Badenoch takes the Conservative helm

After a contest lasting more than three months, North West Essex MP Kemi Badenoch was elected the new leader of the Conservative and Unionist Party: what next?

Saturday 2 November 2024 finally saw the end of the fourth membership-wide election of a Conservative Party leader. Having topped the fourth ballot of MPs on 9 October, albeit by a single vote, Kemi Badenoch won 56.5 per cent of the membership vote—53,806 votes in total—to beat Newark MP and former immigration minister Robert Jenrick to win the crown. It was hardly an unexpected victory, as Badenoch had been the preferred candidate in most of the opinion polls of Conservative Party members, and while it was not a dominant win, it was a clear margin.

Badenoch has been viewed as a potential leader for most of her parliamentary career. Elected for the safe seat of Saffron Walden in June 2017, she was tipped as an outsider in the 2019 leadership contest when Theresa May announced ger resignation, but decided not to stand and instead supported Michael Gove. Badenoch did put herself forward in July 2022 when Boris Johnson was forced to call it a day, and in a field of eight candidates she came fourth in the successive ballot of MPs, ending the process with 59 supporters out of 355 who cast a ballot.

For someone who had only been in the House of Commons for five years, was not in the cabinet and had a few weeks before resigned from the middle-ranking position of Minister of State for Local Government, Faith and Communities at the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, it was a creditable performance; Badenoch trailed only Rishi Sunak, a former Chancellor of the Exchequer, the incumbent Foreign Secretary Liz Truss and Penny Mordaunt, a former Defence Secretary who had served as a minister across Whitehall for more than seven years. As she was then only 42 years old, she could afford to take a sanguine view that she had laid down a marker.

Now, at the age of 44, Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch has risen in party terms as far as a Conservative politician can go. Of course she aspires to be Prime Minister, as all but three of her predecessors for more than a century have been, and time ands events will tell whether she can achieve that. But she is no longer a rising star or up-and-coming political figure. She is Leader of His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition and the most significant politician in British centre-right politics.

It is worth saying a word about reaching the premiership. For 75 years, between 1922 and 1997, every leader of the Conservative Party served at least once as Prime Minister. In the same time period, six Labour leaders failed to do so—Arthur Henderson, George Lansbury, Hugh Gaitskell, Michael Foot, Neil Kinnock and John Smith—while only five made it to Downing Street. This contributed, of course, to the Conservatives’ self-image as the “natural” party of government, and made the period of opposition from 1997 to 2010 even more traumatic, with a run of three leaders in William Hague (1997-2001), Iain Duncan Smith (2001-03) and Michael Howard (2003-05) who would never reach the premiership. The instability of the past five or 10 years had at least the marginal advantage, for the party, of taking place while the party was in government, so even Liz Truss’s rollercoaster 49-day leadership came with the consolation of being recorded as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury. The idea of returning to the days of peaking as Leader of the Opposition hangs like a dark cloud about the Conservatives, even if Hague and Duncan Smith would have late-career revivals as senior cabinet ministers.

Kemi Badenoch is, of course, the first black leader of a major British political party, though she regards that as less important than many commentators. Partly that is because of her rejection of rigid identity politics in thrall to which many progressives remain, and partly it is because Rishi Sunak broke the bigger race barrier by becoming the first obviously non-white party leader; it is true that Benjamin Disraeli, a baptised Christian but born into a Jewish family, was from an ethnic minority; that Boris Johnson’s paternal great-grandfather Ali Kemal was Turkish and had Circassian ancestry, and his maternal great-grandfather was a Lithuanian Jew albeit non-practising; and that the 2nd Earl of Liverpool was (probably) one-eighth Indian, through his mother’s family’s involvement with the East India Company. Realistically, however, Sunak’s attainment of the party leadership was an important “first” in presentational terms and in terms of popular understanding.

Nevertheless, Badenoch is the first black Briton to reach such a position. Vaughan Gething, born in Zambia to a Zambian mother and a Welsh father, was leader of Welsh Labour from March to July this year, but while Welsh Labour enjoys considerable autonomy from the UK Labour Party it is not registered as a separate entity with the Electoral Commission. John Archer, born in Liverpool but with a Barbadian father, founded the short-lived African Progress Union (1918-27) but it was never truly a political party, while similarly Jamaican-born Harold Moody founded the League of Coloured Peoples in 1931; although a formidable civil rights organisation during its 20-year life, it was not a political party. David Kurten, who is half-Jamaican, founded the right-wing populist Heritage Party in 2020 and has led it since then, but it is hardly a major group.

