No Tory leader in history has been handed as daunting a task as Kemi Badenoch.
Who would want the job of picking up the pieces after the catastrophic 2024 election, while the seemingly irresistible rise of Reform UK threatens to suck the lifeblood out of the Conservatives?
Yet Mrs Badenoch has not merely steadied the ship, with a significant recovery in her own and her party’s popularity, but seen off her rival, Robert Jenrick, too.
At last the party has found a serious leader for serious times. What a moment, then, for a self-appointed cabal from its Left wing to announce they would like to take it back to the failures and psychodrama of the past.
As she battles to rebuild her policy platform and party organisation from scratch, the last thing Mrs Badenoch needs is meddling from self-styled centrists – those whom Margaret Thatcher dismissed as Wets. Indeed, the new group includes some of the still-damp relics of that era, such as Ken (now Lord) Clarke and Michael (now Lord) Heseltine.
Led by Ruth Davidson, the former Scottish Tory leader, and Andy Street, the former Mayor of the West Midlands, this well-heeled bunch have been expensively rebranded as Prosper UK.
I wonder whether these ex-politicians-turned-company-directors realise how preposterous their new moniker – a feeble echo of Nigel Farage’s outfit – sounds?
For if anything was responsible for undermining the UK’s prosperity during the last government, it was their bid to sabotage Brexit.
Make no mistake: this is the return of the Remainers. Unlike every single Prosper supporter named on their website, Mrs Badenoch voted Leave – and they have not forgiven her.
Ruth Davidson, the former Scottish Tory leader, and Andy Street, the former Mayor of the West Midlands have launched Prosper UK, which aims to support a more centrist Conservative Party
Among this band of Europhiles are many who did the Tory cause much harm. One of the two vice-chairs is Amber Rudd
Among this band of Europhiles are many who did the Tory cause much harm. The two vice-chairs are David Gauke, who was one of 21 MPs expelled in 2019 for trying to stop Brexit, and Amber Rudd, who resigned the whip in sympathy. Neither is exactly a party faithful.
Other keen supporters include Lord (Gavin) Barwell, Theresa May’s chief of staff when she called and almost lost the disastrous 2017 election, Matt Hancock, our hands-on health secretary during the Covid pandemic, and Alan Duncan, the Israel-critical former Foreign Office minister.
While these retreads insist they wish Mrs Badenoch well, Prosper UK looks very much like a cackhanded attempt to destabilise her leadership.
If there is one theme that defines Mrs B’s leadership, it is a zero tolerance approach to factionalism. When the public are asked what they disliked most about the 14 years of Tory rule, they invariably point to the infighting, the backstabbing and the ego-tripping of a party that forgot all about the country while it turned in on itself.
While Labour are consumed by witch-hunts and identity politics, the Conservatives have tended to succumb to sheer old-fashioned vanity.
Mrs Badenoch has said goodbye to all that, as exemplified by her steely decision to jettison Jenrick this month. Her Shadow Cabinet has on the whole been tightly disciplined. As a result, it has achieved a great deal in Opposition – most recently by using shrewd parliamentary guerrilla warfare to stall the disastrous Chagos Islands Bill.
Now, however, the centrists are threatening to take the Tory party back into a death spiral from which the only winners will be Nigel Farage and Sir Keir Starmer.
What exactly is Prosper UK for? If they were genuinely trying to help Mrs Badenoch, you would expect them to be doing humdrum things such as canvassing for Conservative candidates or raising money to fight the May council elections.
Prosper UK looks very much like a cackhanded attempt to destabilise Kemi Badenoch’s leadership, writes Daniel Johnson
But Prosper UK’s spokesmen, Street and Davidson, are notably silent on such matters. Instead, they claim to speak for ‘millions’ of ‘neglected’ voters who feel ‘unrepresented’ by the present Tory party.
So what do these omniscient voices of the Tepid Tendency think should change? Getting tough on migration, for a start. Mr Street would like to ‘tone down some of the stuff that I understand has had to be there in the last 18 months’.
Does he want to ditch Mrs Badenoch’s bold but carefully constructed policy to reduce net migration – which includes the UK leaving the European Court of Human Rights?
Or to put it another way, has he lost touch with his former constituents in the West Midlands? Why does he suppose so many Conservative voters deserted the party for Reform at the last general election?
Ms Davidson has an answer to that. She thinks that by getting tough on migration, Mrs Badenoch has been borrowing Mr Farage’s clothes in order to look like a Reform-lite. She thinks the Tories ‘suddenly look inauthentic’.
Really, Ruth? Is that why the Conservatives recently overtook Labour in the polls for the first time since their election wipeout? Surely it’s more likely that ordinary ‘small-c’ conservatives have noticed that the party they voted for in 2019 has sensible policies again and they are beginning to return.
Migration, the issue that has been most salient in the minds of the electorate, is the very one that the political geniuses of Prosper UK would like the Conservatives to ‘tone down’ in case they ‘look inauthentic’.
It sounds like a recipe for electoral suicide, doesn’t it? Both Labour and Reform never stop repeating their mantra that the Conservative Party is dying. That’s not happening – not on Kemi’s watch. But if she were to listen to the Street-Davidson diagnosis, the Tories might as well give up the ghost.
What does Prosper UK propose they should talk about instead of migration? The economy? Well, Mrs B already owns that territory, with a recent YouGov poll showing the Tories are 9 points ahead of both Labour and Reform.
But maybe they have something distinctive to say about economic policy? Mr Street, a businessman who once ran John Lewis, says he wants the party to propose tax reforms in order to incentivise work and enterprise.
Well, Kemi’s Shadow Treasury team, led by Mel Stride, has come up with numerous concrete ideas about how to do precisely that. It’s not enough just to reform taxes: the Tories must also show how to cut them.
So far, Prosper UK has come up with nothing comparable. Anyway, there is nothing to stop former ministers, mayors and MPs from feeding ideas into the policymaking process – without divisive noise about One Nation.
What is most striking is not what the new centrists have to say, but what they don’t say. For instance, they have nothing to say about cutting the number on welfare – a task that defeated the Tories in government – or its cost. Yet Kemi’s team has identified
£47billion in cuts and a programme to get people out of what she calls Benefits Street.
Nor has the Tepid Tendency anything to say about rebuilding our armed forces. Yet the latest opinion polls show that for the first time the public is now as worried about defence as it is about the NHS, having been alarmed by global events in the past month.
Again, Mrs B has been ahead of the game, calling on the Government to raise defence expenditure by £28billion – the sum Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, the Chief of the Defence Staff, has told the PM is needed urgently.
The Conservative leader doesn’t need half-baked advice from superannuated centrists. What she does need, from right across the party, is loyalty.
Once upon a time, that was the Tories’ secret weapon. Under Kemi Badenoch, it could yet become the secret of success again.
Daniel Johnson is Editor of TheArticle.
