It is 11:26 a.m. and Kemi Badenoch is on her second drink of the day. The Tory leader is out visiting a craft brewery in Suffolk. ‘I’m not a beer drinker’, she admits, while sampling its signature line – ‘so if I like it, it must be good’. The gin is to more to her taste, and she takes a hearty gulp before bustling around the brewery to promote the Conservatives’ small business focus. Later, she gets to hammer a mallet to batter a sealed cask shut – a weapon she might wish to wield at some of her recent defectors.
The past 12 months have been a tale of two narratives for Badenoch. Her personal ratings have undergone an impressive improvement, helped by a series of confident performances in parliament. But the party’s ratings remain stubbornly low, despite a raft of new policies. On Thursday, the Conservatives are forecast for losses across England and heavy reversals in the devolved parliaments. ‘Everywhere I go, I get a positive reception’, she says. ‘So, let’s see what people actually do on the day. We can’t be influenced by just social media or Reform’s own propaganda. What I see is people recognising that I’m the one who is holding Labour to account.’
‘We can’t be influenced by just social media or Reform’s own propaganda. What I see is people recognising that I’m the one who is holding Labour to account’
On the campaign trail for her second locals as leader, Badenoch is adopting a more aggressive stance towards her rivals on the right. She takes repeated aim at Nigel Farage, insisting his party is ‘not serious’ about the challenges Britain faces. ‘A lot of the people who are in Reform are either people we kicked out, you know, like that guy in Essex who was showing his dick pics everywhere, his genitals, people we kicked out, or people who were causing problems that we didn’t want or people who defected.’ (The Essex man denies having sent a picture of his genitals and says he resigned from the Tory party.)
Badenoch attacks Farage for missing the Veterans’ Bill vote in parliament. ‘That’s what would happen if he ever got anywhere near Downing Street. He just wouldn’t turn up. This stuff is hard work… It’s not just about campaigning; it is about doing the day job as well.’
Badenoch is keen to show she is very much here for the hard yards. Her arrival in Suffolk comes after an early morning slot on the Today programme where she lacerated Labour for not doing more to tackle anti-Semitism. The previous day, she went viral after standing up to British Jews against a heckler in Billericay. ‘The people who have died and who have been killed were Jewish people in synagogues,’ she told protestors, referencing last year’s Manchester attack. ‘Let’s stop pretending that something else is happening.’ The exchange has now been viewed several million times online.
After Thursday, is she worried that Keir Starmer’s party could do deals at a local level to accommodate those with anti-Semitic views? ‘I would like to hope that the Prime Minister can do better than that. He’s been saying that he wants to help tackle this. If he does any sort of deal with people who are knowingly anti-Semitic, I think that will go horribly wrong for him.’ Her criticism is one of priorities, suggesting the PM is too weak to take necessary action like proscribing the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps. ‘What Keir Starmer is thinking about now is how to survive in his job. He’s in a very bad place. I haven’t really seen him on the campaign trail. Nobody wants him to come and help.’
In judging her performance, Badenoch claims the ‘benchmark’ is last May, when the Tories lost 674 councillors and won a projected national vote share of 15 per cent. ‘We are looking to improve on last year’s results, so the benchmark is last year. You can’t really compare to four, five years ago because that was an era of two-party politics. It’s now multi-party politics. All the thresholds have changed. There are no safe seats and no safe areas. Even the protest parties, they’re not winning with high shares of the vote. There’s just going to be a lot of turbulence – that’s not something that’s really to do with me. It’s to do with the political environment that we’re in.’
Popping into a local clothes shop, Badenoch gets the chance to wield a different device: a hand-held steamer. ‘You’re good at this’, admires the store owner. ‘What are you doing Saturday?’ ‘Resting’, replies Badenoch, before casting an eye over the shop. ‘My husband is getting very much into his gilets right now.’ Outside, a band of 30 Tory activists wait eagerly for their leader, shiny new placards in hand. Amid plenty of cheers, Badenoch duly appears, flashing smiles, before a short speech which ends the promise that ‘The Conservatives are coming back!’ ‘That was quick’, mutters one activist, as Badenoch blazes off to prepare for local press. Highly regimented and very visible, this is a presidential style of campaigning that seeks to show Badenoch at her best.
‘I’m an engineer by training. It’s about having proper plans. There’s too much of politics. There’s just people talking. You know, in engineering, you can’t talk your way into building a car or a bridge’
In the Commons, Badenoch can still rely on the status which comes with being Leader of the Opposition (Loto). She says she is taking advice from her predecessors Iain Duncan Smith and Lord Cameron, ‘who have institutional memory of what being Loto is like and what’s likely to come around the corner.’ Yet she is keen to say that while ‘lots of people give me good advice’, it is her ‘judgement’ which is the thing which is important… I’m an engineer by training. It’s about having proper plans. There’s too much of politics. There’s just people talking. You know, in engineering, you can’t talk your way into building a car or a bridge. You’ve got to actually know how to do the thing.’
This leads us onto the question of judgement. After Thursday, there will be many more Reform councillors, MSPs and MSs. At a local and devolved level, will Conservatives have Badenoch’s blessing to come to accommodations? ‘I want people to understand what the character of these people really, truly is. They’re not focused on public service at all.’ She points out that, ‘Last year, where Reform did win a lot, nobody, and I mean, nobody, has done any deals with them’, insisting ‘there is a character problem here.’
‘I have not told anyone to go into deals with Reform. When they’ve had the opportunity, they haven’t done that. The council leaders I’ve spoken to have all said they’re not interested. They don’t think that the characters in Reform are serious about public service.’ She reels off adult social care and children’s services as areas where Farage’s party have failed to offer answers. ‘It’s just about stitch ups for jobs. And that’s why I don’t even entertain the question.’ One area where Farage is looking dangerous is in Essex, where Badenoch and many prominent Tories are seated: ‘The people in my backyard can see me doing the day job. They like what I’m doing in the constituency.’
The traditional lesson for successful Leaders of the Opposition from Thatcher and Blair to Cameron and Starmer has been: if you want to change the country, first show you can show change your party. Has Badenoch done enough of that yet? She suggests an overhaul of the once-mighty Conservative party machine is underway. ‘We’ll be talking about that after the locals. We are changing our candidates’ procedure. We’re making it much tougher. I only want authentic conservatives becoming MPs, not just people who want to be an MP… It’s a lot tougher now to pass our parliamentary assessment. We’re not like Reform where they barely vet their candidates.’
This is fighting talk coming from a leader whose party is down in the polls. Down but not out – that is the message which Badenoch wants her party to absorb ahead of a difficult polling day on 7 May. ‘I’m saying we’re going to have to make some tough decisions’, she says. ‘But this is how we get a strong economy. This is how we get Britain working again. Whether it’s abolishing stamp duty, drilling oil and gas in the North Sea or cheap power plan, I don’t have to U-turn on my policies the way Keir Starmer or Nigel Farage have to U-turn on theirs.’
