How Badenoch’s Tories aim to win again
On Wednesday night, Conservative MPs held a powwow under their new leader, Kemi Badenoch, who had just survived her first Prime Minister’s Questions.
With MPs staying late to take part in 10 votes on the Budget, the Parliamentary Conservative Party decided to have a “little get together” between the divisions.
According to one of those present, the mood was remarkably upbeat for a party that had recently suffered its worst electoral defeat in modern history. “Everyone was feeling quite positive,” the senior Tory MP said.
Much of that optimism is based on the early performance of the Labour Government.
“We’ve frankly been taken aback by how shit they are,” the senior Tory said. “It’s unbelievable, with all the amount of time they’ve had to prepare for it.”
The MP was not the only one to reach for scatological terms when opining on Sir Keir Starmer’s government. “What a shitshow the new lot are,” a second Conservative MP said.
Labour’s travails have made Tory MPs surprisingly bullish about their chances of winning the next election under Badenoch. A Shadow Cabinet member said: “There is a very big opportunity for us to return to government in one term.
“They’ve already made some very big mistakes… particularly the withdrawal of the winter fuel allowance and the tax-raising Budget.”
Badenoch’s plan to return to power has several elements. For all the optimism, it starts with a frank acknowledgment of the current state of the party and its standing in the country.
“The most important thing for us to remember is that the road is long,” the senior Tory said. “We have just been massively stuffed at the election.”
There is also a belief that Labour will get its act together. The senior Tory went on: “This is a couple of months in to what is going to be a four or five-year period, and they can’t be this shit for ever. They will catch themselves on, they will reorganise, rearrange, reboot, and we have to keep plugging away at it for a very long time.”
As Badenoch made clear during the leadership campaign, the distance from the election means the Tories will not be setting out detailed policies anytime soon.
“Off the back of any crushing defeat you’ve got to have a period of reflection, a period of – in Kemi’s own words – renewal,” a Tory backbencher said.
“There’s no point us coming up with ‘x’ off income tax or ‘x’ new hospitals or whatever it is. It’s just pointless, no one’s listening. They just gave us the most almighty hiding in the polls in July. It’s about actually re-earning the right to be heard.”
Tory MPs are on board with the message. An ally of Badenoch’s said getting back to power would be a “phased process”. “Nobody gives a toss what our policy is right now,” they added.
Professor Tim Bale, an expert on the Conservative Party at Queen Mary University of London, said Badenoch is following a familiar playbook. “I don’t think she’s unusual in putting off making any policy commitments,” he told i. “If you look at what the Conservatives tend to do in Opposition, every time they hold a bunch of policy reviews.”
True to form, Badenoch is planning to launch a series of policy commissions to deliver proposals later in the Parliament.
That will buy some time for the Tories to focus on the more pressing tasks of setting out the party’s principles – as well as building Badenoch’s own public profile.
Tory MPs think that the latter task will be made easier by Badenoch’s vivid personality. The MP ally said: “You’ve got to get the masses to see ‘oh right, Kemi is on our side, she gets us’. She’s very capable of doing that because she does express things bluntly and plainly, and I think that will be seen as a virtue. Whereas some find it irritating, I think the masses will see it as, ‘that Kemi, she’s not taking any shit’.”
The senior Tory agreed that Badenoch would be hard to ignore. “The beauty of having Kemi elected is whatever part of the party you’re from, and whoever was maybe your first choice as leadership candidate, she definitely gives the prospect of being able to cut through.”
The MP said that Badenoch would strike a contrast with the Prime Minister. “Starmer isn’t terrible, he’s got many ‘steady as he goes, not a bad person’ attributes,” they said. “But he is really dull. He’s very wooden.”
Badenoch and Starmer’s inaugural PMQs certainly made for a spicy encounter, with the Tory leader goading the Prime Minister over disobliging comments which the Foreign Secretary David Lammy had made about Donald Trump.
But she did not have it all her own way, with Starmer landing blows about Badenoch reading from a script and inaccurately claiming the Budget made no mention of defence.
The senior Tory said she had done enough to satisfy her parliamentary foot-soldiers. “It was a good start and it will get better actually,” they said. “It’s bound to be a very nerve-wracking experience the first time.”
The PMQs also showcased the battle which Badenoch will face in establishing her own public image, with planted questions from Labour MPs dredging up controversial comments she has made across a range of topics, from maternity pay to the minimum wage.
A Tory MP said: “She needs to define her values, what her gut is – because if I were Labour or the Liberal Democrats or Reform, I’d be trying like hell to define her over the next eight weeks.”
The decline in the Tories’ membership
November’s Conservative leadership election confirmed the continued decline in the size of the party’s membership.
In total, 131,680 members were eligible to vote in the contest – a drop of 40,000 since the last time the figures were released in September 2022 when Liz Truss triumphed over Rishi Sunak to become Tory leader.
Party insiders admit it poses a problem for the Tories. A Shadow Cabinet member said: “We need more members and we need more supporters who are willing to campaign for us on the ground. In the general election we were often outgunned on the ground, by Labour particularly who have a younger and more mobile volunteer network and that is another task for CCHQ”.
Another Tory MP said they believed Kemi Badenoch could turn around the decline if she made progress against Labour. “If people begin to see her as a credible person who takes on the Government fearlessly, more people will join,” they said.
Professor Tim Bale said that anxiety about the size of the Tory membership is not new. “You can go right back really to the 50s to find Conservatives worrying about the size of their membership even in the golden age,” he said.
He said that it was “very difficult for parties to boost” membership, with the explosion in Labour members under Jeremy Corbyn “the exception that proves the rule”.
