Badenoch’s ‘the one’ to beat faltering Labour at next election say Tory grassroots
“She’s going to make it a lot harder for Starmer… she doesn’t pull her punches.”
Conservative party activists may have been just been on the end of an almighty electoral drubbing, however, Labour’s faltering start in office, and the up for it attitude of one their wannabe leaders, has left them in an optimistic mood ahead of their annual conference this weekend.
The event will see the Birmingham International Conference Centre transformed into a giant “beauty parade” as the party’s four remaining leadership contenders make their pitch to the Tory faithful.
Almost all of the local grassroots party leaders that i spoke to this week now think they are about to elect the country’s next PM rather than a caretaker leader, and many are already clear on who it should be.
Kemi Badenoch was the name that came up most often when i interviewed more than 20 local Tory association chairs, officials and councillors about who they and their fellow members were backing.
“I want someone to take the fight to Labour, and I’ll just be honest, I think she’s the only one,” said Mike Botting, chair of the Orpington Conservative Association in comments that echoed the views of many.
Badenoch had a narrow lead over Robert Jenrick, in i’s sample of views with Cleverly and Tugendhat further behind. Her pole position with Tory members tallies with three separate polls by ConservativeHome, and one from YouGov that have all put the shadow housing secretary out in front of her rivals.
“I’m pretty convinced it needs to be her,” Cllr Nadim Muslim from Bolton told i. “If you look at the other leadership candidates and what they are doing, they are talking about policies. We couldn’t be further away from that place. We need to understand the problem first and Kemi is the only one acknowledging that.”
‘The left won’t know how to handle a black woman being Tory leader’
There is a belief that a Badenoch led opposition would wrong foot Labour. “From a tactical viewpoint, I don’t think the left will know how to handle a black woman being the leader of the Conservative Party,” said David Britton, chair of Bognor Regis and Littlehampton Conservatives.
The admiration is not unanimous. “There is an arrogance about her which I think will not serve her well in public life,” a former chair of an association in Hampshire told i.
But Badenoch’s performance in local hustings and culture warrior credentials in taking on “the wokes” have also left Tory foot soldiers “very impressed”.
However the votes of local members – who did also reveal support for Jenrick, Cleverly and Tugendhat – is only one side of the contest.
Firstly, the candidates must win enough backing from their parliamentary colleagues to get through two more rounds of MP ballots as the field is whittled down to the final two that the Tory membership will vote on.
Conservative MPs and members think the contest is still wide open, and David Cameron’s famous performance in 2005 (see box), when an impressive no notes speech saw him eclipse his leadership rival David Davis shows just how much potential next week’s conference has to shake the contest up.
“There’s still a lot of members with an open mind,” said Andrew Hixon, an activist from Redcar. “If one of the candidates can come forward and just do something to galvanise people behind them, have a Winston Churchill moment, a blockbuster speech… that’s what members are looking for.”
How conference can boost a leadership campaign
In 2005, a fresh-faced David Cameron gave a no notes, no lectern speech at the Conservative Party conference in Blackpool’s Winter Gardens. The speech was credited with transforming the Tory leadership race, catapulting him ahead of the previous frontrunner, David Davis.
On Wednesday, the four candidates will have their chance to emulate that feat. An MP supporting Kemi Badenoch said the final day speeches would be “undoubtedly the biggest moment” of the conference “because that’s the nearest you get to the Cameron 2005 set-piece”.
Another Tory MP, who had backed Cameron in 2005 before being elected to Parliament, said the speech was important, but has been over mythologised. “By the time of the party conference, David Davis might still have been nominally the favourite, but the mood music had already changed, the weight of expectation had changed… things were already moving in Cameron’s direction,” they said. The speech was about “solidifying and sealing a deal more than actually turning it round,” they added.
Conference will provide the candidates plenty of opportunities to woo MPs and demonstrate their support among the membership.
There will be hour long “fireside chats” with each contender for Tory members to “meet our leadership candidates”, with Badenoch and Tugendhat taking questions on Monday afternoon, and Jenrick and Cleverly appearing on Tuesday afternoon.
Badenoch, Cleverly and Tugendhat are holding receptions with ConservativeHome, while Jenrick is holding his in a separate tent at the conference. A Badenoch supporting MP said these “rallies” would provide “temperature gauges” of “how much energy and excitement there is around each campaign”.
However, the main event will occur on Wednesday morning, when each of the candidates will have the opportunity to deliver their official speech from the conference stage. Each contender will have 20 minutes, with the running order decided by lot: Tugendhat first, Cleverly second, Jenrick third and Badenoch last up.
Meanwhile at fringe events supportive MPs will get the opportunity to press the case for their favoured candidate, while the numerous drinks receptions and parties of conference will provide plenty of opportunity for the camps to engage in horse-trading with those MPs whose support is still up for grabs.
