Kemi Badenoch is proving a specialist in squandering political opportunities. The defection of a wave of Conservative MPs to Reform – Robert Jenrick, Andrew Rosindell, Suella Braverman – was far from good news: the Tory party is too small to be intensely relaxed about emigration. But it did offer Badenoch a chance to relaunch her leadership. With the populist Jenrick no longer lurking behind her, she could affirm the Tories’ status as the natural home of the centre right.
Earlier this week a new movement, Prosper UK, was launched by senior Conservatives, including Andy Street, Ruth Davidson, Amber Rudd, David Gauke and Gavin Barwell, to champion fiscal conservatism, a pro-business culture, free trade and environmentalism – in short, an impeccably Thatcherite programme (in the late 1980s it was Thatcher who pioneered action against climate change). Badenoch should have embraced them as potential allies, a force to help ensure that her party’s liberal wing does not begin to collapse in the manner of its right.
Instead, she impugned them as heretics. “The people who don’t agree with [my] direction need to get out of the way,” she declared at a press conference yesterday. “We’re about the future, not the past. We’re not trying to recreate 2006 and it’s not 2016 any more.”
She didn’t quite threaten to expel them but she did gesture towards an open door: “I won’t apologise to those walking away because they don’t like the new direction. We only want Conservatives.”
As an electoral strategy it is a curious one. Less than two years ago the Conservatives lost 60 seats to the Liberal Democrats, including fortresses once held by the likes of David Cameron (Witney), Boris Johnson (Henley and Thame) and Michael Gove (Surrey Heath). For Ed Davey’s party, which is in second place in 20 more, Badenoch’s two-fingered salute to the centre right is a “massive gift” in the words of a Lib Dem source.
“I’m slightly obsessed by those Conservatives who feel politically homeless; I meet so many of them,” Davey told me when I interviewed him last September. Polling confirms as much: a survey by More in Common for Prosper UK estimated that 22 million people consider themselves to be in the centre or the centre right and that nearly a third (seven million) believe no political party adequately represents their views.
The next election should offer the Tories a chance to appeal to many of them: the public already fears that Labour is taxing and spending too much but is sceptical of Reform as an alternative government. These are the voters Badenoch should be love-bombing, persuading them that a party which contrived to offend almost every Middle England sensibility – through Boris Johnson’s law-breaking and Liz Truss’s kamikaze economics – has changed. Instead, she is apathetic towards them at best and actively hostile at worst.
Mass parties only succeed as broad churches: Thatcher might have expelled Tory “wets” from her cabinet but she never sought to purge them. Badenoch, who mistakes stridency for strategy, has demonstrated little awareness of this. “My Conservative Party has moved to the right every day since I became leader,” she boasted in an early draft of her speech. Such is the language of someone who wants to lead a sect rather than a party – and that may prove her political epitaph.
This piece first appeared in the Morning Call newsletter; receive it every morning by subscribing on Substack here
[Further reading: Inside Labour’s plan to win Gorton and Denton]
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