A consensus has formed at Westminster that Kemi Badenoch will not last long as leader of the Conservative Party. Reform UK is rising, her party’s poll ratings are dismal, the Tories are addicted to change having had six leaders in eight years, and Keir Starmer has had the best week of his premiership. Badenoch is struggling in her weekly duels with him at Prime Minister’s Questions. She seems simultaneously both under- and over-prepared: the accusation is that she repeatedly asks the same question because she’s not flexible enough to adapt and respond to what is being said. She is caricatured as being lazy and gaffe-prone: “Kemikaze”. Robert Jenrick is supposedly preparing his next leadership bid.
That is one view. Here is another. In a recent piece, my old friend Simon Heffer asked an interesting question: does Badenoch have a plan? He thought she did. Unlike most of her colleagues, she is patient, just as Margaret Thatcher was when, scorned by the patricians and one-nation establishment, she won the leadership in 1975 and set about remaking the party from the radical, free-market right. Heffer liked Badenoch’s willingness to make statements of principle rather than give detailed pronouncements on policy, seeking “to give a broad idea of what the Conservatives stand for”.
Labour’s huge majority means there will be no general election until at least 2028. It is hard to exaggerate how loathed the Conservatives are in the country, and their unpopularity is not Badenoch’s fault. The party’s shadow front bench is the weakest I can recall; she has only 120 Conservative MPs to choose from. Worse still for Badenoch, the right is divided. Thatcher never faced a threat from the right like Nigel Farage and his self-styled people’s army: the insurgent force in the early years of her premiership came from the SDP, before it merged with the Liberals.
In her BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg on 2 March, Badenoch was composed as she outlined her support for the government’s position on Ukraine. There was a revealing moment when she was asked about President Volodymyr Zelensky’s treatment by Donald Trump and JD Vance in the Oval Office. Badenoch hesitated, as if uncertain or even fearful, and then said: “Honestly, my heart went out to him.” I liked that hesitant “honestly”. There seemed nothing rehearsed about her answer, and it was obvious how moved she was. We know she is tough, but she has begun to show her thoughtfulness and vulnerability as well.
There is something else Badenoch shares with Thatcher. She has a thriving ecosystem of well-funded right-wing think tanks, magazines and journals, online production, tech bros and provocateurs, which she and her advisers could use to their advantage. In the 1970s, Thatcher channelled the spirit of the times, and her intellectual outriders led a counter-hegemonic project against the left.
The right is today similarly attracting ideological investors, such as Paul Marshall, whose fortune was made through the Marshall Wace hedge fund. Last year he led the £100m takeover of the Spectator and installed Michael Gove as its new editor. He was already a significant investor in GB News, owner of the UnHerd website, and founding trustee of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC). “The left,” as one senior Labour adviser said to me, “needs more of its own ideological investors and ideological production. We have no answer to the app-based media. There’s the Novara Media ecosystem but that’s not where we need to be. The trouble is we have no strategy for creating our own bros. Who is the Joe Rogan of the left?”
One notable new project is the Future of the Left, co-led by Jonathan Rutherford at Policy Exchange, a right-leaning think tank seeking influence with the Labour government. Rutherford is associated with the Blue Labour faction but told me the project’s purpose was to build a “coalition around a conservative left politics”. He particularly wants to develop “political and intellectual leadership among a younger generation”. Downing Street is engaged: Starmer’s policy aides are looking for transformative ideas and intellectual outriders. I chaired the Future of the Left’s inaugural event at Policy Exchange’s Westminster offices on Old Queen Street, where various magazines and think tanks are clustered.
The guest speaker was John Bew, historian and former foreign policy adviser to several Conservative prime ministers. He spoke to me about the lessons of the Bevin-Attlee Labour Party for today’s politics. Bew said this new age of raw power demanded increased defence spending and a foreign policy of “strategic purpose and vision”.
In early March, Starmer has shown he understands that hard-edged realism is the necessary precondition of these times, as I used to argue when I was editor of this magazine. Through his coordination of the European response in support of Ukraine, while remaining aligned with the Trump White House, the Labour government has demonstrated the kind of strategic international leadership Britain has not shown since the 2008 financial crisis. This much is clear: realpolitik will be required to bring peace to Europe.
This column appears in the 7-13 March 2025 issue of the New Statesman magazine
[See also: The politics beneath Zelensky’s suit]
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