1 September 2026 - 7:00am
Kemi Badenoch has tasked her new shadow cabinet with manifesting an “economic revolution”. Former Sky executive and Just Eat chairman Andrew Griffith has replaced the “safe pair of hands” Mel Stride as shadow chancellor, Claire Coutinho has moved to Business, while hawkish Tom Tugendhat is returning as shadow foreign secretary.
Badenoch’s message is clear: the period of subdued reflection following the catastrophic Conservative election result in 2024 is over. It’s time to move on from penance and confession towards a bold vision for a future Tory government. “The Conservatives will always back the risk-takers and wealth creators who deliver growth, investment and jobs,” Griffith said, emphasising his background in business. Coutinho, a Sunak protégée, is similarly bullish about stoking the boiler of British growth with “cheap, abundant energy and economic freedom.”
With such a passion for inexpensive and plentiful energy, it ought to be an awkward first shadow cabinet meeting between Coutinho and the new shadow chancellor. Only last year, Griffith stood in the Commons to oppose a 20-megawatt solar farm in his Arundel and South Downs constituency. “No place is more inappropriate,” he said, suggesting supermarket roofs instead.
Given that Britain already suffers from some of the highest industrial electricity prices in the developed world, this was a depressingly familiar response. But there is little sign that anyone else in the shadow cabinet is willing to do much about it. Coutinho herself has railed against “indiscriminate building” on the Green Belt; the new Shadow Chief Secretary to the Treasury, Richard Fuller, has written against new rules requiring councils to notify the housing secretary if they intend to refuse developments of 150 new homes; and Tugendhat is a proud supporter of Halt the Houses, a Kent Conservative campaign with the unambiguous slogan: “NO WATER. NO HOUSE BUILDING.”
Every individual objection can be framed as reasonable to someone with something to lose or change. Every solar farm is on the wrong field. Every housing development arrives before a GP surgery. Every reservoir has a village somewhere near it. Stack these reasonable exceptions, and you get the last Conservative government — a 14-year mess with anaemic wage growth, unaffordable housing, and no growth to fund public services.
Griffith’s bold words about growth and business, like those of the many and varied chancellors that the Tory party supplied before he entered his shadow post, don’t mean much anymore. The boy has cried wolf too many times.
A new Tory growth doctrine will therefore need red lines: national outcomes cannot evaporate as soon as they become politically inconvenient. The way to do so is by making saying yes worth something, such as Labour’s transmission scheme, which gives households within 500 metres of qualifying infrastructure £250 a year off electricity bills for 10 years.
Some owners might accept less, some much more. Others might prefer cheaper power, infrastructure or a local stake. The aim should be to make people near development and progress feel like beneficiaries, not losers.
Badenoch’s task is not to fight the Nimbys head-on. That would be a battle against the shadow cabinet she just appointed. Her task is to buy them and their voters into growth by shaking up the incentives in their favour. Make the village richer for hosting the grid, the street richer for accepting density, make the town more affordable by building homes. Otherwise, it’ll just be another deck shuffle of Conservatives talking the growth talk, while stumbling on the growth walk.
