Kemi Badenoch delivered her Conservative party conference speech in Birmingham this afternoon. Here are fourteen things we learned from her speech:
1) Kemi Badenoch has her tail up
Anyone who read my interview with the Conservative leader last week, where she claimed: ‘I get better every day,’ knows that Badenoch is not lacking for confidence, having turned her personal prospects around with a barnstorming speech to the party faithful at last year’s annual conference. Today she seemed confident in herself, her views and the arguments she wants to make — though the delivery was a little less urgent than last year, the pauses too prevalent and the energy a little thin until the final ten minutes.
Badenoch’s plan is to remind people of how toxic that 2016-19 period was. Keep Brexit done might be her slogan
2) Her plan is to win back voters from the left first
Frontbenchers have been excitedly regaling journalists about a presentation given by the chief party strategist Stephen Gilbert, which explains a lot of the choices Badenoch made in her speech. They have looked at the polling and devised a two-part plan.
First, win back wealthy Southern voters who have abandoned the Tories for the Lib Dems and Labour in order to overtake Reform UK as the second force in British politics. Then persuade the tranche of Reform voters who just want to support the leading party of the right that Badenoch, not Nigel Farage, is the only one who can keep Andy Burnham and a rabble of left-wingers out of power. This makes some sense as the seats where the Tories, rather than Reform, are the major party of the right are predominantly in the South, the voters who are open to them once backed Cameron, Clegg and Blair.
The supermarket of choice for a lot of these voters is Marks & Spencer and Badenoch compared the Tories to that once distressed brand which has turned itself around and recently had a show at London Fashion Week: ‘Not so long ago critics said they were a bit stuffy and stuck in the past. Some were even questioning whether the brand would survive. Now M&S is back in fashion. Great looks at affordable prices…People are flooding back. Just like M&S we must learn from our mistakes win back trust and make people feel good about our party again.’
3) Every major policy announcement was directed at this group
The big policy ‘rabbit’ out of the hat in the speech was Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives would scrap inheritance tax on family homes and let couples leave an additional £1 million to their children tax free. ‘No stamp duty when you buy your home, no mansion tax when you live in your home and no inheritance tax on your home when you pass it to your children or grandchildren,’ she said. ‘That is what the next Conservative government will deliver.’
The same goes for the plan to smooth out the cliff edge on childcare handouts, which means someone earning £100,000 a year gets no help while someone on £99,999 does. And by pledging to half the employer’s national insurance on jobs for the under-25s, paying up to £50,000 a year is surely designed to get the children of the same voters into work.
4) That means convincing voters Burnham’s Labour are fiscally and economically irresponsible
Burnham barely mentioned his political rivals in his speech, Badenoch gave the Prime Minister both barrels for his desire to ‘wind back the clock’ to 1970s socialist solutions to Britain’s problems.
She said: ‘They believe economic growth is created by politicians. They think government knows best. They think that your income, your pension and your savings are theirs to take and then hand out as they see fit. They believe that what they are doing is compassionate but we know that these ideas will make every single person in this country poorer. Your taxes will be higher. Your bills will go up. You will find it harder and harder to make ends meet. Just because these ideas are delivered on TikTok doesn’t make them any less dangerous than they have always been … Spending money on things we can’t afford is not kind, it is reckless. We are running out of money… and running out of time to put it right.’
Strategists think this will not only turn some 2024 Starmer voters against Burnham, but also make it much more perilous for progressive voters who care about the economy to back the Lib Dems, since the prospect of Burnham in bed/coalition with the Greens and the Lib Dems is more likely.
5) The Tories are in their element when politics is on the old left-right economic divide
Badenoch opened her speech spelling out how comfortable she is having a row on this terrain. ‘There is a fight coming in British politics. A fight that we have not seen in this country for more than half a century. It will be a battle for the soul of this nation, a battle of ideas.’
Burnham barely mentioned his political rivals in his speech, Badenoch gave the Prime Minister both barrels
As someone who, by common consent, could start a row with her own reflection in the mirror, this pugilistic bully pulpit about conservative values suits Badenoch. Her team hopes that the budget and the fallout that follows it will gradually exclude Reform from the mainstream political debate.
6) The Tories risk being seen as the party of the few, not the many
Aiming most big policy at the better off risks the Tories being painted again as the party of the rich. Defector Robert Jenrick, Reform’s economy spokesman, was straight out after the speech saying: ‘The Tories are for the two per cent, we are for the 98 per cent.’ Inheritance Tax already excludes family homes worth up to £1 million so the new policy will only help those with bigger and more expensive houses. Experts are also warning it will encourage people to pile more money into property and deter the elderly from downsizing.
