise. We don’t need to pay reparations or give away the Chagos Islands.’ This can produce jarring headlines as Tory woes are juxtaposed against the collapse of Western civilisation.
But it did lead to effective moments of political communication too. Perhaps the most striking moment from Badenoch’s speech was when she talked of the superficial allure of dictators and their ilk:
In the 1960s, many former British colonies in Africa decided to move on from British values a lot of people preferred strong man politics and ethnic nationalism to democracy and pluralism. But when they got it, they didn’t like it. The strong men had lots of words, but no plan. They ran everything and delivered nothing.
‘Lots of words but no plan’ – who might Kemi Badenoch be thinking of there? In likening her Reform rivals at home to foreign despots abroad, the Tory leader was showing how she intends to tackle the threat posed by Nigel Farage. She and her team want to portray him as an attention-grabber who, ultimately, is writing checks he cannot cash. As she continued:
The very essence of democracy is acknowledging the will of everyday people – and then actually making it happen. Populism becomes corrosive if it is just words without thought, rage without reason, anger without the ability to action. For those of us who seek leadership, we must do better.
That, her allies argue, is what Mrs Thatcher would have demanded. Tomorrow, Farage will get his turn to respond when he addresses this same conference. But today, Badenoch gave perhaps the best insight into her worldview in her leadership to date – and illustrated just how she intends to fight him over the next four years.
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