Jenrick has led throughout the MP voting. In the third round he collected 33 votes, with Badenoch in second place on 28 and Cleverly and Tugendhat tied on 21 votes each.
However, Tory MPs think that it is possible that Badenoch may yet be edged out of the final two.
The dark art of vote lending
With Jenrick and Badenoch sitting on the right of the party, one unknown factor is whether MPs from the moderate ‘One Nation’ wing will end up lining up en masse behind one of Cleverly or Tugendhat to propel them through to the final two.
One Tory MP told i that Cleverly had set his hopes on beating Tugendhat into third and collecting his support.
They said: “His pitch is ‘Make sure Tom goes out first, because if Tom goes out first his votes will come to me predominantly and I shall have a good choice of displacing Kemi or Jenrick’.”
There are also rumours of dark arts at play, with some Badenoch supporters believing a plot is afoot to block her from making the final two.
“What conference will demonstrate is that Kemi is the members’ choice,” said a Badenoch backing MP. “It’s absolutely vital that MPs allow the membership to have her in the final two as a choice.”
They claimed that Jenrick was running an “aggressive” campaign and said he was “undoubtedly” lending votes to Cleverly.
“It’s definitely going on,” they said. “He’s encouraging people to keep Cleverly in the race because he feels that he has the best chance of being the second placed candidate and therefore the easiest person to beat.”
However, other MPs are sceptical about this level of skullduggery. Another MP not aligned with any camp told i: “I think genuinely it’s bollocks.
“It would require – I’m not being unkind to my professional colleagues – but a level of sophistication which is kind of off the scale.”
Another MP who has not publicly endorsed a candidate but is leaning towards Badenoch agreed that talk of vote lending was “overdone” because of the risky nature of such tactics in a secret ballot. “The numbers are quite tight and it gets a bit delicate,” they said.
A Cleverly ally said the claims were “nonsense”. They pointed to polling by Techne UK in August showing their man in first place among Tory members, which they said offered a “pretty good clue for why other camps might be eager to play our chances down”. And an ally of Jenrick’s dismissed the accusations of vote lending as “complete and utter tosh”. “There are 121 MPs, we can’t lend votes. I wish we had enough MPs to lend but we don’t, it’s madness”.
Despite the briefing and counter-briefing, the general consensus is that there is all to play for. The unaligned Tory MP said that after the next two rounds of voting “I think it could be any two of the four, really.”
Voices from the past could yet shake things up. A source close to Boris Johnson – whose memoirs, Unleashed, will be published on October 10 – said on Friday that he still has “no plans” to endorse a candidate. If he did it could make a big impact, as members still yearn for the former PM.
“The general feedback from at least half the members I talk to, if not the majority, is they’d rather bring back Boris.” Cllr Leo Hammond, chair of Bridlington and the Wolds Conservatives, said. “If he does decide to back a candidate, that would bring massive support for that candidate, in the North at least.”
The other politicians capable of boosting Tories at the moment do not even belong to the same party.
“I think the Conservatives absolutely have a chance of winning the next election, look at what’s happened since Labour got into power,” said Cllr Keith Merrie, told i. “It’s been a catalogue of errors… I’ve spoken to lifelong Labour voters who’ve said they will never vote for them again.”
The Tory party’s demographic timebomb
The Conservative Party membership who will pick the eventual winner of the leadership contest are disproportionately male, elderly, southern and well-off.
Professor Tim Bale from Queen Mary University of London runs The Party Members Project between QMLU and Sussex University which tracks the demographic make-up of the Tories. He told i that the party has roughly a 60/40 split between male and female members, an average age of 60, and is “overwhelmingly middle class”, with around a third of living in the south of England. In terms of their beliefs, Professor Bale said Tory members are “quite Thatcherite” and “concerned about immigration to the point of obsession”.
Professor Bale said the demographics of the membership are a “bit of a problem” for the party because the Tories need to craft policies which appeal to younger voters who are in work and less economically comfortable. They also have fewer activist “boots on the ground” in Red Wall seats, which made it harder for the Tories to hold onto them at the election.
Luke Tryl, the UK director of the More in Common think-tank – who is a former Tory special adviser – said that the party needed to widen its membership. “What clearly does seem to be happening is that you’re getting people who either die or can’t be active in the party anymore because of age and they’re not being replaced to the same degree, except for by a handful of keen young Conservatives.”
It is frequently said that members usually back the leadership candidate who comes from the Tory right. However, Mr Tryl said it is possible to “over-exaggerate” this and that members are often more pragmatic than they are given credit for. “They really like winning,” he said.
It is not clear how many members there are, because unlike other parties the Tories do not routinely publish their figures. When the party elected Liz Truss over Rishi Sunak in September 2022, there were 172,437 Tory members.