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November 2, 2024 - 2:30pm
At a time of unprecedented political volatility, in picking Kemi Badenoch for leader, the Conservative Party’s ageing membership — if not, apparently, its MPs — chose continuity. It is perhaps a sign of how radically British politics is shifting (largely, ironically, as a result of the Conservative Party’s own failed governance record) that by the end the contest came down to two candidates of the Tory Right — or at least what now passes for the Tory Right.
Did the party make the right decision? It is difficult to critique Badenoch’s platform on a policy level, because her campaign chose not to propose any, instead running on vibes. By the numbers, Robert Jenrick could be seen as the stronger performer, with polling showing him as the preferred candidate of everyone outside the Conservative Party membership — which is to say, the electorate at large. Indeed, the battle between Badenoch and Jenrick was an intergenerational war within the British Right, with younger reformists backing Jenrick, and older members fighting the culture war battles of half a decade ago hailing Badenoch, often on grounds of identity politics.
On immigration, now rapidly becoming the defining issue of British politics, Jenrick possessed a clear advantage, having resigned in protest at the destructive “Boris Wave” of post-Covid mass migration, either as a matter of principle or because he could read the political runes. Through a mixture of concrete policy proposals and a generally combative attitude, Jenrick had suddenly emerged as the candidate of the anti-mass immigration Right, outflanking Reform UK and presenting a plausible path towards retaking the Red Wall. Throughout the campaign, Nigel Farage had shown himself rattled by Jenrick’s performance, and his relief today, observing that “what you’ll get with Kemi Badenoch is more of the same”, was palpable. As Reform MP Rupert Lowe declared on X: “Badenoch wins — I have never been more confident that Reform will outright win the next general election.”
But even beyond immigration, Jenrick was simply a stronger candidate. While both contenders ritually invoked Thatcher’s legacy, as is customary for their party, Jenrick presented a clear and attractive emphasis on industrial policy. He focused on cheap energy with an emphasis on nuclear power — particularly the Small Modular Reactors so bafflingly neglected by the state — alongside infrastructure building and supply-side planning reforms. As Jenrick observed, “the economic consensus of the last 25 years is collapsing,” and in fact the rhetorical gap between him and Keir Starmer on reformist industrial policy is markedly narrow. If anything, Jenrick offered all the attractive elements of Labour’s economic offer with none of its flaws of crippling taxation and a risky and soon-to-be-politically-toxic emphasis on renewable energy over a stable and secure path to decarbonisation.
It remains to be seen whether Badenoch can revive the Tory Party’s fortunes. Starmer’s floundering Labour government will allow any opposition to play politics on easy mode — but it is hard not to view Badenoch’s victory as a missed opportunity for reformist conservative governance. As Labour slumps, and Reform sighs in relief, her elevation will leave British politics a three-horse race for the near future — but this may in itself be a productive outcome.
Jenrick, whose rapid political ascent and energetic and headline-grabbing campaign culminated in a tighter contest than many had expected, should console himself that, with Britain’s political winds blowing in his direction, today’s defeat is likely only a temporary setback. The crown of British political reform still lies in the gutter — if Badenoch means to wear it, she needs to start outlining what she proposes to do, not just who she is. The party may be won by platitudes, but the country remains restive and hungry for serious change — and is more willing than ever to turn on politicians who fail to deliver it.
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Subscribe“By the numbers, Robert Jenrick could be seen as the stronger performer, with polling showing him as the preferred candidate of everyone outside the Conservative Party membership — which is to say, the electorate at large.”
I wonder who was polled. I follow these things, and yet I was barely aware of Jenrick. Who were these people who would choose him over Badenoch? Plants, maybe?
If you were barely aware of Jenrick then I suggest you broaden your sources of information. While pleased for Kemi Badenoch the points made by AR in this piece are salient and well made, and should be taken in that vein. No need for defensiveness.
Not being defensive at all. I am just saying that if *l* can’t say I really know Jenrick, I can scarcely believe the electoral at large would.
In any case, Badenoch seems to be making the right noises advocating for conservative values.
