This article is taken from the July 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
The job of Prime Minister requires three qualities: competence, charisma and character. It is rare to find someone who excels in all three, even amongst the greatest holders of this, the oldest office of its kind in the world. Disraeli and Lloyd George both had plenty of competence and charisma, but neither ever overcame doubts about character. Churchill proved his character early on in battle, but his charisma only fully emerged in 1940 and his competence was questioned even after that. Until the Falklands War, some questioned whether Margaret Thatcher had any of the three.
The case for Kemi Badenoch is that she has competence, charisma and character in abundance. She was an excellent trade secretary; has shown formidable leadership in the culture wars; has an inspiring life story and a warm, spontaneous yet steely personality. Most who have been under fire alongside her find Kemi extraordinary: “I admire her brains and her bravery,” said J.K. Rowling. Her ambition is to find common ground across a broad spectrum of the electorate on the culture war issues. As Lord Biggar says, “That is the ground on which only Kemi Badenoch stands.”
In the present British political landscape, indeed, she is unique in possessing all three prime ministerial virtues. Sir Keir Starmer is barely competent and deficient in charisma, whilst nobody who has followed the twists and turns of his career can entirely dispel doubts about his character. Nigel Farage may ooze charisma, but if his competence is an unknown quantity, his cynical character — especially his habit of truckling to tyrants — is a known one.
Readers of The Critic may take some persuasion that Mrs Badenoch is the paragon of prime ministerial virtues, having been informed last month that she is “conceited and idle”, her policy review a “shitshow”. Indeed, ever since her election as Conservative leader, she has endured a baptism of unfriendly fire and briefings that would have flummoxed her predecessors. But not her: “Anonymous briefings for me are always from cowards.”
Reports of the “strange death of Conservative England” have been exaggerated. At the time of writing, just one poll by YouGov has put the LibDems ahead of the Tories. Asked whom they would trust in Downing Street, voters still prefer Starmer, Badenoch or even Davey to Farage. The Tory predicament gives no cause for complacency, but panic is premature.
Indeed, behind locked doors the Faragistas sound like a cross between Carry on Clacton and The Godfather. “Reform is not a political party,” she says of the Zia Yusuf affair. “It’s a fan club.” To extrapolate from polls now to a general election four years off is folly. And it would be even worse folly to attempt a change of leader without giving Kemi a chance to do what she was elected to do last October. The return of Tory regicide might titillate jaded journalists, but would confirm the public’s fear that, like the Bourbons or indeed the Gaullists, this party has learned nothing and forgotten nothing.
In place of strife, Mrs Badenoch is determined to build a new model Britain, more self-reliant and less dependent on statist solutions. Just as Mrs T was the first leader of any British party to have a science degree, so Mrs B is the first to have an engineering degree — and her approach is refreshingly practical.
Step by step, she is constructing a policy platform that will last. But she refuses to rush the process. Hers is a systematic mind that is comfortable with complexity. Unlike some on the Right, however, Kemi despises those whom the great historian Jacob Burckhardt called the terribles simplificateurs, the “terrible simplifiers” whose demagogic appeal, magnified by social media, has brought even the White House within their grasp.
She has already taken on Nigel Farage, who oversimplifies for England, on his two chosen battlegrounds: migration and net zero. Her positions are tough-minded: an annual cap on numbers, an end to automatic citizenship, an energy policy that doesn’t penalise business or consumers.
However, chauvinism on race or religion is anathema to her. Her refusal to allow constituents to meet her wearing a niqab or burqa is justified by security: not even the strictest forms of Islam require women to cover their faces in front of another woman. But she knows better than to be drawn into dwelling on deliberately divisive Reform talking points.
Kemi’s Nigerian background has bequeathed her an aversion to bullies, despots and fanatics. She is no more inclined, like Nigel Farage, to toady to Trump or praise Putin “as an operator” than she is to appease the Greta Thunberg tendency or grandstand on Gaza. She has been a staunch, though not uncritical, ally of Israel. Above all, Kemi — like Boris and Rishi — has made the Ukrainian cause her own. Unlike Keir Starmer, however, she would find the cash to give Zelensky the tools to finish the job — and to rearm Britain too.
