MANCHESTER, England — The last 10 days have shown Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch to be in strangely similar straits.
The leaders of Britain’s ruling Labour Party and opposition Conservatives went into their respective party conferences with rock-bottom expectations. Both stepped over that low bar, avoided any immediate threat to their jobs, and loudly delivered messages their members needed to hear — more muscular rhetoric against Nigel Farage’s populist Reform UK (Labour) and bolder policy on the economy, climate and immigration (Tories).
Badenoch announced £21 billion in annual spending pledges funded by £47 billion in cuts, culminating with a “rabbit” in her Wednesday conference speech — a pledge to abolish stamp duty on people’s primary homes, returning £9 billion a year to taxpayers. It won an instant standing ovation.
Yet the bars of Manchester, as in Liverpool last week, were haunted by a sense of impending doom. Upstart Reform still has a runaway poll lead over the two main parties. A general election isn’t expected until 2029, yet many of Starmer and Badenoch’s own MPs believe each could face leadership challenges after May 2026 elections in Scotland, Wales and England that will provide a major test of the public mood.
Polling by the Opinium market researcher, conducted last week, found Starmer’s approval rating had slipped backwards (to net minus 44 points, down 3 points in a week) after his conference. Likewise, Badenoch’s flurry of policy announcements failed to land on most front pages or the tops of news bulletins — while a million people saw an X post about “Britain” being spelled wrong on a promotional Tory chocolate bar. (Press officers blamed a printing error.)
That moment underscored, again, the challenge facing both main parties. “Conferences alone rarely move the dial. The vast majority of the public pay little to no attention,” said Patrick English, YouGov’s director of political analytics. “What we are looking for really is … what cuts through to the few seconds of clips which will make it into news feeds and television screens? Will it look like unity, competence, and connectedness, or division, distraction, and distance?”
At first glance, the mood at the Tory conference resembled unity and frenetic activity. Yet underneath, profound questions remain about the party’s relevance, direction and leadership, as well as whether the center right can hold — and whether Britain’s oldest political party will survive the challenge from Reform. And that’s before Labour’s November budget and the May elections rewrite the narrative again.
Nothing lands
Badenoch’s speech in Manchester came eight years after the worst hour of Theresa May’s career. The then-prime minister struggled through a cough while a comedian handed her a fake redundancy notice and her slogan peeled off the back wall.
A performance like that would have finished Badenoch, observed one shadow Cabinet minister; instead, she was a “lucky general.” (Like several other MPs, aides and activists quoted in this piece, this person was granted anonymity to speak frankly.)
Yet the mood was flat. Badenoch moved to a smaller hall in the same venue where May had her meltdown, speaking to around 1,000 people, albeit with no technical difficulties. The shadow Cabinet minister quoted above said the number of visitors was “very clearly down,” despite Tory aides insisting such chatter was media groupthink. There were barely even protesters, apart from a two-man effort to pedestrianize the M6 motorway.
With the Conservatives at 16 percent in opinion polls, the sense of impending irrelevance was unavoidable. One senior Tory politician asked during a conversation at a group lunch: “Who is our shadow work and pensions secretary? Does anyone know?” After a pause, someone at their table worked out the answer.
Badenoch, who originally wanted to go slow on policy formulation, opted instead to make a flurry of announcements that positioned the party firmly on the right. Across the days of her conference, she pledged to repeal the 2008 Climate Change Act and its binding carbon targets, slash welfare spending, and pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights — allowing what aides briefed would be 150,000 migrant deportations per year. “Being timid will get us nowhere,” she said in her speech. “This is a party fizzing with ideas.”
‘Some really punchy things’
The party’s conference communications work was done in-house this year, said one person familiar with it, and the designers came up with a lengthy acrostic based on the word “BORDERS.” But even some people involved in writing it could not recall what the letters stood for. Asked about it at a drinks reception, one shadow minister looked blank.
A second shadow Cabinet minister said: “We’ve been doing some really punchy things and they haven’t all landed.”
Some of that was due to communications, as was shown when Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride announced a £4 billion-a-year pledge to scrap business rates for 250,000 high street firms.
Neither business figures nor the media were pre-briefed. Allies of Stride called it a “rabbit” — a political bombshell designed to grab the narrative. Yet it earned only a five-paragraph story on page 14 of the Conservative-leaning Daily Mail, and seven paragraphs in the Financial Times next to a half-page piece on the leadership ambitions of Badenoch’s Shadow Justice Secretary Robert Jenrick.
Two people with knowledge of internal discussions said officials had originally talked about announcing the Climate Change Act and ECHR policies earlier to have them in the bank before conference and clear the field for Badenoch to focus mainly on the economy. Instead, the conference pivoted sharply from right-wing messaging on migration to a broader appeal about responsible spending.