We will see what lies ahead. She does have 4-5 years to make sure there is a Tory party and not a lib dem adjacent one.
Also, I couldn’t possibly define Badenoch as the continuity candidate.
Sorry AR, but the result of this leadership election comes down to something more than just “who has the best policies” which we all know can mean nothing once the means to implement them are attained.
There’s a “gut feeling” that what the UK needs isn’t the latest chinless wonder to emerge from the Tory ranks but something far more radical. One could say, it’s the same gut feeling that people began to have about Thatcher, once they started to see what she was made of. Widely reviled, of course, but elected by significant majorities three times in a row, and transformative in terms of how the UK stood in the late 1970s.
One suspects that by the time Starmer and his regime have finished, we’ll be in a similarly parlous state, if not worse.
And apart from dissing a certain kind of white men (!), how does this provide any kind of positive argument for Badenoch, who to my mind has objectively turned out to be a largely empty disappointment?
How can she have ‘turned out ‘ to be anything when she has only just won the leadership? Give the woman a moment or two…
Because he had already decided and couldn’t wait to tell everyone.
There’s no “dissing”, simply a recognition that in order to win back a majority in parliament, the Tory leader would have to have widespread appeal in all sections of the country. Jenrick seems to have conveniently “found” his right-of-centre credentials after entering parliament via the usual channels for Tory MPs. Badenoch sounds and looks like the real thing – just as Thatcher did.
Kemi stands for British values and traditions, putting these even before economic policy. Thus country has been sold down the river by every government since Blair. Finally, it takes an immigrant to actually do something about it. After five years of a Badenoch government, come 2034 we may even have national pride back: something most thought had gone for ever.
She stands for nothing of the sort. She’s a Goveite Globalist, and pure poison as a result.
What utter nonsense. She is not “Goveite”, nor is she a globalist. She is a brexiteer, and a patriot to her core. She is a hell of a lot more sound than Jenrick, who went seemlessly from centrist remainer to darling of the populist right without passing Go.
Based on what track record have you come to the conclusion she’s a Govite Globalist ? (Whatever that label means(
Don’t hold your breath ….
In what possible sense can you accuse Kemi Badenoch of having “turned out” as anything? She has been an MP for seven years and Leader of the Opposition for one day. It is like saying that Winston Churchill “turned out to be a largely empty disappointment” in 1907.
Utterly ridiculous.
I agree LL. Kemi comes across as a problem solver; one who wants to return to first principles and to subsequently draw up a plan to re-engage with the electorate. She won’t walk away from a fight and will certainly not be cowed into silence by the wokerati. It’s important to reconcile the different elements of the party, but even more important to gather around her a competent group of ministers to take the fight to what is a rather talentless group of ideologues posing as the government of the day. Good luck to her!
‘Competent group of Ministers’ ? Out of the 121 left who is not tarnished by being involved in the most incompetent Govt in memory? Herein lies one of her key problems.
…and if Jenrick is offered the post of Shadow Home Secretary a great deal of the speculation and regrets of this article will be deflated.
I hope that comes to pass.
KB is anything but a continuity candidate! She has deeply held moral principles and a vision for the soul of the country. She will change the party for new generations.
As Kemi Badenoch said of Jenrick: “You and I know that we don’t actually disagree on very much and I have no doubt that you have a key part to play in our party for many years to come.”
The conservatives have elected someone outside the conventional circle just as they did with Margaret Thatcher. Margaret Thatcher did not succeed on her own but by harnessing a pretty impressive team. Kemi needs to discover the Whitelaws, Lawsons, Josephs, Tebbitts etc etc in the Conservative Party.
She has an impressive grasp of Conservative principles and strengths – she doesn’t have to come up with all the policy details herself merely to ensure such policies will deliver solid conservative outcomes and have the energy to ensure they are delivered against the entrenched opposition of the statist blob.
She also has to ensure that she comes to some accommodation with Farage to ensure the conservative vote is not split. It is clear that Reform can win seats in Labour held constituencies that conservatives never could so there is ample room to build a conservative coalition of interests. Labour only won an impressive tally of MPs because of a disorganised and divided opposition. The population will be desperate for an alternative to Labour after a few years.
