There was a moment backstage, before I interviewed Kemi Badenoch for a Spectator event this week, when I felt like John Sergeant with Margaret Thatcher bearing down on him as he pronounced her leadership in difficulty. I suggested to Badenoch that she was a rare example of a politician I had changed my mind about. ‘You mean you were very negative before?’ she said, fixing me with the full alpha female glare.
I muttered something placatory, but the truth is that a year ago I thought she was rubbish – and that was the mainstream view in her own party. She was arrogant, flat-footed, absenting herself from a stage that was being dominated by Nigel Farage, resistant to advice, convinced she was great at PMQs when even Keir Starmer was wiping the floor with her. She thought the political ‘game’ was beneath her and the media was an impertinent nuisance.
At the 2024 party conference, I watched her imperiously dismiss anyone who questioned her approach. ‘I’m doing it my way,’ she proclaimed after a week of PR gaffes (capped with her statement that she ‘never has gaffes’). ‘I’m striding through the fire,’ she told me at the time. Those of us around the table WhatsApped each other the meme of the cartoon dog sitting in a burning room proclaiming: ‘Everything is fine.’
But Badenoch has since shown that she is one of the few politicians who can turn around public perceptions. Yes, most learn with experience to do their jobs better. Both Tony Blair and David Cameron say they were much better prime ministers the day they left than the day they arrived. But for many politicians their peak popularity comes when they are a blank slate onto which people can project their hopes. We are probably at peak Andy Burnham popularity now, before he starts making choices people don’t like.
In one sense Badenoch has not changed – she remains abrasive, but she has shown the humility to take advice from Cameron (‘PMQs is not a courtroom, it’s panto,’ she explains). She weaponised the Peter Mandelson scandal and deals confidently with the public (witness her recently demolishing a pro-Palestinian protestor). Tom Tugendhat, who ran against her in the 2022 and 2024 leadership elections, says: ‘If I’d known she was this good, I wouldn’t have stood.’
More importantly, she knows her own mind and isn’t embarrassed about her views. When I asked who she was for, she gave a polished answer: ‘We are for the people in this country who produce, who work, who get up every day and actually make this country wealthy.’
Ask most politicians who they are against and they fudge. Not Badenoch: ‘We are not for the people who can work but choose not to work and would prefer to be on welfare. We are not for people who cheat the system. We are not for people who commit crimes… We are not for people who want to change our culture into something that it is not.’ She would ‘ban the pro-Palestinian supposed protests’ and is ‘actively looking at’ banning the Muslim Brotherhood. All this is not Badenochism; she calls it ‘Kemistry’.
The caveat to all this is that it may not matter a damn. The Tory brand, in her own words, remains ‘a distressed asset’. To revive it she is demanding that every candidate sign up to core conservative principles. ‘We are leaving the European Convention on Human Rights. If you won’t sign up to that, you will not be a Conservative MP.’ They’ll have to agree to ditch net zero. Her first decision on day one in No. 10 would be to ‘drill our oil and gas in the North Sea and get the tax revenue out’.
Badenoch has shown she is one of the few politicians who can turn around public perceptions
Ed Miliband’s insistence that these assets remain in the ground is ‘very much like what the Nigerian military dictatorships were doing in the 1980s and 1990s’. Bridget Phillipson, by raiding VAT on private school fees ‘has acted like a Gestapo officer’. Of Starmer she says: ‘I’ve grown to feel sorry for him, but I have also grown to dislike the way he does not take any responsibility.’
Badenoch also gave the clearest answer to what I find the most tedious question in British politics: whether there will be a pact or deal between Reform and the Tories. The truth is obvious: there won’t be unless there needs to be, though that is more likely after a general election than before it.
Badenoch says the Tories could win and claims there is a ‘high chance’ she will become prime minister. But asked explicitly whether she would be prepared to put Farage into No. 10 if he fell short of a majority, she made it clear the answer is yes: ‘This country cannot have another left-wing government.’
She ruled out standing down candidates or an arrangement to target resources so the two parties could focus on different seats, however. ‘We don’t need to do a pact… deals, non-aggression pacts. These things end up falling apart anyway.’ Instead, Badenoch implied she would accept a confidence and supply deal to ‘deliver a conservative agenda’.
She admitted she already has a casual arrangement with Rupert Lowe, the leader of Restore Britain, who took a Tory seat on the public accounts committee. ‘Rupert Lowe wants to cut spending in a way that Nigel Farage doesn’t,’ she explains. ‘Reform has quite a lot of left-wing ideas. They want more benefits. They want more nationalisation. They want the big state. They just want to be in charge of it.’ Asked if she would accept Lowe as a Tory one day, she says: ‘I don’t think I would go that far.’ But she adds: ‘I respect the fact that he turns up for work, which Nigel Farage doesn’t do. He does policy. He doesn’t run away.’
Thatcher, too, was dismissed early in her leadership as a lightweight who lacked people skills before going on to run one of the most consequential governments of the last century. You wouldn’t bet on Badenoch doing that but she has already defied political gravity. ‘I don’t like playing the game,’ she says. ‘I want to play my game.’ Her game is poker, at which she has repeatedly vanquished the editor of this magazine.
Like Michael Gove, she is also a fan of Game of Thrones. ‘I identify with Daenerys Targaryen before she went mad. She just kept building an army. Then eventually she rode the dragon and burned the city to the ground.’