There is leftover policy that was not announced at the conference and will be dripped out in future, said a third shadow Cabinet minister. Meanwhile, the party is engaging in frenetic attacks on Labour — led by veteran official Sheridan Westlake, who directs a team of researchers to write thousands of parliamentary questions submitted in MPs’ names.
Yet the Tories are so far from power that attacks get more coverage than policy.
The third shadow Cabinet minister said this was inevitable, but that policy still “fills a vacuum” that would otherwise be taken up talking about personalities.
The center cannot hold
What has landed — with members, at least — is Badenoch’s decision to position the party firmly as a right-wing movement that can take on Reform.
The new policies on the climate and deportations pushed this beyond the leader’s long-held distaste for identity politics, which she believes has created a backlash and rising nativism, turbocharged by the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
Yet the Conservative Party has long been a church of right-wingers alongside Europhile, socially liberal Tories — the “One Nation” group. The pro-EU, anti-Trump Liberal Democrats won a record 72 seats last year, many of them in former Tory strongholds. And they had an advertising van outside the conference calling for disaffected Tories to defect.
Conservative aides answer that this is a two-pronged strategy — exemplified by the conference slogan, “Stronger economy, stronger borders.”
First the party must shore up its flank on immigration — on which the third shadow Cabinet minister argued a “score draw” with Reform is the best hope — then win back a wider section of the public by presenting itself as a prudent manager of the economy.
A fourth shadow Cabinet minister said: “Lib Dem voters care about immigration. Reform voters care about the NHS. We’ve just got to be good on the issues that people care about.”
To some, it all risks confusing voters who may not be that interested in classic, big-tent politics. The senior Tory politician quoted above complained of Badenoch: “She’s still trying to keep Andrew Mitchell and Mark Francois in the same party. Pick a lane.”
Kemi picks a lane
Yet to others, there are plenty of indications Badenoch has already made her choice.
The fourth shadow Cabinet minister quoted above suggested the Tories did not, in fact, lose many voters directly to the Lib Dems. Badenoch’s allies also argue the facts have simply changed, and Britain’s “Overton window” has shifted.
“Times have changed,” Shadow Energy Minister Andrew Bowie — a senior aide to May when she signed net zero by 2050 into law — told POLITICO. “It’s quite clear that the actions that we took in 2019 are actually hampering the ability to do business in the U.K.”
Likewise, many accept privately and publicly that the Tory government failed to handle a huge inflow of migration in the years after Brexit — which Boris Johnson (who presided over it) insisted would “take back control.”
A fifth shadow Cabinet minister above said Johnson’s 2019 election landslide bred “complacency,” adding: “The mistake we made previously in government is we tried to be all things to all people. You can’t be in politics. We’ve got to stick to Conservative values.”
That is about to be tested. All 32 boroughs in London, home to a more socially liberal caucus of Tories, are up for election next May alongside the national legislatures in Scotland and Wales — a first electoral test for Reform’s new strength in opinion polls. Badenoch’s joke that Reform were “trans Conservatives” — dressing up in her party’s clothes — went down with a “wince” at the reception for London Tories, one attendee said.
Reform dominating the show
The problem for Tories is that Reform UK is tooling up on policy too.
Reform’s Head of Policy Zia Yusuf joined Danny Kruger — a former right-wing Tory MP who defected to Reform last month — at a meeting with the Centre for Social Justice last week to talk about welfare and family policies, three people confirmed to POLITICO.
It’s a notable move for the center-right think tank, founded by senior Conservatives in 2004 and exerting an influence on former “One Nation” PM David Cameron. One of the CSJ’s co-founders, Tim Montgomerie, caused a stir by attending the bars of Manchester despite having defected to Reform too.
During the conference, Jonathan Brown, the chief executive of Reform-friendly think tank Center for a Better, was in Washington D.C. trying to drum up funding from the MAGA right, two people familiar with the visit said.
Reform announced the defections of 20 Tory councilors in a drip-drip of emails Tuesday, sparking derision from some Conservatives. The veteran MP quoted above said: “Who are they? They may be famous in their own dining rooms, but no one knows who their MP is, let alone their councilor.”
But frustration is real on the ground. One Tory leader of a large council lamented that they had not heard any solutions to the crisis in social care funding all week. One losing candidate in 2024 added: “People aren’t interested in who Reform are. They don’t need any history or policies. They’re going to cream votes off us just by putting up a candidate.”
The long game
Winning voters back will mean “millions of hard yards,” said the fifth shadow Cabinet minister quoted above. They suggested a poll rating in the low 20s would be a good result next year, but added: “I think the impact on the polls will be gradual.”
For some, the battle already stretches into the 2030s. One former Cabinet minister suggested the Tories need to carry on in order to exist as a “sensible center-right party to step in after Labour have screwed up [and] Reform have disappointed,” otherwise Britain would face a “real danger.”
