Good morning. Kemi Badenoch was elected as Conservative leader over the weekend, and now has a window of about two minutes of mainstream attention before the US election devours the entire news agenda. That is not time to plot the next five years in any detail. But it doesn’t take long to observe just how stiff the challenge she faces will be.
The contest was billed as a postmortem of the election defeat – but as it played out, we don’t even know in any detail why Badenoch thinks the Tories lost. She said yesterday that the threat of Reform UK was a symptom of her party not being “consistent enough about values” – without being specific about what that would mean in practice. Meanwhile she starts with a reputation as an abrasive media performer who is firmly on the right of her party, and will soon have to decide whether to oppose public spending increases just four months after a landslide defeat.
