Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch says that her job is like “picking up a distressed asset and turning it around”, acknowledging the party’s dismal poll ratings, which have struggled to get above 20 percent in recent months.
Talking to POLITICO’s Anne McElvoy ahead of the party’s annual conference in Manchester next week, Badenoch implored her MPs and members to give her more time to rebuild the party after last year’s landslide defeat, the worst in its history.
“To use a corporate analogy, the quarterly returns may not be great, but the long-term strategy will deliver,” she said. “If we’re looking for sugar highs just to get us through the week, get us through the day, we will not win the next election.”
However, she insisted that she could revive the Tories and lead them back to power at the next general election. “We are attempting to do something that has not been done before. Going from an historic defeat back into government in four years, in one term, that’s going to be difficult. It’s going to be hand-to-hand combat, and there’re going to be a lot of bumps along the way.”
Badenoch will shift her focus at the Manchester gathering next week from her early focus on culture wars and free-speech issues to an assault on Labour’s economic record.
Hitting out at Chancellor Rachel Reeves, who is expected to raise taxes in the budget next month, Badenoch says that business leaders have expressed concerns directly to her. “Now they’ve seen they’ve got the change, the change is a lot worse … I have businesses coming up to me saying, ‘Rachel Reeves lied to me.’ She did it just a few months ago to the CBI on stage, ‘I won’t be coming back for more tax rises’, and now she’s doing that.”
Badenoch said that the economy and repairing relations with business will be her priority in Manchester next week, in an effort to restore the party’s reputation for economic competence. “Business got disillusioned with us because they felt that we were being complacent and weren’t helping. And they thought that perhaps, you know, Labour might do a better job or couldn’t be worse.”
In recent weeks and months, the Conservatives have suffered a string of defections from former ministers and MPs, most recently Danny Kruger, who was a prominent member of her frontbench team until a few weeks ago.
“We have a tough journey ahead of us,” she said. “Whenever there’s a tough journey … you lose some people along the way. You don’t want to lose people, but not everyone has the stamina to go through the tough times. But she revealed that Kruger had not consulted her before departing to join Nigel Farage’s party. “He did not indicate at any point that he was unhappy,” she says.
Asked about the possibility of further defections, Badenoch sounded a defiant note: “Some people just jump wherever they think the wind is blowing. We need MPs who are going to stay the course and stay true to our values, not just people who want to be MPs.”
Speaking for the first time after Keir Starmer and Nigel Farage traded blows over immigration during Labour’s conference week, the Conservative leader said: “I think that they are both as bad as each other. They are both squabbling like children; the country needs the grown-ups back in the room. We are the grown-ups.”
She claimed Farage had “messed up and run into trouble” over his plans to abolish indefinite leave to remain for settled migrants.
Badenoch dismissed the leader of Reform UK as “someone who is quite happy to stir things up and agitate”, but said that the Prime Minister and Nigel Farage were both “playing grievance politics.”
The idea of a Tory merger with Reform would not work, she added, because the two parties were moving further apart on key policy areas. “He wants to lift the two-child benefit cap. Nigel Farage is in the same boat as Labour, Lib Dems, the Greens, Plaid Cymru, SNP, that is not our boat. He wants to increase public spending. He does not want to balance the books. We are the party of fiscal responsibility. We are the only party of fiscal responsibility.”
After criticism that she had failed to distance herself strongly from the recent “Unite the Kingdom” march, which had far-right activist Tommy Robinson, real name Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, as one of its leading organizers, Badenoch observed: “I think endlessly talking about Tommy Robinson is making Tommy Robinson a big name. In the same way that Keir Starmer labelling Farage racist just keeps … upping the ante on these things.”
Reflecting on the rise of support for Robinson and for populist-right politics more broadly, Badenoch said: “What is going on is that people are seeing the government is not working. And when someone comes along, a polemicist or an agitator, whether it be Tommy Robinson or someone else, who says something which turns out to be true, people aren’t interested in the criticism of the people in their ivory towers in Westminster or wherever, criticizing that person. They want to know what we’re going to do to solve it.”
Despite criticism from within her party, Badenoch is adamant about remaking the Conservatives in her image. “A party takes the shape of the leader. I’m the leader now, and the party is taking my shape. I’m not Boris Johnson. I’m not Rishi Sunak, not Liz Truss, not David Cameron, not Mrs. [Margaret] Thatcher either or John Major. I’m Kemi Badenoch. And at this conference people are going to see what a Kemi Badenoch party looks like.”
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