What’s gone wrong for Kemi Badenoch? The recent milestone of her first 100 days was met with a slew of worrying report cards. Her party has been overtaken by Reform in the polls. Nigel Farage is sucking up its airspace. The “box office” star quality that was meant to have Keir Starmer quaking in his boots at Prime Minister’s Questions each Wednesday has failed to materialise; Badenoch gives off the air of an underprepared student who, to quote the Prime Minister, “hasn’t quite done her homework”.
We’ve come a long way since 2024’s “Kemi fever”. A year ago, the then business and trade secretary was the bookies’ favourite to replace Rishi Sunak as the next leader. She topped the ConservativeHome leaderboard as the party members’ pick and her victory was deemed so assured that, as one Westminster wag put it, Tory MPs who perhaps should have been focused on holding their seats were “resigned to spending this year sucking up to Kemi”. Now there is a despairing mood among the remaining Tory MPs, who are wondering how quickly they can oust her. After a dire showing at the May elections? During the autumn conference season?
Allies are quick to point out that rebuilding a party after a catastrophic election defeat is a big job. They dismiss the polls, just as the Labour government is trying to, on the grounds that we’re four years out from an election. They use words like “grassroots” and “foundations”. Badenoch herself has made “renewal” her brand (her leadership campaign was called “Renewal 2030”). Renewal doesn’t happen overnight. Any leader would be finding it hard work.
The question is whether it’s the kind of hard work to which Badenoch is suited. Which brings to mind a conversation I had this time last year with a party insider concerned about the inevitability of her leadership. “The trouble with Kemi is that she hates media,” they warned. It’s not that she scorns individual journalists but media in general: forging relationships with reporters; placing strategic op-eds in newspapers; recording soundbites for the news. “She doesn’t see the point of it.”
Courting the media is one of the main parts of being opposition leader, far more so than for a government minister. It’s right up there with rebuilding party machinery and wooing donors – two other things that Badenoch seems to struggle with. At the time of the leadership contest, James Cleverly had stepped up to charm donors and host a fundraising ball when Sunak dropped out. Robert Jenrick toured the country addressing local Conservative associations. The woman who beat them both skips constituency events and cuts fundraising functions short.
The result is a crisis of funding and morale, and a void where a Conservative narrative should be. Reform is now gleefully referring to itself as the “real opposition”. Badenoch’s response has been to try to grab headlines by moving into Nigel Farage territory. At the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference on 17 February, she praised Donald Trump, took aim at “left-wing progressivism”, and warned that “all of Western civilisation will be lost” if Conservatives didn’t get back into power. This backfired in the right-wing press: she barely made it onto the Telegraph website homepage, tucked away in a slot next to a story about a pet cat travelling solo on a train. GB News put the item on her speech under a much more prominent story headlined “Could Kemi Badenoch face a leadership bid?”.
As for why PMQs, the part she’s meant to excel at, has been a disappointment, consider the debacle of 12 February. Badenoch plucked two issues from the front pages of the Telegraph and Daily Mail (a Gazan family allowed to apply to live in Britain under a scheme for Ukrainians, and the appointment of a border inspector who lived in Finland), but appeared to have done no research on either. Her performance was so embarrassing even her front bench looked dejected. It’s become commonplace for Badenoch to try an attack line only for Starmer to remind her that whatever inspired her outrage happened when she herself was a minister.
This isn’t about ideology, or a question of whether Badenoch’s brand of conservatism is too far to the right or left. It’s about attitude. She seems to think being opposition leader means giving big speeches about Western civilisation and how the political system is broken, coming up with “gotcha” moments gleaned from front pages and waiting for Labour to fall apart. In reality, it means touring the country to motivate local activists and donors, doing more than five minutes’ prep for the only fixed parliamentary event a week and saying yes to as many op-ed and interview requests as possible to give your party maximum exposure.
Badenoch’s critics have always accused her of being lazy. Her supporters say the opposite: that she has an engineer’s laser focus that is rare in Westminster. The reality is that both are true. On things she cares about – her crusade against identity politics, for example, or making the case for the need to rewire the British state – she is relentless. Things like networking and reading briefs on subjects that don’t interest her get ignored. All politicians have strengths and weaknesses.
What has gone wrong for Kemi Badenoch is that her skills align with a very different job to the one she actually has. If she doesn’t put more effort into the less glamorous aspects of being opposition leader, she may quickly find herself replaced with someone who will.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[See also: Reform is very wrong about net zero]
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This article appears in the 19 Feb 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Europe Alone