That kind of agonised taxonomy neatly illustrates why Badenoch regards identity politics as such a nonsense. Writing in The Times in July 2022, she pulled no punches:

Our country is falsely criticised as oppressive to minorities and immoral, because it enforces its own borders. We cannot maintain a cohesive nation state with the zero-sum identity politics we see today. Exemplified by coercive control, the imposition of views, the shutting down of debate, the end of due process, identity politics is not about tolerance or individual rights but the very opposite of our crucial and enduring British values.

Instead, she believes there must be some shared notion of Britishness, some framework of values to which all citizens adhere, for a nation state to endure. In September this year, noting that she came from an immigrant background, she argued:

I love Britain with the knowledge of how special this country is and how many opportunities it gave me… as citizens and taxpayers, we must have rules. We need to demand that those who come here love this country and will maintain and uphold its traditions, not change them. Our country is not a dormitory for people to come here and make money. It is our home. Those we chose to welcome, we expect to share our values and contribute to our society. British citizenship is more then having a British passport but also a commitment to the UK and its people.

There is, I think, a plausible argument that these “firsts” are, as they should, declining in significance. Although Rachel Reeves loses no opportunity to remind her audiences that she is the first woman to be Chancellor of the Exchequer, in truth, as I touched on in my analysis of last month’s Budget, that is more a matter of chance than anything else: we have had three female prime ministers (all Conservatives), two female foreign secretaries (one Labour, one Conservative) and six female home secretaries (four Conservative, two Labour). Indeed, at the beginning of Liz Truss’s ill-starred premiership, no white man held one of the great offices of state. The chancellorship of the Exchequer had become an outlier but it is hard to argue that this had been due to gender bias for 20 or 30 years.

Of course we should observe these achievements. But it is when they become unremarkable that prejudice has truly been conquered. With Badenoch, however, there is a degree of nuance, because it can plausibly be argued that her upbringing and family, if not her simple ethnic identity, have played a part in shaping her political beliefs and how she approaches public life.

Sir Trevor Phillips, the broadcaster and former Labour grandee who was also chair of the Commission for Racial Equality and its successor, the Equality and Human Rights Commission, was mildly mischievous when he noted on Spectator TV that:

The most important thing to understand about Kemi is that she’s Nigerian. That means she is combative, and she expects others to be combative. There is a sort of, in my view, a sort of juvenile prissiness about British politics now in which people are expected to somehow cloak their beliefs in a way that means that nobody could possibly object to anything they say. Whereas I think the point of politics is to object. I mean, the point of politics is to make a decision about whether we’re going up, down, left, right. And if it doesn’t matter, it’s not a decision, if it does matter, people are going to care about it, and they are going to argue passionately that we want to go that way and not that way. So I am, I think, temperamentally a bit Nigerian, though I think in manners, less so. I think she’s very direct. And that’s the thing that people like about her.

Not everyone would choose to frame their assessment of Badenoch in that way, nor could everyone get away with it: even as the child of parents from British Guiana, it might be felt that Phillips was sailing close to the wind in his broad-brush characterisation of Nigerians. Nevertheless his description of Badenoch herself is acute. She herself has described the difference she found moving from Nigeria back to the United Kingdom (she was born in Wimbledon but raised primarily in Lagos) when she was 16.

When I moved back to this country 30 years ago, it was impossible to communicate quickly with my family. Letters would take weeks to arrive, I had to schedule calls with the few people who had working telephones let alone mobiles.

The result of these cultural differences is that, like many conservatives who grew up in Eastern Europe under Communism, for example, she does not approach freedom and opportunity as abstract ideas but as privileges, gifts which have been hard won and must be cherished and protected. See, for example, my old friend Dr Marian Tupy, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute who was born and spent his early childhood in Czechoslovakia and speaks passionately about the attractions of liberty for those who have endured its absence.

Towards the end of the leadership campaign, Jenrick attacked Badenoch for not having set out many specific policies which she would promote, calling it—in what seemed to me slightly odd phraseology—“disrespectful” to party members. Speaking on BBC Radio 4’s Westminster Hour, he said:

I think it’s disrespectful to the members and the public to ask for their votes without saying where you stand on the big issues facing our country today. A plan today is what I offer. A promise of a plan at some point in the future is what my opponent offers, and I don’t think that’s the way to rebuild the public’s trust and confidence in us.

Jenrick missed the mark here, in my view. It is only four months since the general election, and the road to the next one will be a long, hard slog which must involve deep and difficult thinking about policy. But the landscape over which the 2029 or 2029 election is fought will not be exactly the one we see today, and to spend too much time setting out detailed policies is simply pointless. On the other hand, there is an implication in what Jenrick says that the party membership is entitled to know what sort of world a candidate wants to see and create, and the principles upon which he or she stands. But on that score, it can hardly be said that Kemi Badenoch is enigmatic or non-committal.

