Kemi Badenoch began this year as she ended the last — by admitting to mistakes the Tories have made. On Thursday she gave a speech in which she attacked the Conservative Party’s record on Brexit, migration and net zero.
Badenoch believes the approach is essential if the Tories are to get a hearing with voters again. “We had our worst ever defeat,” she says. “In order to be listened to again it is important that we rebuild trust with the public.
“I use the analogy of when you’ve had a break-up, you don’t just carry on as if nothing’s happened. You’ve got to show contrition, show you’ve learnt from the mistakes. And it’s really important that the public know that the Conservative Party is under new leadership. It’s not the same thing they kicked out in July. This is an evolution that’s taking place. It’s about showing people the road map to a new set of policies and a new way of thinking.”
Badenoch is not writing off 14 years of Tory government. She says the party made “a lot of good things happen”, such as benefit reforms, “near full employment” and raising educational standards. “But people remember the most recent period,” she says, “and I think the most recent period was the most difficult.”
Badenoch is referring to the tumult that has beset the Tories since 2019. Four prime ministers in four years, a succession of scandals and Liz Truss’s brief but disastrous premiership. Truss has not gone away, most recently issuing Sir Keir Starmer with a cease and desist letter over his claim that she “crashed the economy”. Starmer was delighted, publicly using the letter to remind voters of her tumultuous time in power.
Did Badenoch find Truss’s intervention helpful? “I can only focus on what I can do,” she says. “As much as possible I want to see the Conservatives moving in one direction. That is one of the great things that’s started happening under my leadership. The party is uniting.
“This time last year, if you opened the papers it would have been plots and people putting in letters and all of that nonsense. That has stopped. Now we are all singing from the same hymn sheet. We are writing the music together.”
At this stage of her leadership, Badenoch wants to focus on a broad vision of the future. The policies will come later, she says. “The most important thing is that we rebuild trust. Just throwing out lots of policies without showing the plan behind them is not how you do that. The public are disillusioned because politicians keep saying things and not doing them.”
Badenoch says she wants her party to focus on the next generation — as well she might. Only 5 per cent of people aged 18 to 24 support the Tories. “A lot of people today are very complacent,” Badenoch says. “They think the UK will always be rich, everything will always be as it is. But we are living off the inheritance that previous generations gave us.
“We need to leave an inheritance for the next generation. That’s my mission. That’s the mission of the Conservative Party. We want to conserve what’s good about our country. Improve what’s not working as well — but let’s give something to our children and their children.”
Some of her colleagues believe she has less time than she thinks. The local elections in May are likely to bring heavy losses for the Tories, and pressure from Reform UK is growing.
Badenoch says voters are still in a mood to punish the Tories. “These local elections will be quite difficult for us as a party,” she says. “If you compare to where we were four years ago, it was a record high. So compared with that it will be very bad.”
A YouGov poll for The Times this week suggested that Reform was tied with Labour, the Tories trailing in third. Experts have said that politics is more competitive than ever, with five parties battling it out. How worried is Badenoch by the rise of Reform?
“Every party poses a threat to the Conservative Party,” she says. “We are in a very, very competitive political environment. What those numbers show me is that the Conservative Party has a job to do in making sure that people understand what we stand for and that our values are the values of the British people.”
Badenoch’s approach to Reform is to appeal directly to voters. “The only people that I hold to account as leader of the opposition is the government,” she says. She suggests that she had a “lot of time and respect” for Farage until she met him last year. “We had a very good conversation,” she recalls. “And then I read an account [of it] that was untrue.”
Reform, however, is difficult to ignore. Over Christmas, Farage made headlines claiming that Reform’s membership numbers had overtaken the Tories’. Badenoch accused Farage on X of “fakery”. Her intervention led to a row, to the dismay of some senior Tories who said it served only to publicise Reform’s claim.
Badenoch is unrepentant. “I stand by what I said on that day,” she says. “It was very specific and I said the mechanism they were using was not real. But I don’t want us talking about membership. This is not something that the public are interested in. I was actually astonished at how much time was spent on a trivial issue when there are huge issues going on in the country right now.”
