3 hours ago
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The Conservative spring conference in Harrogate over the weekend illustrated two important truths about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership. The first is that she has indeed started to find her feet and operate at a much more effective tempo, as attested by the gradual rise in her personal favourability ratings since last September. The second is that this is not delivering nearly the boost to her party’s fortunes that it needs to.
Badenoch’s speech was perfectly serviceable; the government’s handling of defence is a big old bruise, and she is very happy to punch it. She has also partnered it with an actual policy intervention – reinstating the two-child welfare limit to fund an increase in defence spending – that adroitly targets another Labour vulnerability with rightwing voters.
Yet despite all that, the cut-through has been minimal. At the time of writing, several national papers seem not to have covered the speech at all, at least online. (As I have written before, one question mark over Badenoch’s leadership is not whether she can use the spotlight – she can – but whether she can attract the spotlight when events don’t point it at her, as they do in parliament and the autumn conference.)
Furthermore, in our increasingly fragmented party system, the dividends of simply bashing the government are simply going to be less than they were under the old party model, because a fall in Labour support does not automatically mean a rise in Conservative fortunes. In fact, the recent rally in Tory polling has been real but muted; they remain about six points down on where they were when Badenoch took over, and have failed to capitalise much on the recent decline in Reform UK’s polling.
Winning a hearing in such conditions requires a very different strategy to the one the Conservative party is used to, and senior Tories are still struggling to get the hang of it.
More substantially, they have also not yet really got to grips with the sheer scale of problems Britain faces. Badenoch’s proposal to fund defence with welfare restrictions is a tidy political package, but it would barely scratch the surface of the sustained increase in defence spending that many experts increasingly think we need.
Yet for all that Badenoch and Mel Stride like to recite the old hymns about fiscal responsibility, the Conservatives remain as averse as ever to confronting the fundamental contradictions that eventually toppled them last time. There is no way to balance the books, cut taxes or deliver big increases in defence spending without cutting other parts of spending, most obviously pensions, that Tory voters like.
At the same time, a more competitive party system makes it harder for any party to make policy choices that alienate important parts of its remaining coalition. There is no long-term future for a Tory party that remains in essence a sectional interest party for retirees, but it could quite easily lose the (easily angered) older vote without picking up enough support elsewhere to survive.
In truth, it is extremely difficult to see any politically viable route to a serious, sustained uplift in defence expenditure. Cold war-era defence outlays were sustained in part by cold war-era voter attitudes that attached more weight to foreign affairs. It is also extremely difficult to unwind welfare spending once the state has committed to it. This means that unpicking the “peace dividend” will have a very high political price, and it isn’t obvious how any government could survive trying to pay it when there are so many other parties prepared to tell the voters whatever they want to hear.
Such is the catch-22 in which the Conservative party finds itself: it has neither the inclination nor the political space to propose a radical break with the status quo, but neither has it the old hegemonic position that allowed it so often to get away with merely not being Labour. Historically, the Tories could often coast on simply being “the rightwing option”. In a world with more than one such option, their offer isn’t nearly refined enough.
The question is when (or perhaps if) this truth is going to filter through to the party itself. While the mood among some in Conservative headquarters is black, overall the Tories have allowed themselves to be geed up by the “Kemi bounce”. Their leader is performing better, the government is in a truly abject condition and old instincts suggest this indicates a revival in their fortunes.
But the actual polling remains bleak, and the impact on the Conservative machine of it being borne out in May’s local elections would be catastrophic. Badenoch has more to learn about winning a hearing – but there is little point in winning a hearing when you have, as yet, too little to say.
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Henry Hill is a journalist and commentator