And Kemi needs to make sure that all the LibDems, and worse, in the Cons decide to leave. The Tories cannot save this country while beset with traitors within.
The Tories cannot win power unless they appeal to a broad cross section of society. This isn’t to say they need to copy Labours Blairist imitation, but purging anybody deemed to be not ideologically pure will simply lead to years in the wilderness, as Labour have often found to their cost.
Ideology without pragmatism means opposition
I can only deduce by the amount of downvotes that most on here believe it’s better to be ideologically pure but never anywhere near the levers of power to be able to enact change
Shes african you bundle of wood what the hell is wrong with you?
I don’t follow. Did I or she ever suggest that her parents were not Nigerian and hence African? What is this about wood and something being wrong with me? You need to be a little less brief, enigmatic and incoherent if you want to get your point of view over.
Born in Britain, educated abroad as many are. Are the latter also citizens of the country they were educated in instead of the one in which they were born.
Badenoch is a Goveite Globalist. The “Conservatives” have made the wrong decision. AGAIN.
Yes I think you’re probably right…unfortunately.
Has Aris been out of the country for the past 3 months? He should have listened to Tom McTague’s interview with Badenoch on this site before essaying this rubbish.
What do you mean by “fighting the culture war battles of half a decade ago”?
It has never been more relevant. The loons are still in charge of so much, look at what Germany has just done.
Nothing matters more than repelling all these attacks on reality.
Badenoch has used gender as a ruse to appeal to the Tory membership, many of whom are disapproving older women. But such members are liberal on many other issues and were scared by Jenrick’s pledge to abandon the European legal complex vis-a-vis immigration.
There’s one big factor that is not mentioned here: the palpable honesty and integrity of the winning candidate compared to the loser with his suspect track record.
The Tories need to purge the LibDem MPs posing as Conservatives.
What will really determine the future of the Tory Party is whether Jenrick and the other defeated candidates are willing to put aside their differences and work together with Badenoch.
The Tories always used to be quite good at putting Party ahead of personal ambition: think Whitelaw, Joseph, Maudling, Clarke et al.
It’s behaving like kids in the playground that has been half their problem of late: letting ego triumph over ideology.
And so it turns out not to be the one who claimed to have, “met pensioners who had illegal migrants in their bedrooms when they woke up in the morning.” The winner is the doctor’s and professor’s daughter who said that a Saturday job at McDonald’s while she was a Sixth Former had made her working-class. His supporters are not taking it well, and they are making no attempt to disguise the reason why not.
Unless Kemi Badenoch relished the prospect of the Shadow Home Secretary’s being struck off as a solicitor because of his remarks likely to prejudice a live criminal case, then she ought not to offer that position to Robert Jenrick. She ought not to offer any position to Jenrick. For the second weekend running, the Bad has at least beaten the Worse, and you need only check certain comments threads and corners of social media to see just how much Worse. Those people include one third of Conservative MPs. But last weekend, Richard Tice made it clear that Reform UK actively did not want the support of the person or supporters of Stephen Yaxley-Lennon. And this weekend, the Conservatives have rejected the same thing but slightly better-dressed.
Yet Keir Starmer has today expressed more solidarity with Badenoch than he ever has with, most obviously but not exclusively, Diane Abbott. Will Badenoch’s Conservative Party continue to take money from Frank Hester? Will he wish to make such donations? If the answer to either of those questions were no, then there would always be the Labour Party. Donors to Jenrick’s campaign, and people who might have donated to his party if he had won, might consider instead the party of the sale of everyone’s NHS data to Peter Thiel’s Palantir, of the forcible injection of the unemployed with weight loss drugs, of the dispatch of “job coaches” into psychiatric wards to harangue the patients, of the two-child benefit cap, of the withdrawal of the Winter Fuel Payment, of the 50 per cent increase in bus fares, of the incitement of the Israeli use of the surrender or starve strategy in Gaza, and of the assertion that the slave trade had been no cause for apology.
