There were two schools of thought about what Kemi Badenoch ought to do when she became leader of the Conservative Party in 2024, a few months after the Tories suffered their worst-ever defeat in a general election.
School one said that Badenoch should take her time to develop new ideas out of the public eye. She ought to keep her head down: the public didn’t want to hear from the Conservative Party because the public didn’t like the Conservative Party. The road back to credibility was long and it was paved with an interminable policy review process.
School two thought that school one was living in a fantasy world. Badenoch could only survive as leader and make that pitch to the public if she first took on the discredited Tory establishment within the party and the media by directly laying the blame for 14 years of failure in government at their door. School two’s inspiration was Donald Trump in 2015, when the then candidate for the Republican nomination powered through televised debates taking GOP scalps left, right and centre. Trump attacked the GOP because they were “fucking useless”, one former Badenoch advisor told me last year. She had to do the same. “Can you have renewal without a massive bust-up?” (Interestingly, school two’s analysis – that Badenoch had to fight against her own side and sack large numbers of MPs associated with the previous Conservative government before she could get anywhere with the public – is shared by senior figures around Keir Starmer.)
Badenoch, it would be fair to say, did not go after the Tory establishment in her first year as leader. Those who know Badenoch say she reveres party grandees, donors and old-school Tory hacks such as Simon Heffer, the Daily Telegraph columnist who she rewarded for loyalty with a peerage last year. There was no Trump-style bust up within the Conservative Party. Instead it has sunk in the polls, from leading in December 2024 to a seemingly permanent position behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK today.
Until this morning. Badenoch’s decision to sack Robert Jenrick and remove him from the party looks at first glance like a triumph of school-two thinking: a direct internal party fight that differentiates Badenoch from her rivals, even delivered in Trumpian style with a post on X. Jenrick had told friends in recent weeks that he thought Reform lacked a viable economic spokesperson and an eventual shadow chancellor. Perhaps he was plotting. If it was a case of “conversations” with Nigel Farage, as the Reform leader put it this morning, then quite a few Tory MPs including members of the shadow cabinet could be caught in Badenoch’s purge.
Yet I would be surprised if Badenoch goes further and goes on a full Trumpian 2015-style rampage against, say, Charles Moore and the Centre for Policy Studies. The sacking pushes Jenrick out of the Tory establishment, which Badenoch is trying to shore up ahead of what will likely be another set of poor local election results in May. As one Johnson-era adviser put it to me when I asked them what the sacking meant for the Tories: “Zombie party with zombie leader.”
[Further reading: Kemi Badenoch isn’t working]
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