
The Conservative Party is under new leadership. That was the key takeaway from Kemi Badenoch’s speech today, her first of 2025 and her big opportunity to tell a country that roundly rejected her party six months ago exactly what the Tories now stand for.
Well, that was what she wanted the takeaway to be. Badenoch repeated the line several times, punctuating her diagnosis of the UK’s long-term malaise with regular reminders that the Conservatives have changed. The essence of that change, however, is up for debate.
But let’s backtrack – back through the lavish halls of the Institute of Directors on Pall Mall where Badenoch chose to deliver her agenda-setting leadership speech, back past this week’s YouGov poll that put the Tories in third place behind Labour and Reform, all the way back to the leadership contest. Unlike Robert Jenrick, who made reducing immigration by virtually any means necessary the cornerstone of his leadership pitch, Badenoch ran with a message that it was too soon post-defeat for the Conservatives to have policies. Her pitch was that the party needed time to reflect on what had gone wrong in government and get its ideas straight in opposition before announcing a plan.
Ten weeks into her leadership, this was the speech that was meant to tell us what she had figured out so far. And the answer is… hard to discern.
Badenoch kicked off with a quote from the economist and philosopher Thomas Sowell: “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.” Politicians, she said, had not been honest about the state the country is in. Past governments – Labour, Conservative – have been quick to announce policies they think the public want without any plans to actually enact them. But no longer. “We are going to tell the truth.”
That truth involved some tough words about her predecessors. The most explosive lines from the speech, heavily briefed beforehand, took aim at parts of the Tories’ recent 14-year legacy under various leaders: leaving the EU without a plan for growth (Theresa May and Boris Johnson), signing net zero targets into law without a plan of how to achieve that (Theresa May), and promising to reduce immigration with so little plan that it actually spiked to record levels (Boris Johnson and Rishi Sunak). (There was no attack on the record of Liz Truss. Maybe Badenoch deemed her time in office too brief to have been relevant.)
This is all part of Badenoch’s effort to rebuild the Conservatives’ credibility, by offering a heartfelt apology to the electorate for the mistakes that led to the party’s crushing defeat in July. That requires distancing her leadership from the legacy of recent leaders. But it comes with two challenges.
First, it’s a delicate balance to be critical of the Tories’ record without demonising the greatly reduced pool of MPs and supporters that the party has left. Badenoch dealt with this by generalising (“The problem is broader than one party, one leader, or one period of government”), and by peppering her critique with regular attacks on Keir Starmer (all familiar to anyone who’s been following PMQs over the past few months), making it clear that however badly recent Conservative governments let the country down, the new Labour government is obviously worse. (This argument got several rounds of applause from Conservatives in the front rows – obviously those of a different political persuasion may not see things the same way.)
The second – and bigger – challenge is that Badenoch served in all of those governments. Criticising the records of Tory leaders inevitably risks taking a good hard look at her own. And that is something the new Conservative leader simply will not do.
Take the particularly telling moment when she warned “The public will never trust politicians unless we can accept our mistakes”. True. “Labour are making lots of mistakes,” Badenoch argued. Also true. “But the different between me and Keir Starmer is that he doesn’t believe he’s ever made a mistake,” she continued. “I will acknowledge the Conservative Party made mistakes.”
Note the rhetorical sleight of hand there, the switch from first person to third. Badenoch will acknowledge not that she made mistakes, but that her party did. When she did mention her own record in government – her time a business secretary trying to fast-track compensation for victims of the Post Office scandal, repealing EU laws (though not as many as arch-Brexiteers would have liked), and taking a firmer stance on gender and trans issues than her party held at the time – there were no mistakes to be heard of, only valiant successes.
Even when she was asked a question about whether she should have called for a national inquiry into grooming gangs when she was in government, rather than waiting until Elon Musk had made the issue a hot-button topic to jump on the bandwagon, Badenoch could not admit any blame. Right at the end she was asked if there was anything she personally wanted to apologise to voters for; she dodged the question, turning it back to the Tories’ legacy on immigration. No, in other words.
You could argue – rightly – that no politician wants to draw attention to their own failings. But Badenoch’s whole message was that she was going to be different – again, “the Conservative Party is under new leadership”. And in the absence of any concrete policy ideas, there was very little holding this speech together beyond vague vibes.
Badenoch listed what was wrong with the country: low productivity, high taxes, price rises, broken public services, businesses going under, young people unable to afford homes. But she had little to offer in the way of solutions. On topics where you might hope a party newly dedicated to telling hard truths to offer some realism, there was nothing. The demographic challenges of the UK’s ageing population were brought up, but there was no mention at all of pensions and the unsustainability of the current system. Immigration was cited again and again, but with no accompanying admission that there are tough trade-offs involved – in everything from social care worker shortages to universities going bankrupt – in bringing numbers down.
These are hard conversations to have. It’s not like there is another party is willing to have them. Nigel Farage is offering easy answers with no talk of costs; Labour is trying to pretend the problems don’t exist. But again, this was meant to be a speech about being different. All in all, Badenoch talked far more about the need to tell the truth than actually telling it. Thomas Sowell would not have been impressed.
What else did we hear? Some honing of attack lines against Labour that we can expect to encounter in future: how the Prime Minister was pursuing “legalism, not leadership”, and that he was “a lawyer, not a leader”. There was a good line about Labour treating “business like a cash machine”, although even that was undermined by the fact Badenoch seems unsure whether she would rule out the government’s rise in employers’ National Insurance. And a rousing promise at the end that the Conservatives “are going to give you your country back”, riffing on the “Take Back Control” slogan of the Leave campaign in the EU referendum.
But really it was style over substance: the veneer of a serious imposing speech, in a serious imposing venue with Corinthian columns and gold-leaf on the walls, without anything beneath. The only news lines were Badenoch’s insistence that the Tories would not be merging with Reform under her leadership (as if she was going to say anything else), and her doubling down on her tweet questioning Reform’s membership numbers. No policies, no changes of direction, nothing to convince the hoards of former Conservative voters who abandoned the party at the last election that there was a reason to come back.
There’s still time, of course. We’ve got a long way until the next election; a renewed identity for the Conservative Party could well emerge, complete with a suite of policies. But despite all the hype about the party being under new leadership, all Badenoch was really offering today was more of the same.