Kemi Badenoch once said that she would play Taylor Swift at her victory party if she won the Conservative leadership. One imagines “Anti-Hero” was not top of the playlist, with its chorus: “It’s me, hi, I’m the problem, it’s me.”
The narrative swirling around Badenoch four months into her leadership is that she is the problem: that she is fundamentally unsuited to the task at hand and is worsening an already dire situation, failing to capitalise on Labour’s plummet in the polls since the election and shredding what little credibility her party still had when Rishi Sunak stood down.
Polls show not only that Nigel Farage’s Reform has overtaken the Tories (the latter are languishing around the 20 per cent approval mark), but that voters disenchanted with Keir Starmer’s government are deserting Labour for anyone except the Tories. Once the darling of members and MPs, Badenoch has faced a slew of negative briefings. She has been accused of missing open goals at Prime Minister’s Questions (PMQs). Her work ethic and punctuality have been questioned to the extent insiders speak of “her own time zone”, “KMT”. Dozens of jobs have been axed from Conservative Campaign Headquarters, with the party facing a funding crisis as donors close their wallets – or, in the case of billionaire Nick Candy, defect to Reform.
Might a party with a taste for kicking out leaders already be growing impatient? At a conference on Remaking Conservatism on 17 March, Badenoch gave a brief “keynote” speech that contained little beyond platitudes about her admiration for Margaret Thatcher. Earlier, a speaker had joked that she would arrive soon “to give us her words, wise or otherwise, we don’t yet know”. Before her speech, panellists were asked whether she would still be leader at the next election. None of the four expressed confidence. One recalled a senior Tory who, on the subject of Badenoch becoming leader, had told him: “I’m a bridge player, and I believe in playing your losing cards first.”
The buzz at the conference focused less on the title topic and more on whether Badenoch, whose leadership campaign slogan was “Renewal 2030” (the first full year the Tories could be back in power), would last the year. If the local elections in May go as badly for her party as is expected, will she last until summer?
Her defence is that rebuilding a party from an electoral nadir is not a quick task. Even MPs who did not back Badenoch for the leadership acknowledge that “the challenge is immense” and will take time. Starmer suffered a devastating by-election defeat in Hartlepool a year into his leadership of Labour – but was able to change course and win a landslide general election victory three years later. As Jason Cowley recently wrote for the New Statesman, Margaret Thatcher had to remake her party in opposition before winning power. (Although, when I put this to one Tory insider, they pointed out Thatcher knew what she wanted to do before she became leader.) Recovery requires patience, and patience, I was told by a Badenoch ally, is one of her strengths.
Many MPs believe in Badenoch’s strategy of not becoming a hostage to fortune by announcing a slate of policies early on. On 18 March she announced the start of a “policy renewal programme”, reminiscent of the process David Cameron undertook in opposition, and which will be led by members of her shadow cabinet. A big reason MPs backed her for the leadership was that they believed she had the intellectual rigour to rewire the party. Her focus on canvassing opinion from all sides to rethink what a modern Conservative Party stands for is considered the right one. Or, rather, it would be – if the Tories had the time and space to work out the answer.
“What’s Kemi’s problem? I can answer that in one word: Nigel,” a Tory insider told me. “No one has ever had to do this in a three- or four-party system.”
Panic about Reform runs deep, among those who supported Badenoch over the summer, those who would have preferred a more unifying figure such as James Cleverly, and those who backed Robert Jenrick and believe the Tories need to move closer to Farage’s positions if they are to survive.
If anything, the remaining cohort of Conservative MPs is less anxious about the threat of Reform than the wider party is. One Tory insider referred to it as “survivorship bias”, drawing a comparison with the Second World War statistician Abraham Wald. Wald realised that the high incidence of planes returning with bullet holes in the wings and tail did not suggest that these were the areas that should be reinforced. By only analysing the planes that returned home, scientists were disregarding the ones shot elsewhere that had crashed.
Similarly, Tory MPs who successfully saw off a strong Reform challenge in their seat might be underestimating the risk Farage poses. “Most Tory MPs don’t know how much we’re hated,” the insider said. “Speak to the MPs who lost their seats instead.”
One such MP is Simon Hart, the former Conservative chief whip. When I spoke to him about his book Ungovernable, he was frank about how in 2022 the Tory brand lost first its reputation for integrity under Boris Johnson, then its economic credibility under Liz Truss. “The one thing everybody always used to say was, ‘I don’t really like the Tories very much but they can run an economy.’ So they grudgingly accepted that we were a more competent offering than anybody else on the economy. That was one of our USPs.” By the time Sunak took over in October 2022, Hart believes, he had little hope of reversing the party’s fortunes before the election. The same applies to Badenoch: it is too soon, I was repeatedly told, to expect results yet.
That does not mean that she has been making the best of a bad situation. The grunt work of opposition leader – forging relationships, rallying grassroots, charming donors – does not suit a leader who actively dislikes networking and, as the Westminster consensus goes, can start a fight in an empty room.
One major criticism is that her distaste for media has left a void that Farage has been eager to fill. In opposition, journalists are less inclined to come to you: you have to fight to get your narrative out there. Badenoch seems to be expecting anything she does will be widely covered and win plaudits in the right-wing press, but even the Telegraph seems reluctant to act as her mouthpiece. Her media appearances have not made the impact an opposition leader needs. “Look at it this way,” one former adviser said. “When David Cameron was four months in… he was hugging huskies. All anyone knows about Kemi is she wants to cut maternity leave and hates bread.”
