Tips for Badenoch from Tory veterans
The newly installed Conservative leader should ignore Reform UK and take their time to build a broad coalition of support to beat Sir Keir Starmer’s government, according to Tory veterans who served in opposition before the party took power in 2010.
While Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick are both on the right of the Conservative Party, during the leadership race she declined to match Reform UK’s totemic ambition to leave the European Convention on Human Rights to tackle migration.
By contrast, Jenrick made leaving the institution a key plank of his platform. But Tory Party veterans with experience of opposition warned the new leader against seeking to outdo Reform UK, arguing it won’t win over voters.
Badenoch won the race with 53,806 votes, defeating Jenrick who secured 41,388 votes. “It is the most enormous honour to be elected to this role, to lead the party that I love, the party that has given me so much. I hope that I will be able to repay that debt,” she said on winning the contest.
“Our first responsibility as His Majesty’s loyal Opposition is to hold this Labour Government to account.
“Our second is no less important. It is to prepare over the course of the next few years for government, to ensure that by the time of the next election, we have not just a clear set of Conservative pledges that appeal to the British people, but a clear plan for how to implement them, a clear plan to change this country by changing the way that government works.
“The Prime Minister is discovering all too late the perils of not having such a plan.”
Iain Duncan Smith, who served as Conservative Party leader from 2001 to 2003, said “there is no rush” to come up with a programme for government. Instead the new leader should “take time” to put together a shadow Cabinet and work on their vision of what Britain should look like to “try and remind everybody that the Conservative Party is the only party, in a national sense, that can regain the trust of those who walked away from mainstream politics.”
Duncan Smith, 70, said the new Tory leader should take advantage of the fact that Starmer is not as popular as former Labour Prime Minister Tony Blair was in the early noughties. “This is not Blair’s government, which I was up against when he was at about 44% in the polls and was riding high for years. This is a Labour government that nobody can remember voting for and is not going to be popular for long.”
He said the new leader should listen to a wide range of voices from around the country before coming up with a policy platform. They should be “getting out there, listening to community groups, listening to Conservative politicians and councils,” he added.
After the Tories lost power in 1997, William Hague became the new leader. In 2001 he was followed by Duncan Smith, then Michael Howard, who led them into the 2005 election defeat. Following that, David Cameron became leader and led the party to success in 2010.
The advice to not have a small cabal of advisors is key, echoes Alan Duncan, a former Foreign Office minister who served in Cameron’s shadow Cabinet.
“Do not be leader through the voice or action of special advisors, otherwise you’ll be dead in the water, it would be resented. Work with MPs and then build up the party,” he told i. Cameron “ran it through too tight a bunch of chums. Now we read all the books and it’s all about [George] Osborne, Cameron and [Michael] Gove and their obsession with [Boris] Johnson and not a big enough outreach team at all.”
“Don’t feel you have to comment on everything in the media,” Duncan, 67, also advised the newly-elected leader. “Use the team around you to prove themselves and become people of authority as well; don’t be afraid of having people around you being successful.”
Caroline Spelman, 66, a former Cabinet minister served as Tory Chairman during Cameron’s stint in opposition and remembers the period well.
When “re-envisioning the offer to the electorate you have to hold your nerve” Spelman told i. “I remember the cynicism which greeted our compassionate Conservative approach after 18 years in government.”
When the party pursued its environmentalist strategy under Cameron, it hit a note with a swathe of centrist voters she argued. “The ‘Vote Blue Go Green’ approach adopted at successive local government elections built the foundation on which the return to power was achieved in coalition in 2010. This demonstrates how returning to the centre ground of politics is key,” Spelman recalled. “Starmer had to do this as well post-Corbyn but it looks as if they are veering off again surprising quickly.”
For Dominic Grieve, 68, the former Cabinet minister who served in opposition under Cameron, the new Tory leader needs to look outside of Westminster and the House of Commons knockabout to connect with voters.
Hague, who led the party from 1997 to 2001, “was rather good at duffing over Tony Blair at the despatch box, and it had absolutely zero impact. It was good for morale, but it didn’t change things,” Grieve told i. The party went on to lose the 2001 general election.
“Talk to your key supporters, and that’s not just your party members, and you will soon start to identify the things that are of greatest concern to them, and if you start to connect with them and recommend policies that might work, rather than just policies which are slogans, you will start to rebuild public trust and the credibility of the party, which has been massively damaged by precisely pursuing incredible policies which are undeliverable and amount to no more than sloganeering,” he said.
Key to this approach is not to try and be more right-wing than Nigel Farage, the leader of Reform UK, he argued.
“If you decide as a political party that the solution is to outflank Reform in appealing to this section of the UK electorate, you are going to lose an equal, if not larger, number of people who will conclude that the party has completely lost its anchors of moderation and therefore will never vote for it again,” Grieve said.
Alan Duncan agreed. “My view is ignore Reform,” he advised. “Don’t feel you in any way have to submit to them.
“They have five MPs and two of them, Farage and Lee Anderson are more interested in being personalities than Parliamentarians. Whether the party is headed for failure remains to be seen, but I think they’ve peaked.”