Will Kemi Badenoch last the year? She's too weak to fend off Reform

Reading the newspaper coverage of Margaret Thatcher’s election as Conservative Party leader is a reminder that the figure of history we know today was far from certain to emerge. “New Tory chief just lucky, says Mr Enoch Powell,” ran one Times headline 50 years ago this week. Powell was then one of the most influential figures in British politics, standing to the Right of the Conservative Party, accusing it of abandoning its principles over Europe and immigration. Thatcher, meanwhile, was the Tory party’s first female leader, finding it difficult to get her voice heard above the noise.

It is hard not to read the coverage of Thatcher’s first few days in the job and not marvel at the parallels between then and now. Today, Kemi Badenoch is struggling to make any impact as Tory leader, dismissed as both too lightweight and too divisive to appeal beyond the narrow confines of the Conservative Party membership. Her first three months as leader have been so underwhelming that her position is under threat. Meanwhile, to her Right looms the presence of Nigel Farage, the man whose schoolboy hero was Enoch Powell.

Like Badenoch, Thatcher was written off early in her leadership. The day after her election as Tory leader, in fact, the Times warned that she needed to move quickly to “broaden her appeal to those who are not Conservatives” because “at present the Conservative Party looks wholly like a minority party, and the Labour Party, with all its conflicts and misjudgments, looks like a governing party.”

Given all this, it is tempting to use Thatcher as evidence against those like Dominic Cummings who have written off Badenoch as a “complete useless dud” who must be shoved out of her position “ASAP”. And yet, while there are certainly lessons to be learned from the past, history is a poor guide to today’s politics. The parallels between 1975 and today are real, but are far less important than the differences between then and now which give substance to Cummings’s condemnation of Badenoch’s leadership so far.

The most obvious difference between 1975 and today is that the electoral task facing Badenoch is simply far greater than that which faced Thatcher. Not only is the Labour majority far greater than it was then, but the depth of the Tory crisis is far more severe. Regardless of Enoch Powell’s popularity among a certain section of the country in 1975, he simply did not represent an existential threat to the Conservative Party in the same way Reform UK does today.

The central force driving British politics today is that Reform UK has now established itself as a party realistically capable of securing 20-25% of the vote at a general election. This fact alone changes everything for both parties, though neither yet seem to have adjusted to the situation they now face. The decisions both parties take to deal with Reform will shape the next four years in British politics.

For the Conservative Party, Farage poses an existential threat. With Reform this high in the polls, it is almost impossible for the Tories to win a general election. The situation is worse than this, in fact. One of the central reasons people vote Tory is to stop Labour. But if Reform is 5% ahead of the Conservatives by the time of the next election — as it is today — then voters may conclude that the best chance of stopping five more years of Keir Starmer will be to vote for Farage. The Conservative vote would then fall even further.

In 1975, Thatcher dismissed the idea of bringing Enoch Powell into her shadow cabinet after he had left the Conservative Party. By contrast, Farage is now simply too established as a political force — and the Tories too weak — for Badenoch to be able to convincingly dismiss the notion of some kind of pact with him. The idea that Farage or Reform will melt away as a political force no longer looks even vaguely reasonable. Equally unbelievable, though, is the idea that the Tories will disappear as a major political party by the time of the next general election. Given that the two parties are now if not indistinguishable ideologically then, at the very least, overlapping, the only way to avoid cancelling each other out, guaranteeing another Starmer term, is for them to acknowledge each other’s presence. This, at least, is now the position not just of Cummings, but of an increasing number of Conservative thinkers.

Initially, I was sceptical about the threats to Badenoch’s position as Tory leader. But after a week of conversations with senior figures in Westminster, I now find it difficult to avoid the conclusion that it is more likely than not that she will be replaced before the next general election — if not at some point this year. Similarly, it is now the case that whoever emerges as Conservative Party leader will be forced to negotiate some form of arrangement with Reform before the next election. Events may yet intercede, but as of today the prospect of Prime Minister Robert Jenrick, supported by First Secretary Nigel Farage, is no longer outlandish.

Those close to Starmer are certainly not complacent, convinced that “populist nationalism” will find a way to challenge for power in one form or another before the next election.

For Labour, the rise of Reform is not existential in the same way it is for the Conservatives, even if Farage’s party threatens its position in scores of seats across England and Wales. Encouraged by his most influential adviser, Morgan McSweeney, Starmer is now trying to see off Reform by making a series of high-profile announcements on immigration and welfare. The Home Office released a series of videos earlier this week showing an illegal migrant being arrested and then deported from Britain. The idea is that voters, cynical about the Government’s intentions, need to see evidence that their concerns are being addressed.

Similar tactics were deployed under Tony Blair. Yet as McSweeney understands, the level of public cynicism about politics today is far deeper than it was even 25 years ago when Blair was at the height of his powers. To persuade voters that the Government is serious about immigration, therefore, Labour may need to go much further than it is willing to. The risk for Starmer, then, is that he might performatively move Right but achieve little either practically or electorally from doing so, while at the same time undermining his support on the Left. The same is true on a host of issues beyond immigration and welfare, from Net Zero to taxation and public service reform.

Another striking difference with the New Labour period is that while Blair was clearly to the Right of Starmer ideologically, he also had a far more substantively Left–wing agenda too, from constitutional reforms to the huge increases in public spending overseen by Gordon Brown. As Blair leaned Right on issues like crime, his chancellor spent billions trying to eradicate child poverty. Today, Starmer looks like a soft-Left prime minister pretending to be more conservative than he is but without any of the “stealth” radicalism which defined the previous government: New Labour without Blair or Brown.

The problem for both Labour and the Tories is that they risk learning the wrong lessons from history, and end up in a worst-of-all-worlds position because the political reality today has fundamentally shifted. Badenoch, like Thatcher in 1975, was elected because of her appeal to the party grassroots. She was a straight-talker with a clear set of Conservative principles. That was the pitch at least. Yet if Badenoch isn’t careful, she will become merely the caricature of late-Thatcher without the political nous, skill and adaptability Thatcher showed to win power in the first place.

“She is an exceptionally astute politician and an accomplished party tactician,” the High Tory commentator T.E. Utley wrote in The Spectator in August 1986, dismissing Thatcher’s reputation as an unbending ideologue. “It is inconceivable that her devotion to doctrine would ever persuade her to do anything which was plainly politically suicidal,” he added.

Utley was obviously correct. In 1975, Thatcher — the future Eurosceptic icon — sat alongside Ted Heath in the referendum campaign on Britain’s membership of the Common Market, demurely praising the man she had removed as leader for being the “master” of European affairs. During the next four years she reassured voters she wanted good relations with the trade unions. And then, once in power, she ordered her ministers to settle with the miners when she felt she was not yet strong enough to defeat them in open confrontation.

In 1975, Enoch Powell complained that had the Tory leadership election happened six months earlier, somebody else would have claimed the crown. Three months after Badenoch’s election, the painful reality is that if there were another contest today, it is likely that it would be Jenrick who would win, not her. If she is to survive in the job for much longer, she will need to show less of Thatcher’s apparent obstinacy and more of her astute political skill. And even if she does, the facts on the ground today suggest that it will be “plainly politically suicidal” for her to go into the next election without some kind of arrangement with Reform. Half a century is a long time in politics. The world has irrevocably changed, but neither the Labour Party nor the Tories have yet adapted sufficiently. Farage may be the heir to Powell’s insurgent conservatism, but he is now far more dangerous to Badenoch’s Tories than Powell ever was to Thatcher.

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