Badenoch says there is no deal to be done with Farage, though polling suggests that half of Tory voters would be in favour. “What a lot of those people don’t know is that Nigel Farage has said he wants to destroy the Tory party,” she says. “So they see Reform as being a sibling party they can do business with. It really is not. It is a party that is out to destroy us.”
She argues that Reform is benefiting from protest votes. “We have got to get people out of that place where they are just fed up and hate all politics,” she says, insisting that Reform’s support will collapse. “I think it is [a protest vote], in the same way the Liberal Democrats were and still are a protest vote. Time will tell, but the Conservative Party being under new leadership means there is scope for new people coming towards us. We need to make sure we are the most credible centre-right offer.”
Badenoch is taking an interest in a Swedish government announcement that immigrants will take a test on values such as gender equality and the rule of law.
The UK citizenship test focuses on history, law, politics, culture and the English language. “I think that that test is really a history test, and maybe an English-language test, rather than a citizenship test,” she says. “I think Sweden has the right principle. It’s got to be about how you’re going to contribute to a country, wanting it to succeed. I tell people that assimilation should be the target and integration should be the next best thing.”
She says that tests “might be one way” to weed out those who do not share British values. Beyond that, she suggests that people could be required to get references from senior figures in their communities — vicars, teachers and others. “There should be better references from communities,” she says. “We need everybody to step up and be a part of making sure our society is strong. That’s what used to happen. It was a lot easier.
“At the moment, we pretend that our values are just an option and people can have whatever it is that they want. I don’t believe in moral or cultural relativism. I do believe British values are great and we’ve got to defend them.”
Badenoch is still weighing up her options on immigration. She has said the Tories will commit to a numerical cap for legal immigration, although the party is still weighing up the appropriate level. She has yet to commit to leaving the European Convention on Human Rights, which several members of her shadow cabinet are pushing for. She wants to take a longer view, she says.
“Saying we should leave the ECHR is not a policy, it’s an announcement. It would have ramifications across the board because it’s been integrated into our common law. How would we make sure that we don’t accidentally unpick things?
“I don’t think the ECHR is the only problem. There are other countries in the ECHR who are able to do things we are not.”
She is attracted by the idea of barring migrants from claiming unemployment benefits unless they have paid taxes. “I believe in a contributory principle,” she says. “I know there are reasons why we let people claim benefits without having contributed. That was fine when the numbers were tiny. Now the numbers are off the scale. It doesn’t make sense to do that. We’ve got to find a better way of working out this system.”
Badenoch says the approach would not apply to everyone — people could still get child, sickness and disability benefits — but “within reason we should look at that as the main way, the default”.
A few hours after her speech on Thursday, Badenoch gave an interview in which she appeared to suggest that the triple lock, under which the state pension rises in line with whichever is the highest of inflation, average earnings or 2.5 per cent, should be means tested. The comments added to concerns among some Tories about Badenoch’s ability to stick to her own message.
She insists, however, that she wants to look at the issue of means testing more broadly. “What I’m not going to do is indulge all the other parties who are doing the same old politics — spinning rubbish, telling lies and pretending things were said when they weren’t said.”
But is it affordable in the long-term? Her shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, has questioned in the past whether it is sustainable. “There are views in the City, in the pensions world, there are lots of people who questioned it,” she says. “They questioned it when we brought the triple lock in. And people should ask questions, we will look at it. But our policy has not changed.”
Badenoch recently travelled to the United States to meet senior Republicans including JD Vance, the vice president-elect. Does she think Donald Trump will be a force for good in his second term?
“The leader of the US is the leader of the free world. So yes, he will be a force for good in the world. But I want him to also be a force for good for the UK.”
Badenoch’s style of leadership may ruffle feathers for some in her party, but she is unrepentant. “We’re doing things differently. We are going to be honest about the problems we face and the mistakes we made. That’s going to make people uncomfortable, because they don’t want to have difficult conversations. But if we are going to try to win the public’s trust, we’ve got to be honest.”
