𝓤𝓷𝓲𝓽𝓮𝓭 𝓝𝓮𝔀𝓼

After its brutal hammering in the 2024 General Election, the Conservative Party’s very survival was in doubt. Its broken body lay in intensive care, a pulse barely detectable. Commentators predicted that the last rites would soon be read for the fading patient. Although the trip to the mortuary was averted by the election of Kemi Badenoch, who brought a spirit of resolution to her role, the prospects for long-term recovery appeared bleak.

For all her bravery, Badenoch gave some poor performances in media interviews and in the Commons, sparking a renewed bout of leadership speculation. The mood of crisis was sedulously cultivated by disaffected former Cabinet Minister Robert Jenrick, who was said to be plotting her overthrow at the 2025 party conference in Manchester so he could seize the crown for himself. But Jenrick’s manoeuvres gained little traction with activists, in part because Badenoch shored up her position with a powerful, defiant speech.

Since then, Jenrick has sulkily gone over to Reform UK, while Badenoch has gone from strength to strength. Exuding a new confidence and dry humour, her Parliamentary style has improved dramatically. Her punchier language has also connected with the British public.

Now in command of her party, her leadership is secure. The problem for the Tories is that there has not been a commensurate improvement in their overall popularity. Indeed, their ratings are now lower than at the last General Election, which illustrates how they continue to pay a heavy price for their spectacular failures to get a grip on immigration and the public finances during the last government.

As the polling expert Lord Ashcroft recently warned Conservative MPs and activists: “People like her – they’re just not convinced by the rest of you.”

Yet in the face of these dismal poll numbers, the atmosphere at this week’s Birmingham conference was remarkably buoyant. Some might call this delusional but there are a number of positive factors that help to explain it. One is the star quality – or “Kemistry” – that their leader exudes, as highlighted by her bravura conference speech, whose self-assured delivery and vote-winning ideas had members cheering to the rafters. In an echo of William Hague’s call in 2000 for a “common sense revolution” against Blairite ideology, she advocated the return of “common-sense” Tory principles like sound money, strong defences and a restrained state. “The “Right Way,” as she dubbed this strategy, is epitomised by her pledge to abolish all death duties on family properties, a bold move that could galvanise support for the Tories, since inheritance levies are the most hated taxes of all.

Predictably, Labour claimed the Tories are now favouring the rich at the expense of the poor. But Badenoch’s team will welcome this kind of class war rhetoric as a further sign of how far their opponents have lurched to the left under Andy Burnham. His yearning for a return to the high-tax, union-dominated, big-spending socialism of the seventies gives the Tories a golden opportunity to present itself as the pragmatic voice of the British mainstream.

Badenoch put it well in her speech when she attacked Labour’s retreat into the comfort zone of a mythical past: “Hope is not a strategy. Nostalgia is not a plan.”

The Conservatives’ potential rehabilitation under Badenoch is further helped by the self-inflicted troubles that have engulfed both Reform and the Green Party – the former over poor internal discipline and acceptance of dubious donations; the latter over its shameful embrace of antisemitism, a process with which its cowardly, duplicitous leader Zak Polanski has colluded.

The most compelling passage in Badenoch’s speech came when she said that she would never form any pact with Reform because of the bigotry displayed by some of its key members. A year ago that might have sounded like a hollow boast. Now, with Badenoch’s stock continuing to rise, it has real credibility.