🔒 Martin Ivens: Kemi Badenoch offers the Tory party a shot at redemption

04 Nov 2024, 12:04 by Editor BizNews · BizNews

Kemi Badenoch, the newly elected Tory leader, is a dynamic, unapologetically conservative politician who’s unafraid to challenge “woke” policies and advocate for direct voter engagement. With five years to rebuild Tory strength, Badenoch must balance strength with unity and charm with pragmatism.

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By Martin Ivens ___STEADY_PAYWALL___

Among British Conservatives, the appetite for power trumps any residual prejudice about race, color or creed. On Saturday the Tories elected their first Black leader, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch. She’s known as Kemi, and her Scottish surname (via her husband) is pronounced carefully by those who have been forcefully corrected for getting it wrong — “There is no ‘bad’ in Badenoch,” she tells them. (It’s Bayd -en-och.)

A politician with media star qualities, the newly crowned Tory Party leader has, as Boris Johnson posted, “zap and zing.” Her generous acceptance speech and smile of unaffected delight hit the right note. In public and private, however, Badenoch has a short fuse and is untested as a team manager. Which version of its new standard bearer will the demoralized opposition get in the crucial first weeks in which a new leader makes their indelible mark?

Badenoch has put her historic victory as a Nigerian-born leader in shoulder-shrugging perspective; her party already boasts a history of three female prime ministers since 1979, one British Indian of Hindu faith and a Jewish premier, the 19th century statesman Benjamin Disraeli. The Labour Party talks the talk of diversity, but in practice has always preferred White men as leaders. Even though Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves vaunted the silver medal of being the first female holder of the second-most important post in government, the leadership election delivers something the Conservative Party badly needs — the sense of being a force to watch.

Badenoch is more unapologetically Tory than most Tories, a Brexiteer and a warrior against so-called woke policies. The child of Nigerian-born professionals, she’s used to being adjacent to elites but not quite in them; she trained as an engineer at Sussex University, rather than the Oxford or Cambridge education of so many of her political peers. The new leader of the opposition is also more intellectually curious than her Labour opponent; in a recent policy paper, Conservatism in Crisis, she drew on the work of a trio of economists who won the Nobel prize this year for locating the prosperity of nations in inclusive institutions that promote meritocratic competition against existing elites — a cause close to her heart.

But the key to Badenoch’s success is that she speaks clearly and directly to the voters, like a throwback to the 1970s before the political class learnt to hide from an unforgiving media behind weasel words – think Tony Benn on the left or Margaret Thatcher on the right. She has, in short, “cut through.”

What next? Badenoch was not the overwhelming choice of her fellow Tory MPs. Only a third of their number, 42, voted for her to make the final cut. That reflects a tendency to be terse with colleagues. The dominant theory has been the new Tory leader is likely to be a stopgap; challenges are two a penny in an organization that relishes defenestrating its own when times get tough. Many party members failed to vote in the final run-off, and Badenoch received fewer votes than Rishi Sunak when he lost to Liz Truss.

Hot on the heels of her election, however, the influential Tory backbench 1922 committee has moved to change the leadership rules, raising the threshold to mount a future challenge. Badenoch need not always be looking over her shoulder now. Besides, she has been a loyal servant to party leaders whose views she didn’t always share. When Tory fortunes were at their nadir, I saw her dance the night away (R&B is her soundtrack of choice, although she told a podcast this week she plays Taylor Swift to pep her morning energy levels) with ordinary party members at a Tory fundraiser. She stayed after every other Cabinet minister (barring the then Foreign Secretary, James Cleverly) had taken an early bath. Loyalty tends to beget loyalty — and vice-versa.

Badenoch has steel, but she needs to use her charm to good effect. In her acceptance speech, she paid tribute to her indefatigable and ferociously ambitious opponent, Robert Jenrick. How she accommodates her rival’s supporters will be seen as one key test. Badenoch leans to the right — will there be a place at the top table for talented centrists like Tom Tugendhat, another leadership candidate? In practice, only a few shadow briefs really matter and have a high media profile – the shadow chancellorship and the health service among them.

She has the luxury of five long years in which to restore Tory fortunes. The party’s worst ever defeat and lowest vote share reduced the Conservatives to a rabble of 121 MPs, barely sufficient to fill out a credible opposition.

After 100 days in office, Labour Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s popularity may have gone south after a series of missteps but, as he proved in opposition, he does learn from his mistakes. It’s not as if Badenoch is in a straight fight either. To her right, the Reform party, led by Nigel Farage, the most articulate communicator of this political era, is on a mission to destroy and replace the Conservative party; in the center, the shape-shifting Liberal Democrats offer her affluent southern voters a pick n’ mix of anti-Tory and anti-Labour policies.

The Tory party’s fourteen fractious, sometimes chaotic, years in office were marked by low productivity, low growth, stagnant wages and crumbling public services. During the campaign neither Badenoch nor Jenrick showed much repentance. Jenrick blamed “soft” policies, especially on immigration, for a catastrophic defeat; Badenoch’s autopsy suggested that the Conservatives talked right but often governed left. Only James Cleverly, eliminated in an earlier round, offered a full throated apology coupled with the admission that the voters thought the Tories “a bit weird.”

On Saturday Badenoch adopted a more apologetic tone, pledging a root-and-branch policy review. Labour’s first budget, which saw the Tories take the slenderest of opinion poll leads for the first time since the election, offers a fruitful line of attack; a big state, tax-and-spend government that fails to deliver on growth will make an easy target.

Policies are of course important — when you’re in power. But personality counts for much. Unlike her grey opponent Starmer, Badenoch is a livewire character. No-one doubts her qualities as a fighter; now, she must persuade the voters and her party that she can be inclusive, too.

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