Badenoch's Bad Start

Kemi Badenoch has not excelled in the areas even I expected her to. No wonder Tories are muttering about her already.

I have been surprised by how poor a start Kemi Badenoch has had at the job of being Leader of the Opposition.

For example, her performances at PMQs are pretty woeful whereas I had assumed she would embarrass Starmer week after week after week. I thought it would be newsworthy if he was judged to have bested her. In performance terms, she is by far the stronger in this sort of arena. Starmer has a reputation for being wooden, Badenoch is combative. This 30-minute weekly gladiatorial showdown then seems designed to play to her strengths and you have to imagine that was a factor in her election as leader.

Half an hour of humiliation for a PM who is polling badly and knows it was the wide and in vast sections of the press somewhat gleeful expectation. But Badenoch has failed to deliver. As such, they usually come out pretty evenly.

If Badenoch isn’t excelling in the arenas where she was expected to get a slam dunk that should be worrying Tories about what his happening in the areas where she was always considered weaker.

As I said when she got the gig, this role has three specific and sometimes conflicting areas: Leader of the Conservative Party, Leader of the Opposition and Future PM in waiting. Of course, there are overlaps in these areas but also conflicts. Any Leader of the Opposition sometimes has to make a choice between them (indeed, Starmer made a virtue of doing so with his ‘country first, party second’ rhetoric which he has carried forward into government).

It is in making and selling those choices that leadership can be demonstrated. But it is not totally clear what kind of leader Badenoch wants to demonstrate she is - especially from the three roles I outline.

I read some fascinating research from Professors Tim Bale and Paul Webb and Assistant Professor Stavroula Chrona recently on what the public wants from Leaders – and the divergence between the qualities they want and those prioritised by members of political parties. There is a divergence in general between Party members and the general public, but this is much more pronounced between the Tory Party members and the public than with Labour members.

The paper explores the factors that lie behind this combining the weakness of a party that has just been categorically rejected at the polls and the individualistic ideology of purity Tory thinking.

Timing almost certainly plays a part too. Most oppositions go through a period where they believe that they were rejected not for what they are, but for not being what they are *enough* and there are few indications that the Tories are in any more of a hurry to learn this than any other party fresh out of government has historically been.

But while this shows why they may have opted for Badenoch it is clear that this is at least in part a leaning towards this instinct. And her narrative about all the things her government got wrong confirms that. Badenoch is echoing her party’s sentiment that they lost because they just weren’t Tory enough.

In part, this is a response to the threat from their right in the shape of Reform. And to the threat from her own right from Robert Jenrick who has never stopped campaigning for the leadership and shows no signs of doing so any time soon.

The complexities of Badenoch’s task are not to be underplayed. Yes, there was a global anti-incumbency mood that the Tories found themselves on the sharp end of. And it’s fair to say that Labour has had a wobbly start. Add to that the right turn of many other countries across Europe, the US and probably in Canada and can see how, for the ‘natural party of government’ these factors alone might lead you to think that the route back to power will be pretty smooth and that the biggest obstacle to that is the party to your right.

All of which might explain why Badenoch is pursuing a populist path in day-to-day politics and rhetoric combined with a ‘wait and see’ strategy in terms of policy.

I don’t think the latter is completely wrongheaded. However much I suspect I won’t like the outcome, a party that has just lost by such a significant margin should take its time to redevelop policy from first principles. The problem is that it is not consistent with the areas where Badenoch does weigh in which are largely the kinds of ‘culture war’ areas on which her own stances match – to a degree – those of Farage. So the Tories seem to have highly developed policies in these areas while not saying anything much on the NHS, education or housing – the areas which touch voters’ everyday lives not their online lives (those that have them – and my hunch is that this is loosening).

She’s also making some of the right noises about sorting out the mess that CCHQ has become. This too is the right thing to do. But the problem again is that while Badenoch recognises that the machinery is broken, I don’t think she understands properly what caused that breakdown in discipline and competence. Her dismissal of Partygate does not speak to a leader who understands leadership over posership. And posership cannot make for a functional operational organisation however charismatic the poser.

Her glomming on to Musk’s agenda on Grooming gangs – a horrific scandal which has been inquired into repeatedly shows followership not leadership (interesting isn’t it that so many of the people who build a reputation as a ‘free thinker’ all think so alike…). And followership will not allow for the internal challenge that would allow Badenoch to show voters symbolically that the Party recognises and is responding to their revulsion.

The good news for Badenoch is that the one lesson the Tories do seem to have learned is that they cannot treat their leadership like the Sugarbabes lineup. The 1922 Committee has made the rules for deposing a leader harder – and were able to do so because Tories saw what a laughing stock the endless parade – and even more endless speculation about potential coups – had made them.

So she has time to impress and build on her own wobbly start. As I have said about Labour’s travails – the next election is quite a long way away. But I do think Badenoch is going to have to do something reasonably soon to show that she has a grip on at least one of the three roles she has. Because the Tories may have made it harder to get rid of her but, as the manoeuvrings of Robert Jenrick show, not all of her party believes it is impossible to do so.

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