The “no-nonsense party” – that’s how Kemi Badenoch framed the Conservatives during her speech at party conference. Sounding more like a headteacher than a prime ministerial hopeful, Badenoch characterised the last 15 years of politics as all a bit silly. In contrast, Badenoch sees herself as a serious politician. “To think people were writing us off,” she told the crowd, “I am not someone who gets written off and neither is the Conservative party.”
Badenoch is, in some ways, an impressive politician. While most MPs were playing catch-up on the gender question, unsure of which horse to back, Badenoch was unabashed in her defence of gender-critical feminists – with a confidence that won her brownie points in sections of society that would usually baulk at the Tories.
Likewise, on so-called culture war issues – like Suella Braverman’s bizarre demands that minority ethnic Britons should be categorised differently from their fellow white citizens – Badenoch sounds sensible. “I don’t want to explain to my son when I’m watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English,” she told conference. This statement got the loudest applause from her supporters and colleagues in Birmingham, a reaction which mirrors how most people feel about the Right trying to play ugly identity politics.
But while many think Badenoch has her head screwed on – full of “common sense” – a popular leader does not a popular party make. She expressed some humility about the Tories’ historic and continual defeats, saying that people are “looking in the shop window” but “not enough of them are buying”. But Badenoch’s speech, positioning the Tories as the sensible – perhaps even centrist – parents of politics, revealed how little the Conservatives seem to understand about why they have had such a terrible time in the last 10 years.
As the Tory conference opened, Badenoch proudly declared herself a “no-nonsense mum”. Her tone when talking about the challenge the mainstream parties face from Nigel Farage and Reform UK was certainly that of a mum who’s at the end of her tether. “We are not uniting with that”, she retorted at the suggestion that the right should be “united” – a call that has come from some Tories who are worried that their party is ignoring the pull of Reform.
And if she sees herself as the mum in charge, Badenoch succeeded in positing voters as children in need of a telling off. Reform voters, she told conference, needed to “come home”. The patronising tone of her speech risked treating former Tory voters like unruly teenagers who had had their fun in the Reform camp getting drunk with Farage, but now needed to come back to Mummy.
Badenoch is mistaken if she thinks all voters want from the mainstream parties is a little less silliness; that all that’s keeping them from voting for the Tories is the fact they’re not quite the party of “no drama” yet. In many ways, Boris Johnson was the silliest prime minister the country has ever had – and yet voters from red and blue seats sent him to No 10 in impressive numbers. Why? Because he stood on a Brexit ticket which, for many working-class voters across the country, had become the new way of understanding politics. Framing the Reform threat as about decorum, suggesting voters have just forgotten who the adults in the room are, was a swing and a miss.
What neither Badenoch nor Andy Burnham want to confront is the reality that many voters are not being hoodwinked by populism, but are choosing it. Reform has successfully managed to capture the unruly, experimental spirit of the Brexit vote, channelling voters’ desire for a more direct approach to issues like net zero and immigration. Likewise, the middle-class turn to the Greens seems to express their own, Prosecco-style of populism, positioning a “grassroots” form of politics over the guiding hand of the old parties.
There were some good lines in Badenoch’s speech. Calling Burnham “Paddington Bear” for his instruction to Britain to simply “hope” a little harder hit at the emptiness of much of Labour’s ideology. But the Conservative leader should know by now that it’s dangerous to throw stones in glass houses. Behind the applause and a few announcements on tweaked inheritance tax and changes to interest rates on student loans, there was nothing bold, new or exciting to Conservative politics. Badenoch might have common sense, but that’s a low bar after the last 15 years. These days, voters want something more.
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