This article is taken from the March 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
When it comes to Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, the case for the defence remains a simple one: that it is simply too early to judge her.
Rebuilding from a defeat as shattering as last summer’s takes time — and time, in this telling, is the one resource the Conservative Party has in abundance. Besides which, surely the public has had enough of the party’s increasingly trigger-happy approach to its leaders?
Simple, however, is not the same as persuasive. There is some merit to the above case, but even in the best of possible worlds there is always a clock ticking, and Badenoch’s conduct so far has shortened that period of forbearance considerably. There are a couple of reasons for this.
First is that appeals for patience work best when accompanied by lots of very visible hard work in the here and now; people are more inclined to wait for the harvest when they see you bent over the plough. Yet the leadership gives no impression of great activity, so it’s an open question as to what exactly is supposed to be paying off by the end of this parliament.
Second, the deliberate absence of a policy agenda means that Badenoch’s leadership stands or falls on her day-to-day ability to do the job. Here too she is not impressing. It might be correct to observe, as she allegedly has, that winning PMQs didn’t do William Hague much good — but it’s still better than not winning PMQs, especially against a government as embattled as this one.
Beyond the Chamber, things are arguably more serious still. Since the excitement of the leadership contest faded, it is now not uncommon to see entire days in which the Conservatives get scarcely a mention in the national press. Meanwhile Badenoch’s rare high-profile interventions often go badly; her allegation that Nigel Farage was lying about Reform UK’s membership not only amplified an embarrassing stunt into a damaging story, but may yet end with him suing.
Badenoch has no ideological bedfellows and has not cultivated a following
None of this should come as any great surprise. In government, Badenoch built her image on a small number of well-chosen, carefully-controlled interventions on her favoured (invariably cultural) topics. It was an adroit strategy that played to her strengths.
But it rested on the fact that in government your party is always the story, and the press will come to you. Opposition is a completely different game, and it was never obvious that Badenoch would be willing or indeed able to mount the tireless charm offensive required to secure the Conservatives even a bare minimum of media oxygen.
It certainly won’t have helped that the submarine strategy (punctuated then as now by the occasional, unhappy surfacing, as on maternity pay) saw the new leader successfully through last year’s contest. But that was an atypically media-rich environment, and it isn’t working now.
Nor is the rest of Badenoch’s already thin prospectus playing out as promised. The two-year wait for new policies was meant to allow for a thorough and painfully honest review of the past 14 years. Of this, there is no sign.
If mistakes are to be admitted, it is only in the most general terms; the only time the Shadow Cabinet has addressed in detail a major failure, such as the Johnson government’s immigration policy, was when Priti Patel defended it.
Even the pledge not to have any policies has cracked, with Badenoch proposing in February a major shift in citizenship law. On the substance, it’s a step in the right direction. But it arose not from any deep review by the Great Engineer but was lifted from right-wing thinktanks to give the Tories something with which to attack the Government over the Border Security Bill.
This was inevitable. Politics abhors a vacuum, and any attacks on Labour were always going to be hobbled if the Conservatives couldn’t answer the question of what they’d do instead.
But having made one commitment, it’s going to be hard to make a pious point of not making more. Far from buying time to develop a comprehensive programme, the Tories may end up being bounced into an opportunistic patchwork of promises, each designed with winning a news cycle uppermost in mind. That was hardly the sales pitch.
All this makes Badenoch’s position precarious. With no project, she has no ideological bedfellows, and nor has she cultivated a personal following that might serve as a praetorian guard.
Whilst some yet see her as the Risen Thatcher, many who supported Badenoch last year did so simply to stop Robert Jenrick, finding in her uncontroversial (one might say platitudinous) emphasis on the party’s “values” a way to hit the snooze button on any ideological reckoning with 14 years in office that saw the tax burden and immigration hit record highs.
The question is when the clock on wait-and-see runs out. Between this May and next seems the most likely answer; whilst disastrous local elections this year might be excusable, a town-hall rout in 2026 would not. Her one-year anniversary in November seems also likely to be a point when the party’s patience with excuses — and wait-and-see is an excuse — reaches its limit.
