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In a speech last week, Kemi Badenoch definitively declared the reason for the Conservatives’ defeat at the general election and outlined, in detail, her programme to revive the party. The address, curiously, did not get much coverage.
Badenoch was the keynote speaker at a dinner on Thursday hosted by the International Democracy Union (IDU) Forum. (Most Conservative leaders peruse the after-dinner speech circuit only once their leadership has been terminated). The IDU describes itself as “the global alliance of the centre-Right” and is chaired by Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister of Canada. Alongside Badenoch, other speakers included ex-Australian PM Tony Abbott and former Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz.
On Thursday, the Forum’s delegates collected in Washington DC to consider the potential paths forward for the political right following the election of Donald Trump in November. And although Badenoch’s speech was not widely covered by the British media, it represents the most wide-ranging statement yet of her personal politics.
Moreover, given the speech was later pinged into UK journalists’ inboxes and shared widely by the Conservative Party across social media, one supposes CCHQ wants us to take note. Days later, admittedly, I feel willing to oblige
Badenoch began her address to the IDU with some commentary on her background. “I’m not a lawyer, I’m an engineer”, she stressed — it’s a line we will hear a lot more of over the coming months. It invites the audience to draw a positive contrast between Badenoch’s background and that of the prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer KC.
Badenoch went on: “I am here as leader now, because my party suffered its greatest ever election defeat. We lost two-thirds of our members of parliament and [polled] at a historic low.”
Rishi Sunak’s defeat in the 2024 UK general election contains lessons for the international conservative movement, Badenoch suggested. “I believe my party lost because it spent a lot of time, ‘Talking Right, but governing Left’”, she preached.
In the ensuing sentences, the Conservative leader declined the opportunity to expand explicitly on this point. But her “Talked Right, but governed Left” commentary is neither sophisticated, nuanced nor novel. It reflects, instead, the simplistic tenor of debate that characterised the Conservative leadership contest.
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In fact, “Talked Right, but governed Left” was the very message Badenoch began her campaign for the Tory leadership promoting. That she is repeating the message months later suggests she is not yet pivoting away from the strategy that successfully wooed her activist grassroots — an approach taken by Starmer as LOTO. Back in September, the comment prompted Chris Mason, the BBC’s political editor, to ask Badenoch to provide some examples of the ex-government’s allegedly left-wing agenda. According to the Guardian’s live blog on 2 September, the wannabe Tory chief responded by pointing to its net zero targets.
But on Thursday, Badenoch was able to expand on her own terms: “[The Conservative Party] didn’t recognise how the world was changing, and when we did, we did not adapt enough. There was complacency about the nature of the enemy we were fighting because a lot of people did not recognise it for what it was.
“There’s a great movie from the 1990s – I’m sure many of you have seen called the usual suspects. And in it, there is a fantastic quote, ‘The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.’
“That is the trick that our opponents on the left, whatever you want to call them — communists, socialists, in this country they call them liberal — I don’t know why, there’s nothing Liberal about them.”
The passage drew applause and some laughter from the IDU delegation. That isn’t especially surprising. Here, Badenoch is addressing tropes that US conservatives and the extremely online UK right have promulgated for some time now. As such, the niche, even radical nature of Badenoch’s commentary begs a question: would she have made similar observations in a speech addressed to a UK lay audience?
That seems unlikely. In Washington, Badenoch was seeking to forge connections across the international and “intellectual” right. She is deliberately preaching to the long-ago converted. But these views could nonetheless shape Badenoch’s approach to opposition over the coming months — and therefore deserve finer scrutiny.
Badenoch’s “Talking Right, but governing Left” analysis, suffice it to say, is not data-driven. In fact in Conservative circles, this conclusion was arrived at long before the general election campaign ended in July. Former cabinet ministers Lord Frost and Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg — recalcitrant Conservative right critics of Sunak — issued statements of this nature, via Telegraph columns and/or GB News sermons, almost weekly in the final months of the Tory government.
