Is Kemi Badenoch the right person to rebuild the Tories?

The thing to understand about Kemi Badenoch is that, for all her manifest shortcomings, she is not stupid. Over the last few months, the incoming leader of the Conservative Party has given every indication that she, and those near to her, have given her future strategy some serious thought.

The question to which “Kemi” is the correct answer is: “How do we unite a shattered, electorally thrashed, ideologically obsessed party addicted to plotting?”

Without overdoing the analogies too much, the Kemi answer is the template provided by Margaret Thatcher in opposition, from 1975 to 1979.

Thatcher, too, became leader after the Heath government fell almost exactly half a century ago and the party was trounced in two successive electoral defeats, the latter of which going down as one of the worst in its history.

There then followed a period of drift and confusion over what the party stood for, with the new Labour government embarking on a series of classic tax, spend and borrow initiatives (the real precursor, by the way, to Starmerism). Thatcher, like Badenoch, a relatively junior member of the cabinet, and not universally popular with colleagues, challenged Heath and won the leadership, with some skilful campaigning. Both could be said to be “outsiders” in terms of class and background.

But, then again, the Tory party has always had a talent for accommodating and promoting to the leadership those with a “different” backstory: Disraeli the Jew, Bonar Law the Canadian, Major the Brixton boy.

What did Thatcher do next? What she didn’t do was to invent Thatcherism and do what she was later able to do over more than a decade in government. No – unmistakably a woman of the Right who’d had private qualms about the Heath government’s statist instincts and interventionist tendencies, she felt she had to build an inclusive shadow cabinet and to develop new policies carefully and as collegiately as possible. The later, radical policies, the purge of the “wets” and the arrogance, came much later, when she was well ensconced in power.

So what Kemi will do next, as she has tacitly indicated over these past few months, is to follow the Thatcher template as leader of the opposition – with the added, unexpected bonus of a Labour government diving into what may be a prolonged period of intense unpopularity.

In 1975, Thatcher felt it wise to bring all the talents she could into her team, and that had to include a mixture of old Heathite colleagues and those who had, in turn, fought her for the leadership after she’d dispatched Heath in the first ballot of that contest.

So, in came Willie Whitelaw, formerly a devoted follower of Heath, as her deputy leader, with others who were ideologically opposed to her in senior positions. James Prior, a man who believed in corporatism and incomes policy as devoutly as anyone (they were anathema to Thatcher), was in charge of employment and the very earliest, timid, notions of virtually consensual trade union reform. Geoffrey Howe, also a contender for the leadership, was more attuned to her thinking and became shadow chancellor. Peter Thorneycroft, also closer to her views on economics without being as right wing became party chair. She even rehabilitated that ultimate corporatist, Reggie Maudling, who had an unhappy and brief stint as shadow foreign secretary.

The only people she left out, or who wouldn’t join in, were Heath’s protege Peter Walker and Ted himself, who then famously embarked on the longest sulk in history. Of Thatcher’s front bench, she could only totally rely on her free market monetarist mentor, Keith Joseph, who would have become leader had he managed to curb his instinct to speak his highly logical mind.

Over the next four years, the team set up policy groups and think-tanking, preparing to learn from the errors of the 1970-74 government so many of them had served in. Their efforts culminated in the 1979 manifesto, which was vague on specifics but clear on the direction of travel. Gifted by the suicidal tendencies of the Labour movement, and a Liberal Party self-destructing under a bizarre sex scandal, they enjoyed what was then the biggest swing to an opposition party since the war.

Already in Badenoch’s statements and interviews, we can see this template being followed.

Badenoch wants all her rivals for the leadership – Jenrick, Cleverly, Stride, Tugendhat, even Patel – in her shadow cabinet (though she acknowledges they may not want the jobs she offers, which will make them seem usefully like sore losers).

In her leadership campaign, she was proud of attracting Damian Green on the One Nation wing, as well as Iain Duncan Smith of the traditional Eurosceptic right. She says she doesn’t have all the answers (one wonders how sincerely) and wants everyone to join in on new ideas… and then agree with her – if Thatcher is anything to go by.

Maggie, like Badenoch now, learned to curb her tendency to sound strident and patronising, and to belie her reputation for heartlessness (as in “Maggie Thatcher, milk snatcher” after her cuts to free school milk). Badenoch, who finds it hard not to be scornful, has already pledged to be softer and have fun.

But just as Thatcher was clear about denouncing things the Heath government had done that were “unconservative” so is Badenoch unsparing in slaying the Sunak administration. Perhaps Johnson’s too, which she has said “talked right but governed left”. The constructive ambiguity only goes so far.

As with Maggie Thatcher, too, Badenoch has her own ideas about policy, obviously – and, like Thatcher, apparently a taste for the more philosophical aspects of Conservatism. In Thatcher’s case, it was Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman; for Badenoch, it seems to be Roger Scruton and Thomas Sowell, as revealed in an interview with Tom McTague.

But for the next few years, Badenoch will have to listen to her colleagues and compromise on policy and presentation. That’s not temperamentally easy for her, but the alternative is another series of battles in the Tories’ almost permanent civil war, the one they’ve been fighting, funnily enough, ever since they defenestrated Margaret Thatcher in 1990, by which point she’d lost all the guardrails, power had gone to her head and she had truly reverted to autocratic type.

If all goes well for Badenoch, she’ll tread carefully into power in about 2028 or 2029, aided by a troubled Labour government, and her first cabinet will be a thoroughly reassuring, balanced affair. Then, over the course of the 2030s, a series of Badenoch administrations will gradually but radically reform and regenerate the nation, shrinking the state so that, as Badenoch explains already, it does less but does it better. And then, in around 2040, they’ll turn on Kemi for her barking “extremism” and her abrasive "style of government”, and the farcical Tory civil war may resume.

What is it they say about history repeating itself?