Can Kemi Badenoch turn the Tories’ fortunes around?

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has insisted she will not be rushed into policy positions, claiming there is no “quick fix” following the party’s historic defeat in July’s general election. Despite the multiple missteps taken by the Labour government since the summer, and some “choppy” times, the Conservatives have made relatively little progress in the opinion polls, with Reform UK gaining momentum and Labour still in the lead as 2025 approaches.

Like other party leaders taking over in unpropitious circumstances, Badenoch will have to find a way to persuade the voters to grant her and her party a hearing. At the moment they see no reason to pay the Tories much heed. As Badenoch herself says in her latest interview, the British people “kicked out” the Conservatives because the party was not trusted and did not deliver.

She adds that building trust is “something that takes a while”...

Travelling light would seem to be the essence of the new leader’s approach. As was clear during her leadership campaign, she prefers to keep to big, broad, traditional Conservative themes and make as few policy commitments as possible. Nearer to the next general election she will no doubt be pushed by circumstances into making some definite policy commitments, but they too may be vague and hedged around with caveats – not unlike what we saw in Labour’s successful 2024 election campaign.

Badenoch will inevitably be outflanked by Reform UK, who seem untroubled by making undeliverable promises to almost every group of voters, with Nigel Farage, their leader, cheerfully disavowing any policy that runs into a bit of difficulty. So, for example, on migration, Badenoch’s understandable reluctance to avoid setting any targets or caps on net migration will look weak and insincere when set against Farage’s adamantine certainties.

Since Badenoch had a careless moment at Prime Minister’s Questions a few weeks ago, Keir Starmer constantly accuses her of wanting all the new spending and investment contained in Rachel Reeves’s October Budget but refusing to support any measures designed to cover the cost. Thus, it is now the Conservatives who have to answer the question: “How will you pay for it?”

After 14 years in power, it’s proving difficult for them to know how to deal with that. At the moment, Badenoch is disavowing and even apologising for some of what the last Conservative government did, telling audiences that the party “talked right but governed left”, that it failed on migration, and that it generally “let people down”.

This may be eye-catching and honest, but she runs the risk of denigrating her own party and tempting the public to conclude that if it made such a mess of things when it was in government (not forgetting that Badenoch served in the cabinet during that time), there’s scant reason for it to be given another chance now.

It’s the muddle that Ed Miliband found himself in when trying to pick up the pieces after the New Labour defeat in 2010. Then again, perhaps the scale of the Tory disaster means that the party will have to have a radical rethink and shift to the right, as Margaret Thatcher did after Tory corporatism collapsed in chaos in 1974.

On her own, no. She will depend on having her habitually fractious party united behind her, even as she struggles to gain an audience; she will also have to escape any putative challenges to her leadership as frustrations mount. It’s fair to add, too, that her front bench is a little underweight in terms of profile and expertise – a product of the cull of MPs at the general election.

Given the possibility that Elon Musk could provide financial support to Reform UK, Badenoch will also have to recruit her own wealthy benefactors, or woo the richest person on the planet herself.

Further, she will need Reform UK to take votes from Labour and thus help to deprive Starmer of his majority next time round – that is, in the 89 out of 98 parliamentary constituencies where Reform finished second to Labour in July. Even so, Reform generally takes votes disproportionately from the Tories, and Badenoch cannot relish having to rely on Farage for support in a minority administration, still less as a dominant, disruptive presence in any future Conservative-Reform coalition; he is more popular than she is among many Tory activists.

Most of all, Badenoch will have to hope that Labour’s failures (perceived or real) will be so grievous that the voters conclude that her “changed Conservative Party” (to borrow a phrase) deserves another chance. As the old adage goes, oppositions don’t win elections: governments lose them. Next May, county council elections will provide an early measure of how the Badenoch project is progressing.