Never one to court cheap popularity, Kemi is a commonsense Conservative who came to her convictions through adversity. Though born in Britain, when she moved back here at 16, she knew no one but her aunt and had no money. Character is forged in a personal narrative and the story of Kemi’s life — a young woman who came to Britain, the unfamiliar birthplace she grew to love with such palpable passion and sincerity — gives us hope for the future of our embattled island.
Unlike the last five leaders of her party, she did not go to Oxford. By comparison Mrs T, with whom Mrs B has so much else in common, had a conventional, even privileged, education. Kemi’s only natural advantage was that, as an outsider, she did not have to beat the English class system.
But there were (and are) other, even nastier, kinds of snobbery with which she has had to contend. Often the only black woman in the room, she knows all about being patronised and underestimated. A passionate believer in Tony Sewell’s meritocratic approach to issues of racial equality, Kemi views the prospect of becoming Britain’s first black prime minister with a proper humility, rather than the sense of entitlement that one or two of her male predecessors have exuded. All she expects is fair play.
Kemi may have less experience on the international stage than Sir James Cleverly, the leader of the “centrist dad” wing of the Tories, but she is better informed about what is actually happening abroad. Whilst he is preaching the old orthodoxies on energy, she has noticed that a Continental taxpayers’ revolt is under way, as the cost of pursuing net zero increasingly outweighs the benefits.
She is steering a careful, evidence-based course between the full-blown climate deniers, like Trump and Farage, and the net zero zealots, such as the two Eds, Miliband and Davey. It is Kemi, not Sir James, who is staking out the new centre ground on the environment.
Similarly, on the vexed question of whether the UK should leave the European Court of Human Rights, Mrs Badenoch has set up a lawfare commission under David Wolfson, with five tests for whether Britain needs to head for the exit. Do we need to leave in order to deport foreign criminals and illegal migrants? Or are the Court and the Convention capable of reform, as many other member states — led by two other strong female leaders, Italy’s Giorgia Meloni and Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen — are demanding?
It’s an empirical problem, and Kemi is rightly looking for a non-ideological solution. Her expectation is that we will have to leave the ECHR, though she admits that this is “not a silver bullet”.
Bureaucratic overreach is allowing lawyers (like the Attorney General, Lord Hermer) to exploit Western human rights on behalf of lawbreakers. Kemi’s instinct, as an engineer, is not to destroy the international system and pull up the drawbridge but to fix it: “When I see something wrong, I want to deal with it, and I will have a fight if a fight is necessary.”
No leader of the opposition has had as daunting a task, but her confidence is growing by the week. Indeed, the Prime Minister has stopped even pretending to answer her questions. His refusal to engage on the detail of policy and his reliance on distraction techniques are giveaways. Kemi now has the measure of Sir Keir — and he knows it.
How, though, does she match up against Nigel Farage? The Reform leader has yet to make any impact on his fellow MPs. He is a virtual politician, ubiquitous on our screens but untested either in office or in Parliament. He thinks people are so disgusted with MPs that they will vote for him anyway. But British prime ministers, unlike American presidents, must survive the blood, sweat and tears of the House of Commons. Donald Trump would not last half an hour at the despatch box.
So there is every reason to expect Mrs Badenoch to trounce Trumpery in the parliamentary arena. But a demagogue in Downing Street is a risk too far. The catastrophic geopolitical consequences of protectionism, authoritarianism, isolationism and nativism in Washington are now spilling over into Europe. If Labour’s present malaise were to usher in a Reform government, even with the Tories as junior partners, the cure would kill the patient.
When Disraeli said, “England does not love coalitions,” he might have added, “especially with those who admire Russian autocrats.” The Conservative Party must resist electoral pacts of any kind with the Faragistas. If it were to morph into Reform-lite, the best it could hope for would be to prop up a Putinesque strongman. Kemi Badenoch would rather resign than be Nigel’s poodle. Are we quite confident that Robert Jenrick would do the same?
