The Conservatives believe in family as the “bedrock” of society, love freedom and like to drop inspirational epigrams from a little-known figure called Margaret Thatcher. As Kemi Badenoch made her first conference speech this year – there will be another on Wednesday – it didn’t feel like we were due for any great revelations.
The shadow over proceedings, of course, was the fact that the party is polling on 15 per cent. And when she suggested the country was “crying out for” her brand of politics, there was more than one balk in the hall.
The promised “major announcement” was a restatement of things already trailed in to-camera videos and press interviews in recent days. It was a policy double-whammy: withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) and deporting over 100,000 people from Britain.
She hammered Labour, check. And she went for Reform a little. But her swipes left and right resulted in a performance of almost virtuoso Lib-Demmery positioning, with her presenting the Tories now as the level-headed middle of the road option between two dangerous fast lanes. Labour, we heard, “shouts racism” while Reform “whips up outrage”. The dirtier work of branding Reform as Putin sympathisers – following former party figure Nathan Gill’s admission that he took Russian bribes – fell to Welsh leader Darren Millar in his preludial remarks. “They are despicable,” he spluttered.
Badenoch’s main attack was that Reform has ill thought-through plans. Yet no one here in Manchester has yet been able to tell me why a policy marked “leave the ECHR” is better and more credible when Tory shadow attorney general David Wolfson writes a 200-page paper recommending it, versus when Nigel Farage advocates it because he believes it is right. This is the same policy as Reform’s, it just took the Tories a fair while longer to reach the inevitable policy conclusion of their own rhetoric.
Thankfully the speech stood out in some other ways. Badenoch was willing to quite robustly defend the Tories’ record in office. She’s clearly picked up on a feeling that all the back-flogging isn’t really helping them. I note that her former mentor, and former Cabinet colleague, Michael Gove has recently urged a more robust defence of the 14 years in power, not least his own school reforms, along with job creation and the success of the Covid-19 vaccines.
And Badenoch also addressed rising ethno-nationalism on the Right. It has taken her a while to call this out, despite the fact some members of her own shadow front bench have started to distinguish the “white British” from the rest of the national community, with all the corollaries that carries for British people who are not white.
“I am British, as we all are, my children are British,” she said, before lashing out at race-based identity politics of the left and right: “I will not allow anyone on the left to tell them they belong in their own category or any one on the right to tell them that they do not belong in their own country.”
It immediately reminded me of something a Badenoch sympathiser recently told me when I asked why they defend her so viscerally: “Kemi is hated by the two groups that I hate most in this country: the woke and the racists.”
In this first speech of the conference, she spoke well and was clearly on comfortable ground extolling the Thatcherite homilies of old. I’ve thought before that despite her weaknesses, Badenoch’s political strengths – that she knows what she thinks and speaks in complete paragraphs – show through particularly well when she is required to speak at a podium.
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