I am 100% behind Kemi Badenoch. I agree with the author that Jenerick has good positions on important issues and she should him a prominent part of her shadow cabinet. His policies should be woven into the new strategy but she was the right one as far as I’m concerned. Even on the subject of immigration which could be seen a tricky one for her but it’s quite simple in a way. Her family entered the country legally with tangible educational, financial and attitudinal assets that are a benefit to the UK. This is all anyone want from immigration. I feel this way at 45, not 75.
Her parents are immigrants, she was born here so is not.
Being born in a stable doesn’t make one a horse.
If the tories want an n with nothing to offer they should be completely destroyed. Jenrick join reform and put the tories underground forever
Clarify the first part of that sentence please.
You probably saw another post by Michael W here which consists entirely of pointing out that Badenoch is “african” [sic.] and abusing another poster. I think this makes it fairly clear what MW’s n-word is.
I think we all know what W stands for, just as H is for hanker.
Where does Badenoch stand on British membership of the ECHR?
Said something good about the UK that she won, and there is quite a bit to like about Kemi. Generic meanwhile was the epitome of ‘Tory boy’, and Author’s attraction to his dog whistles says as much about the Author as honest Bob.
However before too much cheer on the Tory Right. She had only a third of her MPs support her and only 4 out of 10 Tory members, a membership that has shrunk by a further 40k. She inherits a party still fractured and still in denial about how much it got wrong. Starmer put v clear blue water between himself and Corbyn to the point of party eviction. Tories yet to do the equivalent with Bojo and his toxic approach to public standards in office, Mad Liz and her unfunded tax cuts for the rich, and the more general decay they facilitated in public services. ‘Labour invests, Tories cut’, will be the attack line she has to counter and it won’t be easy even if the new Govt got alot of problems of it’s own.
Oh and also remember she’s admitted to hacking other MPs social media, and tries to hide she did a law degree at Birkbeck. Neither that well known but they will be.
So get the popcorn. Kemi vs Grifter Nige especially should be fun.
For all Starmer putting distance between himself and Corbyn, he actually received less votes as a result. It was only due to the Reform taking a large chunk of the Tory vote that he won, let alone so comfortably.
If Reform actively target the Brexit supporting old industrial heartlands that Labour currently hold I can see him suffering a catastrophic loss of seats at the next election
UnHerd seems to be drifting into the Reform gutter.
I’m curious as to what Kemi’s idea of “the truth” actually is.
As an Opposition Leader, I think she has the head start, especially in terms of Labour doubling down on Tory failures. This will put slippery Starmer on the back foot but at the same time could entrap her in a narrow policy offering.
My guess is that Jenrick’s policy offering will be largely taken up. But without a substantial decrease in immigration towards net zero then there will be no choice but continue with a low growth high tax economy in order to fulfill the positive rights of a growing population.
The challenge for the Jenricks in the party as well as Farage is to actually show how leaving the ECHR will actually change anything beyond threats and sound bites. This will take the battle to the Supreme Court in order to allow Parliament to determine what is a “safe country”.
It is often cited that immigration is the number one priority which is true but what really is in question is the human rights framework and certainly from a Reform perspective, how to make sure that “old settlers” are treated with dignity in relation to “new settlers”. This means a paradigm shift in how we classify ourselves as British citizens in order to ensure intergenerational fairness. Putting new citizens in brand new housing whilst leaving old citizens in sink council estates is clearly not fair. So some kind of ranking system needs to be formulated so that established British citizens come first.
This in my opinion is the underlying tension between culture and the economy with British ethnic positive rights largely being given less attention than the positive rights of nonBritish ethnics.
This is dramatically highlighted with illegal immigrants and asylum seekers who are expensively housed in plush hotels whilst waiting for Raynor’s new social housing to be built on our ever reducing green belt which only leaves us increasingly dependant on foreign land, energy and materials.
https://www.wwf.org.uk/riskybusiness
Thus whilst we bend over backwards satisfying the positive rights of newcomers, we are depriving unseen others in foreign lands of their positive rights. Are we going to hear this “truth” and other “truths” associated with the global impacts of our national policy.
I suspect not!
