The new Tory leader is already coming under attack. Here’s how she wins
15 December 2024
Source - Daily Telegraph-
A good sailor knows that tides are more important than waves. Waves demand attention and can be noisy. At their worst, they destroy cliffs and buildings. But waves come and go, one moment frothy, the next millpond quiet. Tides are inevitable, often imperceptible.
As we approach the end of 2024, there are plenty of waves (immigration, culture wars, whether Love Actually is the best or worst Christmas film ever).
But there are only three tides. Nigel Farage’s Reform Party has momentum. Labour’s tide is in danger of going out – but could turn. The Tories are becalmed, but not for the reasons most people think.
Three weeks ago Reform hit 100,000 members and set a target of winning hundreds of council seats at the local elections next May. In the summer, talk of Farage having any chance of an assault on Number 10 would have seemed fanciful. Such an outcome remains unlikely, but it is no longer impossible.
The defection of Tim Montgomerie, the former Boris Johnson adviser and once spoken of as “the most important Conservative not in the Cabinet”, is significant. Montgomerie is a thinker in a party that lacks them.
The announcement that Nick Candy, the property multi-millionaire, is to become the party’s treasurer signals that more money will flow to Reform’s coffers. He has already pledged more than £1 million and is in negotiations with Elon Musk.
For Labour, it has one shot at success – the economy. If growth does not return in 2025, the multiplier effects on debt (rising) and tax receipts (falling) will be toxic. The Government will limp to the end of a single term and then be turfed out.
Keir Starmer knows that the government’s present position is unsustainable, last week’s stagnant growth figures only adding to the gloom. He is labouring to change course, attacking the Civil Service for lying in a “tepid bath of managed decline”, promising 1.5 million new homes and the resurrection of a Blairite favourite: anti-social behaviour orders. Reform of public services, more housing and fighting crime is Labour’s version of a populist playbook.
Wes Streeting, attacking Ed Miliband over Syria on Question Time, will be the poster boy of the new narrative, joking at The Spectator’s Parliamentarian of the Year awards that he was the most Conservative person in the room. Even Farage laughed.
Along with Streeting, Rachel Reeves, Morgan McSweeney, No 10 chief of staff, and Pat McFadden, the Cabinet’s Blairite enforcer, make up the top table. Angela Rayner, supposedly in charge of planning reform, was conspicuous by her absence last week, confined to walking behind the Prime Minister as he toured a Cambridgeshire housing estate.
Labour, the Conservatives and Reform are now locked in a three-way battle for public support. Reform is ahead of Labour in some polls and has a leader that demands attention whenever he opens his mouth.
Starmer has the levers of state and multi-million pound communication departments which constantly churn out news of achievements – real or imagined – of his Labour Government. Incumbency has its advantages.
So between the rock of Farage’s laser style and “rebel alliance” emotions and the hard place of state-sponsored communications machinery, Kemi Badenoch is facing a squeeze.
Some argue, one month after she was elected leader, that she is already flirting with failure and needs to somehow make more noise, jumping on issues with aggressive sound bites.
Creating waves, though, is not the route to government for the official Opposition. Yes, it tickles your core vote, excites social media and may grab a headline (“lunch is for wimps”). But Badenoch is not the insurgent. That territory belongs to Farage and why back a tribute band when you can have the real thing?
Badenoch will need three attributes to be successful – patience, deep policy work and an ability to speak across political divides, not create them.
“Kemi should employ the same approach as Margaret Thatcher,” one of her allies tells me. “That took four years in Opposition, and actually Kemi is further ahead than Margaret was at the same stage.”
Thatcher had no Reform Party snapping at her heels from the right. But she had a much more entrenched political and economic consensus, which leaned hard to the Left, and a party far more ideologically split between Wets and Dries. Each era brings its own unique challenges. Overcoming them is the stuff of strategy (tides) not tactics (waves).
Badenoch’s strategy is becoming clearer and has much to commend it. Her speech to The International Democracy Union Forum in Washington outlined a coherent set of approaches anchored in free markets, a smaller state and the rule of law.
Badenoch argued that the politics of the Left had been embedded in society, not through traditional socialist methods of control of the means of production, but by stealth – state over-reach, tax and borrowing and net zero orthodoxy.
“I know what freedom looks like,” she told her audience, which included Stephen Harper, the former Conservative prime minister of Canada, who led the revival of the Right after its almost complete wipeout in the 1990s.
“I know the values that can make citizens wealthier and happier and how without them, they become engines of misery and despair. Classic liberal values, not Left-wing liberalism but classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law, no matter who you are or where you come from.”
Vitally, we also received a glimpse of the intellectual under-pinnings of Badenoch’s approach – an essential element for anyone who wants to make a pitch of substance to the public and where both Starmer and Farage are weak.
Thatcher had Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, her own think tank, the Centre for Policy Studies, and an out-rider, Sir Keith Joseph. All were essential to the success of her time both in opposition and in government.
Tony Blair had Anthony Giddens (architect of the Third Way), Philip Gould (who wrote the foundational pitch to the aspirational working and middle classes), Jonathan Powell (who made government work) and Sir Michael Barber (head of the fabled Number 10 Delivery Unit). Powell and Barber are back in No 10.
Badenoch spoke of Thomas Sowell, the leading US free market economist who counts Friedman among his mentors. Her allies say that the Tory leader can quote great screeds of Sowell from memory.
Badenoch must hold her nerve and choose her battles wisely. There is such a thing as Tory Britain and it is still likely to be in the majority. It will need a sophisticated approach to ensure that it actually votes for the Conservative Party – and her.
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