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Kemi Badenoch was declared the Conservative Party’s latest leader — its fourth in two years — on Saturday, beating her rival, Robert Jenrick, by the relatively thin margin of 10,000 votes.
It’s an arguably inauspicious start for the new Tory chief, given the result (53,806 vs 41,318) marks the tightest leadership contest in the party’s history — going back to 2001. Badenoch won 56.6 per cent of the vote; that’s less than Liz Truss’ 2022 total (57.3 per cent), and less still Iain Duncan Smith’s 2001 score (60.7 per cent).
The former business secretary’s narrow victory reflects the curious contours of the protracted and often acrimonious contest just passed. The campaign contrived the rise of at least three frontrunners across four separate phases: Badenoch, Jenrick, James Cleverly and Badenoch again. After all, the fact that the race came full circle on Saturday suggests the now-Tory leader’s campaign strategy — to lay low in the media and only really begin campaigning in September — was the canniest going. Jenrick, whose campaign won plaudits for its energy and media conspicuousness, had burnt through his momentum by the time party conference arrived last month.
Meanwhile, Cleverly’s inability to secure a position in the final round — roundly attributed to voting shenanigans among his Tory MP supporters — was likely the campaign’s defining moment. Cleverly looked irresistible; until MP chicanery resisted him. It meant the former home secretary was unable to capitalise on his persuasive and widely exalted address to Conservative Party conference. Furthermore, the Jenrick vs Badenoch match-up left Cleverly’s moderate Tory support base searching for a new champion.
And, lo, big beast by big beast, the Conservative herd moved decisively behind Badenoch in the contest’s latter stages. Following Cleverly’s untimely departure, Badenoch accrued the backing of Lord (Ken) Clarke, Damian Green, Lord (William) Hague and Nicholas Soames — all Tory wet doyens.
On top of this, Badenoch embraced Cleverly’s pitch that Conservatism needs to prioritise competence over brazen policy and ideological piety during the first months of opposition. Her pledge to pursue careful, constructive but crucially principled opposition won out.
But now Badenoch’s problems really begin as she tends the Conservative wounds torn by the recent electoral rupture and salted by the leadership campaign’s bitter criticisms.
Her immediate tasks, that said, are logistical. By Tuesday, it is reported that Badenoch will have her full shadow cabinet in place — which she must assemble from a greatly diminished (in numeric and talent terms) Conservative parliamentary party.
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Like any new leader, Badenoch needs to balance a wide range of imperatives with her shadow ministerial selection. The Conservative chief insisted during the recent campaign she would appoint all five of her fellow leadership rivals to her frontbench. Posts will need to be apportioned, therefore, among Priti Patel, Mel Stride, Tom Tugendhat and Jenrick. (Cleverly has ruled himself out of contention).
Jenrick poses a particular problem, given he competed with Badenoch fiercely in the final stretch of the campaign on an array of issues — but especially over immigration policy and the UK’s membership of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). The former immigration minister, all else being equal, would seem a natural pick for shadow home secretary. But Jenrick and Badenoch’s much-reported policy clashes make the idea a non-starter politically.
Elsewhere, Badenoch will need to reward her loyalist backers — individuals like Alex Burghart and Julia Lopez, as well as her wider support base, including Claire Coutinho, Laura Trott and Andrew Griffiths. Badenoch’s primary quandary, however, is the relative dearth of willing talent in the Conservative Party at present — with so many erstwhile MPs having been lost to the electoral cataclysm in July.
Once the relevant roles are filled and Badenoch’s ex-antagonists are appeased, the new Tory leader will need a strategy to return her party to government. Such a strategy, suffice it to say, involves wading through myriad political dilemmas — so many that it is difficult to know where to begin.
But Badenoch’s big challenge is this: how does she, in just five years, convince the public that a party that serially broke promises in power is now suddenly telling the truth in opposition? Indeed, how does Badenoch even begin to answer this question while leaning on the very MPs (like herself) who served in recent Tory administrations?
But Badenoch’s comments over the weekend suggest the new Conservative leader hasn’t even begun to unravel these dilemmas and their grim implications. Speaking to the BBC’s flagship Sunday morning politics show, Badenoch claimed that the Partygate scandal was “overblown”. The Tory leader, who insisted she planned to be “honest” about what went wrong under her predecessors, said Boris Johnson was a “great prime minister” and that he had fallen into a “trap” of breaking Covid rules that should never have been introduced.
The new Conservative leader is already evincing her capacity for cut-through that supportive Tories so revere. But the comments are also a timely reminder of another dilemma Badenoch must reckon with: how should the Conservative Party reflect on its record in government?
Accordingly, I posed the following questions last month when Conservative conference rolled into Birmingham: “Does a future leader inaugurate a clean ‘Year Zero’ approach, admitting that the ‘fourteen years of Tory government’ debate is lost? Do they pick and choose achievements, defending some aspects while disowning others? (What organising principle would drive this approach?) Or do they try to win the argument that Conservative governance, in the round, benefitted Britain?”
What my policy-focussed analysis did not foresee is that a future leader would defend the scandalous elements of the Conservative Party’s recent past — at once reminding voters of wrongdoing and appearing utterly unrepentant.
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Is this, after all, how Badenoch wants to use the short window of media attention before the US presidential election devours the news agenda? Even if Badenoch believes Johnson was maltreated, are there not far better non-committal answers that the Conservative leader could have deployed?
One totemic challenge for Badenoch is to demonstrate the very credibility Conservative politics seemed so bereft of from 2022-2024. That, of course, was the argument Cleverly won — and Badenoch accepted — during the leadership campaign. In other words: before new policy must come seriousness and competence.
Badenoch’s comments are so out of sync with the basic strategy Conservative politics must pursue that one wonders if they were designed to leave the door open to a possible Boris Johnson comeback. The former prime minister praised Badenoch’s “zing and zap” on Saturday.
Whatever the case, the Tory chief’s decision to fight Johnson’s corner on Partygate — which public opinion has long settled on — is a cue for journalists to bombard Badenoch with examples of her party’s mixed record in government. This conversation, if Badenoch continues to engage (and she is not known for backing down), will stymy the Conservative Party’s attempts to move forwards.
The bottom line, in the end, is this: Conservative politics risks straying further from the “normalcy” Cleverly urged it to embrace last month. One wonders how the ex-home secretary would have tackled the Partygate test.
Badenoch will hope her Tory colleagues aren’t already considering such counterfactuals.
Josh Self is Editor of Politics.co.uk, follow him on X/Twitter here.
Politics.co.uk is the UK’s leading digital-only political website. Subscribe to our daily newsletter for all the latest news and analysis.
