No one can say Kemi Badenoch lacks confidence. When the race to succeed Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party was triggered, other candidates scrambled to launch websites with the standard tagline “[Insert name] for leader”. The former business and trade secretary titled her campaign “Renewal 2030”. Why? Because, her website told Tory members, “2030 is the first full year we can be back in government”.
The suggestion someone other than Badenoch might lead the party wasn’t part of the calculation. Such single-mindedness is “pure Kemi”, according to one MP backing her for leader. “She will make Britain governable again,” said Simon Clarke, the former levelling-up secretary who lost his seat in July. “If we elect Kemi, we won’t just get the right policies, we’ll get the wider renewal… that will actually allow us to deliver them in government.”
Her team’s assuredness is understandable to an extent. She was the bookies’ favourite for the first half of the year, discussed as Sunak’s de facto successor. “Kemi fever”, which erupted when she ran for the leadership in 2022, reignited on New Year’s Eve 2023 as she led a poll of Tory members on the ConservativeHome website.
But when the contest began, Robert Jenrick had the momentum, and then, when Tory MPs began casting their votes, the more moderate James Cleverly pulled ahead at the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham. After the penultimate MP vote, Cleverly looked certain to make the run-off, in which the final two candidates face party members. Badenoch and Jenrick were scrambling for second place. But, in the event, Cleverly was knocked out on 9 October and Badenoch, ahead of Jenrick by a single vote, was the front-runner once more.
The elimination of Cleverly, the candidate most liked by non-Tories, fits the narrative that panicked parties turn inwards after defeats, preferring easy platitudes popular with members than the hard truths of wider public appeal. Many Labour and Liberal Democrat figures were positively gleeful at the result, saying that, as Badenoch and Jenrick are considered on the right of the Tory party, their pitches are broadly the same. This is a misconception. Whatever criticisms may be levelled at Badenoch, she is not a cookie-cutter Conservative, a Thatcher cosplayer or a standard-bearer for whichever cause the right chooses to push. Supporters call the shadow housing secretary “thoughtful” and “fearless”, with the “intellectual robustness” to challenge consensus. Her disparagers inside the party call her “divisive” and “toxic”; the line that she could “start a fight in an empty room” has become a Westminster cliché. The one description that unites both camps’ view of her? “Authentic.” “Her principles haven’t changed from the day she got in as an MP,” said one ally.
Badenoch’s rise has been swift and decisive. Now 44, she was elected as MP for Saffron Walden (now redrawn as North West Essex) in 2017 after a career that spanned banking, consultancy and a brief spell at the Spectator magazine, where she was digital director, as well as two years as a member of the London Assembly. She was vice-chair of the Conservative Party, Boris Johnson gave her a ministerial role, Liz Truss made her international trade secretary and Sunak expanded her remit when he created a super-department that merged trade with business.
Born in London to Nigerian parents and raised for much of her childhood in Lagos, Badenoch said of Britain during the 2022 Conservative leadership contest: “I chose this country because I can be who I am and I could be everything that I wanted to be.” She once described herself as “to all intents and purposes a first-generation immigrant”. She held the equalities brief throughout most of her ministerial career; in it, she built a reputation for challenging the orthodoxy of quangos, charities and civil servants. Her response to the 2021 Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities’ report, chaired by Tony Sewell, was typical. The review “found no evidence of systemic or institutional racism” in Britain – a conclusion that sparked widespread outrage. Badenoch robustly defended it, speaking in the Commons chamber of “bad-faith attempts to undermine the credibility of this report”. She has been equally forthright on trans rights and gender ID, earning the label “anti-woke culture warrior” – a term used with both contempt and admiration, depending on the side of the debate it comes from.
A distrust of unelected officials and institutions is the theme around which Badenoch has built her campaign. At a conference event she derided the way “HR is running the economy right now” and took aim at “people living off government”, as well as joking that 5-10 per cent of civil servants are “should-be-in-prison bad”. Her diagnosis of what failed during the Tories’ 14 years of government is that the system is rigged against Conservative politicians enacting Conservative policies.
This is a clear dividing line with Jenrick, who has a straightforwardly populist pitch: reduce immigration by setting a legally binding cap and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). “She’s not interested in easy answers,” a source close to Badenoch’s campaign told me regarding the ECHR. “If, when she’s looked at it, leaving is the solution, she’ll do it.” Promising a magic fix without reforming the wider system would, in Badenoch’s view, be continuing the betrayal of trust for which voters punished the Tories in July.
Another ally suggested that, as an original Brexit backer and long-standing voice on the right, Badenoch had the credibility to make up her own mind. They pointed out she was unafraid as trade secretary to confront the right of the party and disappoint Brexiteers over the Retained EU Law Bill. She also kept quiet during the internal Tory row over Sunak’s Rwanda Bill, while Jenrick quit as immigration minister protesting that the legislation wasn’t tough enough. Some Tories are suspicious at how Jenrick – a recent convert to right-wing, Brexit-coded causes (he backed Remain in 2016 and began his career as a One Nation centrist) – has adopted a more ideologically hard-line approach. Others wonder whether he might revert to the centre if elected leader. Nobody wonders that about Kemi Badenoch.
Do her frequent “gaffes” make her too great a risk for a party in crisis? Badenoch has a popularity rating of -27 (Jenrick is on -19, Keir Starmer on -36). One centrist MP complained to me: “Kemi will blow herself up – and the rest of us with her.” It doesn’t help that she has a reputation for disliking dealing with journalists, a core part of the leader of the opposition’s role. But Badenoch is perhaps not quite as off-putting as rows such as that over her recent comments on cutting maternity pay would suggest. On 13 October, More in Common published findings from a focus group – made up of voters who had switched from the Conservatives to Labour or Reform in the general election – which suggested Badenoch has appeal beyond Tory party members. One participant deemed her “a breath of fresh air”; another praised her “no-nonsense approach”.
When the media inevitably starts to lose interest in a party out of power, a leader who can grab attention is a valuable resource. As one ally put it to me: “She’s box office.” On the day they said this, a row broke out over a pamphlet put out by Badenoch’s campaign that argued autistic people received “economic privileges and protections”. It is now for Conservative Party members to decide whether they think Kemi Badenoch is worth the risk and should be their next leader.
[See also: Keir Starmer and the perils of consensus]
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This article appears in the 16 Oct 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Make or Break