This week, the Conservative Party gained an unlikely new supporter.
Azealia Banks, the New York rapper, whose album Broke with Expensive Taste has racked up 300 million Spotify streams, declared on X: “Kemi Badenoch is f**king iconic. World leaders will respect her Professionalism alot more than goofball Nigel.”
Banks may be on trend. While the Tories continue to bounce around 20 per cent in the polls – a meagre showing for the party sometimes described as the most successful in the democratic world – the Leader of the Opposition has seen an uptick in her personal ratings.
Two recent polls for The i Paper by BMG Research show Badenoch’s net approval at -7 – not brilliant, but markedly better than Nigel Farage on -16 or the dire -46 scored by Sir Keir Starmer.
Reform UK has consistently led in the opinion polling for a year now. But that lead looks soft: the party is only in the mid-20s, far off the 40 per cent or so that opposition parties have historically needed to put themselves on course for power, amid evidence that the populist right may have a hard ceiling on its support.
One statistic sums up the opportunity that is there for the Conservatives. BMG’s latest poll reveals that among those currently planning to vote Tory, only 22 per cent approve of Farage with 45 per cent saying they do not like the veteran leader. But among Reform supporters, 36 per cent say they believe that Badenoch is doing a good job and just 23 per cent disagree. The upshot may well be that the Tories are better placed to nab voters from Reform than vice versa.
And with Labour continuing to struggle – and now facing a serious threat from their left due to the rise of the Greens – the centre ground is looking like fertile territory too for a leader whose public image is still being shaped.
In the words of one shadow Cabinet minister: “Everyone has to be a celebrity these days. Nigel is, Keir isn’t – with Kemi, most people don’t know a thing about her, which is a problem, but might be an opportunity too.”
Both the parties of the right have embarrassed themselves by proclaiming full-throated support for Donald Trump’s war on Iran before having to retreat when it became clear that the conflict was going badly wrong. But the fallout from the fighting, which has pushed public attention back on to the shaky state of the economy, could benefit the Conservatives, who hold a (narrow) lead on the question of which party is best placed to handle the nation’s finances.
There are, however, three obstacles in front of the Tories as they battle to recover from the disaster of the 2024 general election. The first is convincing right-of-centre voters that the party has realised it made a mistake in promising to cut immigration but instead allowing it to hit record highs. “We screwed up, we need to unscrew up”, as one of the party’s most senior strategists puts it.
Another is to win back the politically moderate floating voters who turned away from the Conservatives in disgust after their 14 years in power. This will require picking “sensible people who are not clinically insane” to lead the party into the future, a Tory veteran remarks – but will also need time for the visceral reaction that so many people still have towards it to wear off.
A spokesman for Badenoch admitted this week: “We’re still dealing with the legacy of our time in office, but we want to show people the Conservative Party is under new management and we have a proper plan to get Britain working again.”
Finally, the party faces a moment of real danger at the upcoming local elections. Apart from in London, where the Tories may make some gains, they are almost certain to take an almighty battering in councils across England as well as going backwards in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments.
Some on the right mutter about this being the tipping point which makes Reform the nation’s leading conservative force, drawing away the grassroots activists and elite supporters who have allowed the Tories to maintain institutional heft. A repeat of last year’s bloodbath could be existential for the future of the party.
But if Badenoch can get through that test without too many losses, and keep pushing forward in the polls, Britain’s volatile politics mean that she may yet have a golden opportunity to stage a comeback for the Conservatives in 2029.
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