We can imagine the kind of Conservative Party that Badenoch will seek to lead. She believes in “the free market as the fairest way of helping people prosper”, and has argued strongly that economic growth and liberty are being constrained by “the idea that bureaucrats make better decisions than individuals, or even democratic nation states”.

It is driving the economic slowdown seen across the West and social polarisation in country after country. A new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control. A new class of people, a new and growing bureaucratic class, is driving these changes. More and more jobs are related not to providing goods and services in the marketplace, but are instead focused around administering government rules. Often these jobs are in private sector bureaucracies, confounding the old split between the public and private sectors.

More broadly, she identified her principles as “personal responsibility, citizenship, equality under the law, family and truth”. Much can be inferred from this: not just opposition to identity politics and many ideas which are loosely and lazily crowded under the umbrella of “woke”, but clear and efficiently enforced rules on immigration and border control, a presumption in favour of a duty of immigrants to assimilate to some degree with a broad set of “British” values and culture and creating circumstances in which parents can more easily afford childcare and take maternity and paternity leave as well as find suitable family homes.

It is not hard to imagine the “vibe” of a Badenoch-led Conservative Party nor even, looking further into a potential future, a Badenoch-led government. There will, of course, be specific issues which arise over the course of this parliament on which she will need to take a firm position, and persuade others to follow her: for example, what will the Conservative Party’s reaction to the Strategic Defence Review be, when it is published in the first half of next year? Once the government has given rather more clarity about exactly how it proposes to reform the National Health Service—not simply “reforming to secure its future”, “doing the hard yards of long-term reform” or “taking tough decisions”—there will need to be specific, detailed and realistic responses.

Badenoch has now chosen her shadow cabinet. There are several surprising appointments: Dame Priti Patel as Shadow Foreign Secretary was an unexpected move, as was Chris Philp as Shadow Home Secretary. Splitting the post of Chairman of the Conservative Party between former Treasury minister Nigel Huddleston and financier, fundraiser and ex-minister for investment Lord Johnson of Lainston had not been much, if at all, discussed. But there are few explicit signs of policy direction in the personnel so far, though Robert Jenrick as Shadow Justice Secretary could have opportunities to pursue his campaign to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, while Laura Trott, now Shadow Education Secretary, helped devise David Cameron’s policy on tax-free childcare.

I will end on one thought which is avowedly optimistic and unquantifiable. I have at no point underestimated the scale of the challenge facing the Conservative Party; I have emphasised on several occasions that July 2024 saw the party’s worst electoral performance in its 190-year history and the collapse of both public trust in the Conservatives and its reputation for any kind of administrative competence has been huge and will be enormously difficult to make good. Merely overcoming the parliamentary arithmetic in a single general election will be hugely difficult, though of course Sir Keir Starmer’s transformation of the Labour Party’s fortunes in terms of numbers of MPs proves that it can be done.

I laid out some foundations which would be necessary for a Conservative revival; suggested qualities a successful leader must possess; highlighted the problem of a very small party membership; and stressed the necessity of optimism in a new political offering. So I cannot be accused of excessively or unthinking positive bias in peering into the political future. Being realistic, it must still be substantially likely that the government will be re-elected in 2028 or 2029, though by what kind of margin I would not like to guess. (It is extraordinary that the previous Conservative government became more popular in retrospective comparison with the incumbent administration by October and then the Labour Party fell into second place in the opinion polls by November.)

Taking all of this into account, I will say this: Kemi Badenoch’s election has sparked a tremor of excitement on the right of politics. It is tentative and cautious, and it is not universal. Comparisons with Margaret Thatcher’s election as Leader of the Opposition in February 1975 (which I have previously written about) are inexact and overdone, and that was in any event nearly 50 years ago. Nevertheless, there is a sense that Badenoch has good, sound, conservative instincts, the determination and self-confidence to promote policies derived from those instincts, and, perhaps more importantly than anything, she will articulate a clear, coherent, straightforward centre-right, economically liberal agenda behind which many Conservatives can happily rally. There is intellectual self-confidence in the air, a leader who has ideas on which she will not compromise and which could, possibly, be electorally attractive.

None of this means that, by virtue of Kemi Badenoch’s election as Leader of the Conservative Party, victory and a return to government is a matter of inevitability. Quite the opposite. The journey is long and arduous with no guarantee of success. But if you are passionate about ideas, if you are attracted to clear and potentially radical policies and have the energy and appetite to talk about how the country can be transformed rather than just shepherded from crisis to crisis, and if your instincts draw you towards the right of politics, there could be exciting times ahead. We shall see.