No one who knows her describes Kemi Badenoch as a politician who is much troubled by self doubt. Yet the manner of her victory in the Tory leadership contest ought to give a worm of unease to the party’s new standard bearer. When the result came in on Saturday morning, the first reveal was that the membership of the Tory party has shrunk to 131,680, down more than 40,000 since the last contest two years ago. With the turnout also down on last time, she won with the support of just four in 10 of that shrivelled membership. Her lustiest cheerleaders cannot describe this as an emphatic victory. Even the truest of blues were not greatly impressed by the choice on offer for all the effort that she and Robert Jenrick put into trying to pander to their party’s prejudices on the constituency association dinner circuit. Never have so many rubber chickens died in vain.
This lack of enthusiasm was also evident during the preliminary rounds when it was Tory MPs doing the voting. In the final ballot of Conservative parliamentarians, it was virtually a three-way tie between the former business secretary, Mr Jenrick and James Cleverly. The new Tory leader takes charge with a tepid endorsement from her party’s members, two-thirds of her parliamentary colleagues preferring someone else and prominent names declaring that they have no desire to serve in her shadow cabinet. This is not so much a coronation as a hospital pass. A brittle mandate means she will be treated as an interim chief on probation with a party that will be impatient for results and is infamous for its factionalism and its disloyalty. The sixth leader of her party in a decade, she’s going to have to play a difficult hand with much more dexterity than she’s previously demonstrated if she’s not to be yet another Tory head whose grip on the job is fleeting.
In her acceptance speech, she described the task ahead as “tough”, which is an understatement. The July election was the worst result for the Conservative party, both in terms of vote share and seats won, since 1832 when they were led by the Duke of Wellington. I am not among those who think this means the Tories can never recover. They have been pronounced dead and buried in the past only then to rise from the grave. But they are unlikely to start recovering until – and unless – they have an honest reckoning with themselves about their multiple failings in government. This they have not done and Mrs Badenoch is as guilty as the rest of them. In her first speech as leader, she made only a fleeting reference to “mistakes”. She spent the contest tilting at windmills of the culture wars, badmouthing the civil service and being animated by other topics that preoccupy the Tory party much more than they do most of the public. If she is in possession of fresh thinking about solving the housing shortage, rejuvenating public services or addressing any of the other large challenges facing Britain, she did not share them during her policy-light campaign for the leadership.
Her core analysis is that her party lost the electorate because it was insufficiently right wing. One of her arguments is that the Tories “talked right, but governed left”. Another is that Nigel Farage’s Reform ate into Tory support because conservatism “morphed into much vaguer centrism”. What this explanation conspicuously neglects is that the Tories haemorrhaged support not just among rightwing voters, but around all points of the compass. They also lost support and seats to Labour and the Lib Dems while more than a million people who backed the Tories in 2019 stayed at home in 2024. Immigration was a factor that hurt their vote, but they were damaged more by their record on public services and the cost of living and giving the overall impression of being a clown show. Surveys suggest that very few voters think the Conservatives lost the election because they were too left wing while the majority of those with an opinion put it down to their incompetence. A lurch further to the right may claw back some support from Reform, but will be accompanied by the high risk of alienating more moderate former Conservative voters, the kind who helped the Lib Dems take 59 seats off the Tories by gutting them in their affluent English heartlands. Could things get more dire for Mrs Badenoch’s party? Quite easily if she fails to reunite the right while succeeding in repulsing even more of middle-ground opinion.
One of the biggest challenges for the new leader of the opposition, and especially when the Tory parliamentary presence is so small, will be persuading voters to pay them any heed. The case made for Mrs Badenoch by her promoters is that she is “box office” with a gift for grabbing attention. What she has often failed to grasp is that there is such a thing as the wrong kind of attention. “Still in development” is the assessment of one reasonably sympathetic senior Tory. “Kemi is clever. She will learn on the job,” says a Conservative MP who is friendly towards her. “She will be brilliant or she will be a disaster,” remarks another. It is not hard to find moderate Tory MPs who predict that she will, in the words of one of their number, “crash and burn very quickly”. If she’s not going to self-destruct in the job, many of her colleagues agree that she is going to have to become a lot more disciplined and a lot less rebarbative with colleagues.
When assessing their chances of recovering, a lot of Tories take comfort in the notion that the electorate appears to be more volatile than it used to be. Sir Keir Starmer managed to take Labour from a catastrophic defeat in 2019 to a parliamentary landslide in 2024. Why, Tories can be heard wondering, shouldn’t we be able to do the same? What they don’t ask themselves often enough is how the Labour leader detoxified his party’s reputation. He did so by repeatedly apologising for and drawing lines under its past while relentlessly offering demonstrations of how it had changed under his management.
By contrast, the Conservatives have displayed next to no interest in atoning for all the things voters came to loathe about them. There has never been a comprehensive repudiation of Boris Johnson for debauching standards in public life. Nor has there been an expression of suitably abject contrition for Liz Truss’s calamitous experiment with the economy. Nor have senior Tories had the humility to acknowledge that they left a super-massive black hole in the Treasury’s books. When you have fouled up as badly and as repeatedly as the Conservatives did in government, the first step to redemption with the electorate is to own your blunders and express regret for them.
Too many Tories are instead beguiled by the idea that all they have to do is savour Labour’s difficulties and wait for power to come back to them. The bellowing Conservative response to the budget is instructive. They are howling that it involves increased taxes and higher borrowing, as if none of this has anything to do with their period in office. When Rishi Sunak replied to the budget in his swansong performance as leader, he tried to create the impression that the Tories bequeathed a golden economic inheritance to Labour. If you believe that, I’ve got a squadron of flying pigs to sell you. In their current state of denial, the Tories also seem oblivious to the trap Rachel Reeves is trying to set for them, even though the chancellor was explicit about this in her budget speech. If the Tories don’t like the tax rises, what would they hack out of the budgets of the NHS, schools and other key public services? If Labour has its way, that will be a defining argument of this parliament. Ms Reeves is hoping to make the contest one between “Labour investment versus Tory cuts”, a dividing line that worked very well for her party and extremely badly for the Conservatives during the New Labour years.
Even if voters become persistently discontented with Sir Keir’s government, the Tories are delusional if they imagine that this means the public will simply collapse back into their embrace and tell the Conservatives all is forgiven. Not least because so far the Tories have been almost completely incapable of recognising how much forgiveness they will need before they are taken seriously again. If Kemi Badenoch wants to get a hearing from the British people, she is first going to have to say sorry. And she is going to have to say it a lot.
• Andrew Rawnsley is the Chief Political Commentator of the Observer
