What a difference a year makes. The latest Conservative Home Shadow Cabinet league table puts Kemi Badenoch in a dominant first place with an 86.9% satisfaction rating. Just 12 months ago, she could only manage a distant fifth, with her rival Robert Jenrick way out in front.

Now in confident command of her party, she enjoys other advantages. Andy Burnham has a country to run in between holidays and Nigel Farage has won his by-election in Clacton, where the Conservatives refused to run a candidate. In stark contrast, Badenoch’s summer is free from any major distractions. But with so much breathing space, why has she done so little with it?

The summer recess is an opportunity for opposition parties to renew themselves. For instance, there’s no better time to reshuffle a shadow cabinet, as the MPs who get the top jobs have a month or two to prepare before Parliament returns. But it’s already mid-August, and with Parliament returning on 1 September, it’s increasingly apparent that Badenoch will be sticking with the current line-up. This is hardly a surprise — last month, she dismissed the idea of an immediate change.

Instead, the void was filled with a series of pointless rows. The worst was defending the selection of Joshua Bonehill-Paine — a former neo-Nazi extremist with a conviction for the racially aggravated harassment of a Jewish MP — as a Tory council candidate. It should be said that Bonehill-Paine has recanted his old views and expressed regret for his actions. But when Badenoch argued that he deserved a “second chance”, she was confusing rehabilitation with suitability for public office. In doing so, she also insulted the whole of local government by drawing a bogus distinction between holding national office and the role of a councillor, which she reckoned was “looking at parking and sorting out bins”.

Rather than move on from this unfortunate episode, Badenoch decided to prolong it in an op-ed for the Sunday Times. If nothing else, her insistence that second chances shouldn’t depend on your politics doesn’t match up with her decision to block former Tory MPs from running again if they hold the wrong views.

Another misstep was her open letter to the voters of Clacton, where she told them they “deserve better than Nigel Farage”. Whether they do or not, it was a fatuous point to make in the middle of a by-election in which the Tories refused to stand. Bizarrely, she also described Reform as “woke”.

Where is all this unfocused belligerence coming from? It’s reminiscent of her disastrous first phase as leader, when her approval ratings crashed and she came close to losing her position. That, too, was a period of saying nothing of any real importance, punctuated by perplexing outbursts.

As Parliament returns and the dust settles from the Clacton by-election, the spotlight will likely once again return to Badenoch — and there is a real possibility that voters will realise she wasted her time out of the public eye. The best lesson she can learn from this summer’s silly season is to look around her office and see who’s been on holiday.

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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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