But Professor Bale said that the failure of a formidable grassroots campaign by the Democrats to secure the White House last week showed that there was more to winning elections than weight of member numbers.
He said: “It is worrying [for the Tories], although of course they will be able to point perhaps to what happened in the US and say you can have the greatest ground game in all the world and if the tide of public opinion isn’t with you, then that doesn’t make a blind bit of difference.”
While fleshing out what she and the Conservatives stand for, Badenoch and her team must do the day in, day out hard graft of fulfilling the role of His Majesty’s Opposition and holding the Government to account.
Party figures generally think she has made a decent start of promoting talent and balancing competing Tory factions with her shadow cabinet selection. A Tory insider said: “The Shadow Cabinet is good, that was the first fork in the road she had to navigate successfully. There will be several more, if she can do that, she can survive until the next election.” But with the Tories history of bloodletting, they said there was still a chance she could be gone in “18 months”.
The appointment of Mel Stride as shadow Chancellor after a tilt at the leadership which won plaudits, and Dame Priti Patel’s selection as shadow Foreign Secretary, have both gone down well, as has the decision to make Nigel Huddleston co-chairman. An MP from the centre of the party said of Patel’s appointment: “You have to have a ‘shad cab’ and set of influential people that is properly fully reflective. It was probably more important to give Priti a good position that some of the other right-wingers… she has a long history in the party and a following.”
Of course, opinions on the top team are not unanimous. An MP who backed another candidate in the Tory leadership race scented a whiff of preferment. “There’s some very good people in there”, they said, before adding: “There’s a little irritation across some parts of the party on lack of balance. It’s very heavily her own supporters.”
Another party veteran suggested the Shadow Cabinet lacked a political edge, with few figures experienced in running campaigns or strategising within Westminster. “It’s a very sensible Shadow Cabinet, but you probably need a few more c**ts in there,” they joked.
There are also a couple of high-profile omissions, with ex-leadership rivals James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat returning to the backbenches. Professor Bale said: “Much like William Hague [in 1997], she hasn’t been able to persuade everybody to come on board.
“That is let’s say an amber signal, not necessarily a red one. That’s left obviously a couple of people who perhaps still have leadership ambitions floating around on the backbenches potentially making trouble.”
An immediate challenge will be ensuring the party has sufficient resources to effectively oppose the Government. After the expense of the general election campaign, there is an urgent need to replenish Tory coffers. Several sources told i that the Shadow Cabinet has been ordered not to hire political advisers yet as there is so little funding available, while Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ) is also trying to work out how much money it will have to fight the local elections in May.
The Shadow Cabinet minister said: “We can’t be complacent, we know that we have to be energetic because of our small numbers in the chamber and we need to be raising more money – that is the key to being able to fully staff our campaigning effort.”
On the recruitment of political advisers, they said: “There’s no funding being provided by CCHQ at the moment… we have to wait or find alternative sources, but that is not an easy thing to do.”
A Conservative spokeswoman said: “Kemi has been in place for just over a week, understandably time is being taken to consider the right appointments that will be able to take the Conservative Party forward under her leadership.”
The Tories are also getting to grips with a transformed political landscape since the election. For example, all three constituencies in Stoke-on-Trent – long a Labour stronghold before the Tories won them in the aftermath of Brexit – are now more winnable than Chichester, which was held by the Conservatives for a century until the Lib Dems captured it this year with a large majority. A Tory strategist said: “Everything has been upended.”
A Tory backbencher said that the party was “fighting a war on three real fronts”, needing to beat Labour, win scores of seats back from the Lib Dems and “stop Reform progressing – or certainly stop [them] progressing against us”.
For their own part, Labour and Lib Dem MPs claim to be delighted by Badenoch’s leadership victory. “It’s great news for us,” a Lib Dem said. “She’s crackers!”
Westminster is also calibrating what the return of Trump will mean for party dynamics in the UK. A Labour MP claimed that Trump could exert a gravitational pull on the Tories, dragging them in the direction of “completely pointless culture wars”. They said it would be “very hard in a Trump world for [the Tories] to do a David Cameron-esque tack to the country”.
But Tories insist Trump’s return will not have a major bearing on their party’s postures or prospects. “I don’t think it makes a huge difference to be honest” a Conservative backbencher said. The MP said that while Trump’s victory would probably “put a bit of wind under the Reform sails” it would also “focus the minds of a lot of soft Lib Dem voters, who will be worried about Reform getting traction here. The only way to stop that is to come back to us. So swings and roundabouts.”
Another Tory MP dismissed the idea of the party moving in a Trumpian direction. “America likes to think about American exceptionalism, but we should also remember it is a strange place,” they said. “I love Americans, but they are different. I don’t think anybody in Britain is going to say ‘oh Donald Trump has been elected, that should make us want to do something Faragesque’.”
Badenoch’s Tories think their main chance is if Rachel Reeves’ gamble on tax rises and increased public spending in the Budget fails to come off.
The ally of Badenoch said: “We’ve got a sugar rush for the next two years of money going into the public sector, which is not necessarily going to clean up the public services and give us the upbeat impact on the economy by any means.
“In the second half of this Parliament it is possible that they will have to have significant increases in taxes or borrowing in order to accommodate the pressure on day-to-day spending if we don’t get the enhancement of growth.”
In such a scenario, the MP said that a Thatcher-like message about wrestling down the size of the state might once again start to resonate.
“In those circumstances, people are going to say, fundamentally we can’t carry on like this and we’ll be back to Margaret Thatcher and 1978-79,” they said.
“It looks totally ridiculous from the number of seats we’ve got, but you can see circumstances where we accelerate forward quite markedly and voting Reform is seen as just a way of ensuring Labour get in.”
