As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials that ‘the Treasury are opposed’, I’d invariably respond: ‘The building may have a view, but I’d prefer to hear from a person, and unless that person is the Chancellor, we’re going ahead.’
My most frequent observation, repeated almost every hour, was: ‘Don’t make the perfect the enemy of the good.’ It’s the golden rule of politics, and the advice I’d give now to those of my former colleagues who’ve been indulging in that favourite Tory pastime – grumbling about the leadership. The truth is there has never been a perfect Tory leader (although Lord Salisbury comes close). But Kemi Badenoch is good and getting better.
Monday’s announcement that the government would, after all, commission a national inquiry into the rape gang scandal was many things. Long overdue. An indictment of the moral cowardice of ministers. The very least the victims deserve. It was also a vindication of Badenoch. She had fought for it, forced vote after vote to try to secure it and been denounced for opportunism and dog-whistle racism as she sought only to give a voice to the women and girls betrayed for years. Finally, perhaps, a measure of justice may be coming – although, as John Power points out in his article, there are still ample grounds for fearing that the government will try even now to dodge the most difficult and important questions.
Labour’s U-turn on the inquiry is only their most recent surrender to arguments Badenoch has been making. The retreat on winter fuel payments followed sustained Conservative campaigning. The belated acceptance that men cannot become women by filling in a form meant acknowledging that Badenoch had indeed been right and not the bigot they had claimed her to be. Now, it appears, they may be on the verge of accepting she was correct about the long-term damage to tax revenues their Budget inflicted.
Badenoch’s leadership has been far from faultless. Spending Christmas quibbling with Nigel Farage over Reform’s membership figures was beneath her. A commitment to restore tax privileges for independent schools is a gift not to disadvantaged pupils but to Labour campaigners determined to depict the Tories as the party of the privileged. The Conservatives foolishly chose last week to side with nimbys in a vote on necessary planning liberalisation, putting the interests of the asset-rich ahead of those of the aspirational. But these missteps are minor set against the government’s sins, and they are all either forgettable or correctable.
Contemplating a change of leader is evidence of the persistent political immaturity of too many Tories
Would that the same could be said of Badenoch’s internal critics – the incorrigible in pursuit of the impossible. The agitation for a change of course, in many conversations quickly succeeded by the contemplation of a change of leader, is uncomfortable evidence of the persistent political immaturity of too many Tories. They display the impatience of a toddler allied to the stroppiness of a teenager without either the charm of the first or the promise of the second.
The party’s desperate position in the polls is not of Badenoch’s making. If there’s any female Tory leader who should take responsibility for the unpopularity it’s Liz Truss. There are attempts by some to revise the verdict on that brief period. And it is worth re-examining, because it was worse than many Tories are still prepared to admit. The party inflicted on the country a PM manifestly unfit for office who, whatever virtues any part of her programme may have had, implemented policy so ineptly that it toxified Tory ideas and tarnished Tory achievements. Far from being an icebreaker for another Thatcherite revolution, Truss was an ideologically-intoxicated joyrider who wrote off the country’s best vehicle for necessary reform.
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That is why the process of restoring confidence both in Conservative ideas, and the Tory party as the means of delivering them, will take time and care. Credibility must be restored by demonstrating intellectual seriousness and the sort of detailed plan for implementation that John Hoskyns developed for Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. And just as he helped ensure that the economic errors of the Heath premiership could be corrected, so the party now requires a similarly comprehensive account of how to control the migration which ran out of control in the Tories’ final years in office.
This will, undoubtedly, mean extricating ourselves from the European Convention on Human Rights as it stands. But that will not be enough on its own. Simply leaving the ECHR without addressing how it’s become intertwined with other legal and judicial constraints on necessary executive action would be to promise transformation while being destined to disappoint – the approach of both Truss and Starmer, which has corroded faith in democracy and failed to deliver the change the country needs.
Badenoch’s decision to commission David Wolfson KC, the finest legal mind in the Lords, to review our entire judicial architecture is a sign of seriousness. It is a demonstration of responsibility, not an abdication of action.
Some of the same critics who chide Badenoch for not being bolder or faster are also those who, with admirable inconsistency, complain about her combative character. Her ferocity in argument is undoubted, and it may make those Tories whose own arguments are weak uncomfortable to have them incinerated, Targaryen-style. But it hasn’t put off donors, as a recent increase in financial support for the party indicates.
In any case, successful political warfare requires not just courage in the heat of battle but care in the preparation of the campaign. To invoke another mantra – the right policy is the right politics. By being consistently right on policy Badenoch is, at last, providing the politics conservatism needs.
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