It’s fair to say this view is not shared widely among Badenoch’s team.
“Whoever said that can fuck off,” one shadow minister retorted. “I’m surrounded by people who think they’re so fucking clever and so fucking sophisticated, and it’s that kind of fucking thinking that got us in this shit in the first place.”
The fourth shadow cabinet minister quoted above said they would not agree “that we should keep our heads down for two or three years, and then … emerge like a sort of butterfly from a chrysalis and a grateful nation will suddenly garland us with roses.”
Tory chairman Kevin Hollinrake is trying to get candidates in early so they have plenty of time to fight a 2029 election. Ex-minister Grant Shapps is running a program called “Conservatives Together,” which is providing regular training sessions to 20 potential candidates at a time.
First, however, candidates will need to believe it themselves.
The room was only half full for Badenoch’s Sunday night address to the (usually packed) party hosted by the backbench 1922 Committee. At a rooftop bar overlooking Manchester, she said she would take the Conservatives “into the general election,” paused for applause — then added belatedly: “And after that, Downing Street!”
A sixth shadow Cabinet minister told POLITICO with dry understatement: “I’m an optimist. I just think there is a possibility that we will win the next general election.”
The fifth shadow Cabinet minister quoted above said: “If we didn’t have Reform, we would be soaring in the polls I think — or soaring more than we are now.” A veteran MP added: “When we overtake Labour in the polls, that’s when they will really panic.”
A former special adviser put it less delicately: “I don’t think anybody thinks we’re going to be the next government. We’re not that deluded.” They added: “There are two camps. The optimistic think it’s not the end [of the party] if we get rid of Kemi next year … and then there are the people who think it’s terminal and this is the end.”
Leadership maneuvers
While no one thinks Badenoch will be challenged yet, a second former special advisor estimated there is an 80 percent chance of a leadership challenge next spring. One former MP put it at 100 percent.
Allies of Badenoch note confidently that the threshold of MPs needed to trigger a leadership contest rose last winter to a third, meaning 40 would have to submit anonymous “no confidence” letters to the chair of the 1922 Committee.
If Badenoch is removed, the names mooted most often by MPs to replace her are Jenrick and fellow shadow Cabinet minister James Cleverly — who both stood last time — and Katie Lam, a younger MP who took office in 2024.
While multiple Tory MPs have long insisted Jenrick is quietly on maneuvers (something his team naturally denies), a Conservative official said he had been genuinely helpful to Badenoch at the conference. He told allies he was on his “best behavior” in Manchester, and that the leader had showered praised on him in her speech.
But in private Jenrick takes a strident view of the need to inject momentum and energy into the party’s direction, say people who know him well — including picking some strategic fights within its own ranks to show the public it has changed.
One person who knows Kruger suggested he had been quietly keeping track of the names of people who might support Jenrick in a leadership contest — a job they claimed has now passed to other serving MPs. Kruger declined to comment when approached by POLITICO.
The former Cabinet minister quoted above said: “Obviously May is a big test for her. I almost feel like she would need to look at it and come to the conclusion [herself].”
One aide to a prominent Tory MP said: “All bets are off after May. She’s a total busted flush. There’s just no love for her among the Tory membership.”
Jenrick appeared to suffer little damage in his party from a leaked clip, handed to the Guardian newspaper, in which he complained of seeing no “white faces” in an area of Birmingham (he argued his comment about integration was taken out of context). But questions linger. A former top No. 10 aide added: “Kemi is a complete non-entity. She’s just not there and that allows Jenrick to take the spotlight. “Is Jenrick the person?” asked one former aide to Boris Johnson. “I’m sure he thinks he is, but is there really anyone out there going ‘I want to vote for this fantastic guy Robert Jenrick?’”
Such chatter enrages Badenoch’s allies. The shadow minister quoted above said: “Maybe it hasn’t been painful enough for some people to grow up and stop fucking about. We’re down to the smallest parliamentary party [in our history] and there’s still this feeling of — if we had a better civil war than last time, that would be a good idea.”
But as another aide to a prominent Tory MP put it: “When you’re at 14 percent, you’re basically dead apart from maybe 30 people. This is about whether enough people can make it to dry land.”
And those doom-laden polls will rank higher in the minds of many Tory MPs than what Badenoch announced this week.
There is a silver lining for the Conservatives, though.
On Nov. 26, Chancellor Rachel Reeves will unveil her budget after weeks trying to fill a black hole worth tens of billions of pounds caused by a tight economy and downgraded productivity estimates.
It will wash away the news agenda — and maybe, just maybe, Badenoch’s focus on the economy will earn her a flash of attention. Reeves “will give us all something to cry about,” as Badenoch put it.
One senior Labour adviser was pithier. Asked if they thought Starmer would be under threat in May too, they replied simply: “If we get past the budget.”
Abby Wallace contributed reporting.
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