This week, Kemi Badenoch might just have found her dividing line with Labour. Or, rather, Andy Burnham gifted it to her at PMQs when he declared that “national security […] can’t come at the expense of social security.”

Badenoch lost no time seizing on his words. A reaction video was on her socials within the hour: “I can’t believe what I just heard,” she said to camera. Ever since, Badenoch has been hammering away at the same point — which has won her front page coverage and the main interview on Thursday’s Today program. That’s not bad in a week when the Government and Reform were in a better position to dominate the news agenda. But can Badenoch turn a temporary controversy into a permanent advantage?

She faces two big hurdles. The first is the difficulty of drawing a dividing line against Labour and Reform at the same time. Nigel Farage’s party has just spent its conference also calling for more defense spending funded by welfare cuts. So won’t this be like the immigration debate? That is, anything the Tories say, Reform can say louder.

Not if Badenoch exploits a key weakness in Reform’s position, which is that after a brief flirtation with fiscal responsibility, the party is back to promising lavish tax cuts. Finding expenditure savings is never easy — as Reform have discovered in local government — but we’re supposed to believe it can raise the income tax threshold to £15,000, fully fund the nation’s defenses and convince the money markets that Britain is living within its means. Even if the voters buy it, the bond vigilantes won’t.

Of course, that line of attack won’t be available to the Tories if they spend their own party conference promising a tax cut bonanza. The latest unconfirmed reports are that the party is now planning to announce the abolition of inheritance tax. Instead, Badenoch and her new Shadow Chancellor, Andrew Griffith, should make a virtue of prioritizing the security of our borders and the soundness of our finances over all other considerations.

What many on the Right haven’t grasped is that what Burnham said at PMQs this week wasn’t a gaffe, but a rallying cry to the Left. Given the choice between guns and butter, large parts of the electorate will opt for the butter no matter what the threat to the nation’s safety or solvency. For a start, there are 9.3 million working-age adults who receive benefits in the UK. There will be millions more who resist the idea of cuts for ideological reasons.

And with the Right divided between the Tories, Reform and Restore, Andy Burnham can win the next election on a third of the electorate — or even less. To assemble an electorally viable coalition of her own, Badenoch must win over the middle ground on this issue: those voters who are persuadable on the case for prioritizing defense over welfare as long as the cuts to the latter don’t go too far.

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Peter Franklin is Associate Editor of UnHerd. He was previously a policy advisor and speechwriter on environmental and social issues.

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