7) The strategy also involves convincing voters Reform’s leaders are unpleasant
Badenoch delivered a long charge sheet about proven and suspected wrongdoing among the Reform leadership and sought to distinguish the Tories from the ethno-nationalist politics of the right espoused by Restore Britain and both Zia Yusuf and Suella Braverman from Reform.
‘I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists [Farage shouting ‘Leveson’ and reporters asking about his funding], call veterans traitors [Yusuf against Ben Wallace] and debate whether my mixed-race children are English. [Braverman] I don’t want to explain to my son when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English…That is not the country we are. Reform MPs are openly questioning people’s identity. They are not like us. We are not like them. We are different. We are the Conservative Party.’
8) Any pre-election rightist pact is off and it is increasingly difficult to see a post-election one
Tory and Reform voters agree on a lot and don’t generally hate each other. At both of their conferences I met people whose spouse was in the other party. But the two leaderships despise each other. Fresh from Suella Braverman telling me last week that she would not serve in cabinet again with Conservatives, Badenoch went even harder: ‘This is who Reform politicians are. To those who say “unite the right” – we are not uniting with that.’
When the time comes, and if the numbers say a right of centre coalition could govern, donors will doubtless force a deal of sorts, but it is one into which both sides would be dragged kicking and screaming.
9) Ignoring the Red Wall is risky
By focusing on the affluent South, a lot of those voters who flocked to Boris Johnson in 2019 may feel the Tories are offering them nothing. Badenoch barely addressed the issue of migration in her speech, one of the key drivers of votes in these seats. Instead, she left it to her shadow home secretary, Chris Philp, to announce a ‘hard cap’ in migrant numbers under a Tory government. The best that can be said is that the Tories will try to woo these voters if they overtake Reform.
Having accused Burnham of being a ‘vibes’ politician, some Tories seemed to be succumbing to the same intoxication
10) For now she is trying to convince Reform supporters that they will be let down by Farage
Badenoch made an overt appeal to Tory voters who had switched to supporting Reform UK to ‘come home’. She said: ‘Many of them are our people. We let them down and we want them to come back home. They deserve better than Reform politicians.’ Referring to the case of Nathan Gill, the jailed ex-Wales leader of Reform, and questions about the conduct of Farage confidante ‘Posh George’ Cottrell, Badenoch added: ‘A year ago, those Reform politicians were measuring up the curtains of No 10. Now, some of them are measuring up the curtains of their prison cells…Character, conduct, and standards matter.’
11) Badenoch wants to show the Tories are no longer the party of leadership psychodrama
Part of this was banning perennial plotter Grant Shapps from standing again as an MP. In her speech, she joked about the defections of former cabinet ministers like Jenrick and Braverman, which she described as an ‘export boom of drama queens’ to Reform UK. Unlike her opponents, she said, the Tories ‘actually like each other’. She added: ‘In 2024 voters gave their verdict on the rows the plots and the infighting. Remember all that drama? That’s gone…This party is now the no drama party. We are the no nonsense party.’
12) What you don’t do can be as instructive as what you do
By refusing to scrap Inheritance Tax altogether because she has not yet found a way to fund it, Badenoch will have convinced some close observers that she is a serious politician whose sums can be trusted.
13) On Brexit, the plan is Boris Redux
Burnham’s decision to re-open the Brexit debates is a nightmare for the Tories, since it could force them to defend a hard Brexit which has damaged the economy – a message which will undermine the strategy of reclaiming Lib Dem and Labour voters, a large number of whom will be remainers.
Johnson won the 2019 election on the back of public exhaustion at three years of infighting over Brexit. Badenoch’s plan is to remind people of how toxic that 2016-19 period was. Keep Brexit done might be her slogan. Burnham ‘wants to reopen the Brexit debate,’ she said. ‘Can you imagine having to go through that again? So much time lost arguing with ourselves, with the EU going round in circles businesses not knowing whether they should invest he wants to do it all again! I think that is a terrible idea.’
14) The Tories aren’t dead but they aren’t winning either
A year ago, the mind altering drug at a very downbeat party conference was ‘Copeium’. This year that was replaced by a more upbeat ‘Hopeium’, but the party’s poll rating has barely moved. Having accused Burnham of being a ‘vibes’ politician, some Tories seemed to be succumbing to the same intoxication this week. It is true, as Badenoch observed, that the party has not been destroyed, as Farage believed it would be.
‘There is a reason our party is still here after 200 years,’ she said. ‘We have adapted to every single challenge and every single age and we are doing it again.’ But even Badenoch acknowledges she and her party still have a mountain to climb. ‘People are looking through the shop window they like what they see but let’s be honest not enough of them are buying yet. We have to change that.’
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