Badenoch seems to think she can coast to victory because Labour are every bit as hapless
This article is taken from the May 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.
The last time this magazine called on a Tory leader to go was in July 2022 [“THE FAILURES OF BORIS”]. “The country deserves better,” we said. It didn’t get it, but we were right to say that time was up for Mr Johnson. He announced his resignation on 7 July, though we’re suitably modest about the role of The Critic in making that happen.
No such Cassandra-like gifts attach themselves to our saying that Kemi Badenoch has failed as Tory leader, is failing, and shall go on failing until she leads her party to a defeat every bit as wretched as the one to which Rishi Sunak took the Conservatives. And the simple truth is that she likely won’t go.
In part Mrs Badenoch will probably stay in place because the Conservative Party’s current leadership contest structures offer her considerable protection. It also suits few of those who might wish to succeed her to do so any time soon. Far better to let her take the defeats any Tory leader would suffer, may well be their very reasonable calculation.
But the chief reason why Kemi Badenoch is going nowhere as Tory leader is because the Conservatives still have not come to terms with their general election defeat in 2024, nor with the 14 years of failure which preceded and guaranteed it.
The chief Tory emotion on election night was relief. A great complacent sigh went up — that they had after all stayed in double figures in the Commons and that their vote share was still that of the second party. And their response to their political catastrophe was to elect as leader someone who had stuck with Rishi Sunak to the bitter end.
The no-lessons-learned candidate has led as she helped to govern. Badenoch is aloof in private, petulant in public and seems to think that she can coast to victory off the fact that Labour politicians in office are every bit as hapless as the Tories were. This is the goldfish theory of the electorate: voters will forget their rage at the Tories and seamlessly transfer it to Starmer.
Ignoring entirely whether this is politically realistic, what does Badenoch aim to do with the power she’ll have done nothing to earn? If the glutinously self-satisfied Tories really believe they’re a year closer to being back in office, where’s their Project 2029? What are they actually planning to do with any uncovenanted victory?
Answers come there none, because the fiasco of Tory misrule has not been renounced. Of the 121 MPs the party has, easily a hundred entirely support what was done and don’t care about what was left undone. In our July 2022 leader, despairing of Prime Minister Johnson, we said:
Is being prime minister a serious job? Is it a role for getting things done or is it essentially decorative? The suspicion must be that it’s now part of the “undignified constitution”. That the occupant of Number 10 is required to caper, splutter, entertain and distract. But not to govern.
Judges govern. Foreign agreements rule. Bureaucrats administer, safe from political interference.
No one can suggest that Keir Starmer entertains anyone, but what does he do in office which a Tory successor, drawn from the MPs they have saddled themselves with, would not?
Conversely, given their utter abdication of any interest in personnel, beyond rigging their own selection processes to produce the most incapable cohort of marketing tokens this country has ever seen masquerade as parliamentarians and ministers, what does the next Tory PM want to do and how would they go about doing that?
Enter Robert Jenrick. Our cover story this month is the handiwork of two of his supporters, giving vent to the currently subterranean Tory muttering that “things would be better if Rob was in charge”. You can read their arguments and make of them what you will. But the question for us is — should a case be made for Jenrick or merely against Badenoch?
The merits of the latter proposition should be as obvious as the case against Sunak ought to have been: the Tories are in third place.
Don’t overcomplicate this with appeals to philosophy, history or contingent circumstances: the most successful party in the history of political contest now finds itself habitually in third place. This is a big deal, and it’s foolish to pretend otherwise.
That most Tories’ response is simply to ignore it is highly suggestive of how they got to this place. They are determined not to learn. One lesson that most Tories — albeit not our cover story’s pair of Jenrick supporters — have convinced themselves of is “the Nigel thesis”.
You can’t successfully turn the clock back whilst leaving these activists in place
They believe, as a matter of practical politics, that Reform’s leader will take care of himself and put paid to whatever prospects his party has of displacing the Conservatives as the principal right-wing vehicle in this country.
No one looking at Farage’s shabby treatment of Rupert Lowe would willingly doubt this thesis.
It’s a low blow when the characters surrounding Farage have the police seize Lowe’s gun collection, and this speaks to the sort of man the Reform leader is. Europhiles used to sneer that he was “an Abwehr officer’s idea of an English gentleman”. On this, if not much else, they had Farage’s number.
Simply put, Lowe, who was perceived as a potential leader of Reform, is the sort of chap who ought always to have been the mainstay of the Tory backbenches — before the long moderniser ascendancy of Cameron, Osborne and Gove, fully supported by their preferred heir Mrs Badenoch, put paid to the highs and Lowes of the shires.
That Lowe’s work ethic, in mere months as an MP, contrasts so tellingly with the sheer idleness and indifference of Tory MPs in this and the last parliament says much about who and what they now are.
These deadweights cannot readily be avoided in a parliamentary system, however punchily energetic someone like Robert Jenrick is now being.
That Jenrick is the one shadow Cabinet member to be an effective politician is shown by results. His was the triumph over the Sentencing Council and its explicitly racialised agenda against white men.
It is necessary to put it in these terms because those are the terms the 15-year Tory sustained and appointed quango itself thought in, and fully intended to implement, to the detriment of justice and good order — until Jenrick noisily opposed them.
But there’s the thing: noise is not enough. Take the judges Jenrick fought: something is profoundly wrong with the bench, the people who sit on it and the ideologies they subscribe to.
Yet a mere return to some pleasing fantasy of an imagined jurisprudential status quo ante isn’t feasible. And that’s because you can’t successfully turn the clock back whilst leaving these activists in place: you need to get rid of them, too.
Making the judiciary more modest in their rulings is something Parliament could rough-handedly effect by legislation, but the limitations of that would be seen in everything left to the courts. If your judges are bad, so too will their rulings be.
We can refine this further, and must, since pretence should be avoided. What’s worst about our current crop of judges is not that they have ideas but that their ideas are so predictably unconservative.
The insufficiency of the non-Conservative, but still very much right-wing jeer that everything is the fault of the Tories, is that even if that charge were true it offers nothing by way of a solution. The last thing the guilty men should be provided with is the excuse that no one else could think what to do with power either.
For someone such as Robert Jenrick, the test is administration, not measures. So not what he promises in opposition — we can take as read that Badenoch will, her past obstinacy notwithstanding, soon offer anything and everything on the ECHR, OBR and any of the other institutional initials which come to her attention — but what he does in office.
It’s a test of character, ultimately. We sincerely hope his supporters are right about this.