He has 5 years to improve his presentation skills to take over the leadership when the Tories bleed more votes to Reform in the 2029 general election. The standard for British democracy is to have 14-15 year Soviet-style terms of government – the price for having democracy serve a monarchy – but if Jenrick can move the party fully towards opposition to mass immigration then he has a shout at winning the country in 2034.
I disagree. If having democracy serve a monarchy (the case at least since the Hanoverians in the UK) leads to 14-15 year terms in government, how come we have had numerous governments that have lasted far fewer than 14-15 years? For example, just since WW2 we have had a Labour government that lasted 6 years, two others that carried on just over 5 years, and a Tory government that was in power for less than 4 years. It’s only in the last 45 years that we have had a succession of long lasting governments, although it’s notable that in all three cases (Tories from 1979; Labour from 1997; Tories again from 2010) the party in power changed leader at least once rather than (as it was fully entitled not to do) going to the electorate.
I don’t want reformist conservative governance. I want anti-modern, counter revolution Period. I like Kemi – but useless in the Tory party. She needed to build Reform. We know where Tory government will lead. Quiet acquiescence on immigration, porn, ultra-market liberalism, the big state, trans-indoctrination ….mostly because this is the logical end point of liberalism shorn of God and natural law; the society of individuals spinning in its own wake; freedom …to self-actualize with reference to nothing outside the self; …eventually transhumanism. What we need is God, family – and in terms of pragmatic politics, a libertarianism for families and households (not a libertinism for Andrew Tate)….which is to say a full throated, red-blooded communitarian subsidiarity. State rolled back. Services that remain tied to the obligations to serve and participation…Service for services. And that requires a predominantly Christian and ascriptive civic national community which identifies as such….When police arrest the one guy with an English flag, protesting a bunch of non-citizens and leftist Anti-citizens will ‘kill the jews’ flags, you know that the state has fallen. We need to take it back. Yes to mass deportations; but also mass firings – starting with every Chief Constable in the UK every Quango-leader that has endorsed the Pride agenda. Every LEA need to be abolished. Parents can work it out with teachers. Universities need to be defunded to the tune of 50% – all the grievance disciplines need to go. We need high tech trade and innovation schools, apprenticeships – but also all of the rituals of belonging and rites of passage that used to attach to such Journey men (and women). And we need national service. We need some man or woman with bollocks and chutzpah…Boris Johnson but with a real agenda, a willingness for self-sacrifice and a degree of love for his country….so actually, not Boris. Farage is a start ….only a start….but he may open the door a chink (albeit he doesn’t understand the world of declining growth rates; nor the exposure or Britain to the global economy….)
Does it really matter who won? What can they do if they ever get into power?After 5 years of this Labour Government, they will be left picking up the pieces. More Austerity for us all. Zero growth. And if they ever conceived to do a Truss to get themselves out of the Labour mess they’ll be shat on upon high.
Aris Roussinos has clearly not been paying attention to Kemi Badenoch. She is not offering “vibes”, she is offering robust conservatism, based on conservative values. She very sensibly wants to go back to “first principles” as she often says, to construct a set of conservative policies that will work.
Robert Jenrick, by contrast, stupidly set out a smorgasbord of unrelated, fully baked policies, with no plan or vision backing them up, four and a half years before an election. What on earth is the point of that?
At her speech to members at the Tory party conference, Badenoch mentioned Sir Keith Joseph, telling members who know about these things that she wants to take an intellectual, planned approach to contructing a Conservative programme for the next election and beyond. She is head and shoulders above Jenrick, and when the election comes round the Tory manifesto will the the most thought out and radical in 50 years.
It is very difficult to be a transformative leader from the Opposition benches. This latest Tory leader will merely keep the seat warm over the life of this Parliament, until the real leader is revealed in time for the next General Election.
“the Conservative Party’s ageing membership — if not, apparently, its MPs — chose continuity.” Snide, ageist and totally misunderstands the radical that Kemi is. The author fails in every respect.
Exactly right.
Jenrick was the Immigration Minister who resigned over his own Bill not being very good. A strange figure for Aris to follow…