Writing at the time, I argued that Frost and Rees-Mogg’s wails were borne of ideological reflex and/or dispossession. Similarly, for Badenoch today, the “Talked Right, but governed Left” cliché reflects her view of a desired political destination — that of a right-wing, crusading Conservative Party — rather than a considered, earnest analysis of the specific nature of the Tory defeat.
Still, genuine, data-driven considerations of the Conservative Party’s historic defeat do exist. Take Onward’s Breaking Blue report, which bases its findings on comprehensive research with over 24,000 participants. Onward, a UK-based centre-right think tank, found the party suffered a defeat across all major demographic divides at the last election — including age, ethnicity, social class, and Brexit preference.
The report, published in September, argued a future Tory leader must repair the party’s damaged reputation for competence on immigration, public services and reducing taxes — and warned there are no “easy answers” that will lead to an electoral revival in the short term.
Badenoch’s “Talked Right, but governed Left” comment, of course, is the definition of an easy answer. It effectively absolves the new Tory leadership of, (1), responsibility for the party’s defeat and, (2), its duty to assess the party’s deeper-lying malaise.
In this vein, consider another analysis of the Conservative Party’s defeat delivered, interestingly, from the Tory conference main-stage in September. Then, before his untimely ouster from the leadership race, James Cleverly urged activists to vote for a Conservatism that is more “enthusiastic, relatable, positive, optimistic”.
“Let’s be more normal”, was his central clarion call.
The primary implication of Cleverly’s pitch is that the road to Tory recovery does not run through a combative or muscular mode of conservatism — what the party right might view as ideologically pious, but others as irrelevant and performative. The former home secretary didn’t just want his party to pick its battles better, but to fight those battles more constructively.
And yet, in her IDU speech, Badenoch debuted her solution to the Conservative Party’s historic travails as “muscular liberalism”.
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Badenoch argued that “Muscular liberalism” can counter the rise of “Woke” ideas — which she referred to as “Progressive Authoritarianism”. In one instructive passage, she asserted: “Oppression narratives are the new cloak for socialism to smuggle itself into institutions, pretending to be civil rights and social justice. These are the new battle lines, and I’m going to tell you how to fight them.”
In another, she added: “Arguments over pronouns and gender-neutral toilets or statues and white privilege seem trivial when compared to solving climate change and the demographic time-bomb of an ageing population. But they are inextricably linked.”
When Cleverly called on the Conservative Party to “be more normal”, this is what he was warning activists to resist.
Commenting on Badenoch’s speech, Ian Dunt, columnist at the i newspaper, argued Badenoch’s “greatest advantage” is that the public hasn’t noticed her yet. There’s considerable truth to this: Badenoch’s speech, so far, has remained in the Very Online world it drew from and contributed to.
But if the speech can be viewed as a statement of the Conservative leader’s worldview, we can expect the pronouncements contained within it, in time, to be repackaged in ways Badenoch considers palatable for a British audience.
That, presumably, will manifest in aggressive attacks on net zero and pointed interventions in culture war controversies. (Badenoch admitted she “loved” the title of “Culture Warrior” in her speech.)
At the moment, whatever Badenoch says is unlikely to have any immediate impact on the polls or the Conservative Party’s prospects — especially if she limits her most wide-ranging contributions to relatively obscure US-based think tanks.
But Badenoch’s first contact with public opinion, potentially at the local elections in May, could be very revealing indeed.
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Rachel Reeves vows to ‘break down barriers’ to UK-EU post-Brexit trade — speech in full
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‘I have no doubt that we can find efficiency savings within government spending of 5%, and I’m determined to do so because it’s through finding those efficiency savings that we’ll have the money to spend on the priorities of the British people.’
— Chancellor Rachel Reeves speaks to broadcasters as she launches the government’s spending review.
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‘David Lammy says UK should be “cautious” about regime change in Syria’
Via PoliticsHome.
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