Part of the problem is that for all her talk of returning to core Conservative principles, Badenoch is still sending mixed messages about where the party stands. She has struggled to define herself, preferring to repeat lines about her upbringing in Nigeria or her mantra that the state needs rewiring. “Are we offering something different to Farage?” one disillusioned activist asked. “Or are we Reform-lite? And if we’re Reform-lite, why support us instead of the full-fat version?” They cited Badenoch’s speech to the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in which she talked about “existential threats” to “Western civilisation”. But rather than Ukraine, she took aim at the bêtes noires of the Maga right: “The real poison of left-wing progressivism, whether it’s pronouns or DEI or climate activism.”
This isn’t the only time Badenoch has positioned herself alongside Trumpism. When JD Vance apparently snubbed Britain as “some random country that hasn’t fought a war in 30 or 40 years” (Vance has denied this referred to the UK), Badenoch responded by rebuking her own MPs for tweeting their outrage: “A lot of people are getting carried away.”
“She’s putting her friend over her party,” one former Tory adviser said. At a time the Tories are seeking to burnish their patriotic credentials by standing with the government on defence, Badenoch’s “siding with JD Vance over our armed forces” – as a Lib Dem press release put it – sends a different message.
This is frustrating as there is a real opportunity, another former adviser suggested, for the Conservative Party to use developments in the US and Ukraine to defang Reform on foreign policy. Even most Reform voters have a negative view of Putin, whom Farage has said he admires. This could be a “game-changer” in the local elections, the former adviser said.
Badenoch has invested so much in her relationships with Trump’s inner circle that she is reluctant to be seen as critical of the US president, even if his position on Ukraine has shocked British voters. Whether an attempt to emulate Trump’s success or a bid to neutralise the attention Elon Musk has been bringing to Reform, her equivocation is a missed opportunity to draw a clear dividing line.
Another missed opportunity, one Tory strategist suggested, related to a certain ex-prime minister. Since being forced out of office in October 2022, Truss (who lost her seat last July) has been on a Trump-wards trajectory that is deeply unhelpful to the party. In February she told a conference of American conservatives that the UK was “failing” and needed its own “Maga” movement to save it. As Simon Hart pointed out, Truss’s toxicity was a core factor in the Tories’ defeat. Yet she remains in the party, a reminder of the legacy Badenoch is trying to move away from.
There has been speculation that Truss could defect to Reform, as Lee Anderson and Andrea Jenkyns have done. “Please, take her!” was the response of several Tory insiders when I put this to them. One made the comparison to Starmer suspending Jeremy Corbyn, demonstrating how serious he was about changing the party. “Liz Truss is our Corbyn,” the source said, adding Badenoch was still suffering from the “long hangover” of Truss. Kicking her out would send a powerful signal of how serious Badenoch is about distancing the party from its recent history.
But while Badenoch has reportedly expressed her frustrations with Truss privately to her shadow front bench, she has proved oddly reluctant to call her out publicly. Indeed, one is far more likely to hear her rail against the net-zero legislation signed into law by Theresa May than mention the Truss mini-Budget. Ending the cross-party consensus on emissions by calling net zero a “fantasy” formed the centrepiece of her speech that launched the party’s policy commissions. Rebuilding the party’s economic credibility did not.
Badenoch, with her provocative, confrontational style, was expected to excel at PMQs. But here, there is also disappointment. This matters not because the public pays attention to PMQs (they don’t), but because the MPs sitting on the benches behind her do. When an opposition leader lands a blow on the PM, their MPs are emboldened. When a leader is caught out because they haven’t been properly briefed, or suffers a putdown so stinging the whole House starts laughing, MPs start to despair. The lack of energy Badenoch brings to proceedings, often fading into irrelevance as others, such as Ed Davey or Farage, dominate the questioning, is sapping morale.
With a considerably reduced Commons cohort, Conservative MPs need to be energised, not deflated. After all, these are the people who will decide if she stays in the job. It would take 41 MPs – a third of the parliamentary party – losing patience to trigger a confidence vote. And they have a front-row view of her lacklustre spats with Starmer each week.
But the question haunting the party is: if not Badenoch, who? The runners-up in the last contest remain in the picture. Cleverly might be better at PMQs, courting the media and winning back donors. Jenrick might be better suited to mitigating the threat of Reform – or more open to working with Farage. Rumours have reignited of a “unite the right” effort within the party to do a deal with Reform (though many cannot stomach the idea of working with a man whose stated aim is to destroy their party). No one believes Badenoch is the right person for this particular task.
Restoring the credibility of a brand that has been “trashed”, as one MP put it, is a long job. It starts at the grassroots: showing you can run local councils, then mayoralties. “Our biggest answer to Reform is to look like we’re winning on competence,” they said. “Sure, you may like what Farage says on immigration – but do you trust Reform to fix the potholes in your road and sort out the bins?” Despite the frustrations with Badenoch’s performance, there is little that she – or anyone else – could do to speed up that process. “It’s a case of show, not tell – and we need time to show.”
Time is something the Tory party may not have. It has never had to rebuild itself while facing such a fierce challenge from its right. There is a risk that a strong showing for Reform in the May local elections will further displace the Tories as the opposition in the public imagination. Once momentum starts to build – further sliding in the polls, lost council seats, more defections – it is hard to stop.
“Can we afford to switch leaders again?” is a worrying question for the Conservatives. More worrying still is: what if the biggest problem isn’t Kemi Badenoch after all?
[See also: Who could succeed Kemi Badenoch?]
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This article appears in the 19 Mar 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Golden Age