Kemi Badenoch believes she has caught out Nigel Farage with a bit of digital sleuthing. No sooner had Farage announced that the official membership of Reform has surpassed the 132,000 declared membership of the Conservative Party than Badenoch declared it is all a con.
All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become
“Manipulating your own followers at Xmas, eh Nigel?” she tweeted on Boxing Day. The counter that Reform has been showing us is a fake, she declared. “It is designed to tick up automatically. We’ve been watching the back end for days, and can also see that they have just changed the code to link to a different site as people point this out. Farage doesn’t understand the digital age. This sort of fakery gets caught out pretty quickly.”
Given that Badenoch is a software engineer and I am not, I will take her word for it. But is she quite as politically astute as she is good at spotting dubious goings-on in IT? Farage’s reply was perfectly aimed, reminding the Tory leader that while she has 272,000 followers on X, or Twitter, he has 2.1 million. As he hinted, that suggests that he knows rather a lot about how the digital age works – or at least the most important aspect from the point of view of broadcasting a political message. He is making a rather louder noise than she is.
All Badenoch has really achieved is to emphasise how shrunken the Conservative party has become since the glory days of mass party membership in the 1950s, when it could claim nearly 3 million members. Even 20 years ago, after the debacle of 1997, 300,000 members were still paying their subs. There is an argument for saying that the size of a party’s membership isn’t all that important: just look at Jeremy Corbyn, who piled on a huge number of members after he was elected Labour leader in 2015 – and look what good it did him.
But to challenge Farage over the size of Reform’s official membership seems rather a misdirected attack. Clearly, Farage appeals to large numbers of people who are not usually motivated by politics, or who feel alienated by it. Trying to pretend that such people do not exist in the numbers that Farage claims is not going to achieve very much.
What Badenoch needs to do is similarly to motivate her potential followers. She needs to be banging home the message that the free market, low-tax economy is under threat, that Starmer is taxing and regulating on a different scale from any government of the past half century, that the unions are back in control of the country – and that Farage is not the man who is going to save small businesses, the self-employed, or the spirit of aspiration. Our enterprise economy is in dire threat, she needs to be saying, and only the Conservatives can save it; joining the Tories is a mission to do just that.
Badenoch has just shown that she may well have the talent to head up the National Cyber Security Service, but unfortunately that is not the job she is auditioning for. She wants to be Prime Minister, and for that you need mass appeal, not a nerdy knowledge of how stuff works on the web.
Have we been too quick to judge Kemi Badenoch? Paul Goodman speaks to Katy Balls and Oscar Edmondson on the latest Coffee House Shots podcast:
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