One of the origin stories about Kemi Badenoch’s career as politician is that, while waiting to be interviewed as candidate for Saffron Walden, she sat alone, listening through headphones to Survivor’s ‘Eye of the Tiger’ – that pounding, sinew-stiffening theme to Rocky III. Given the ups and downs of her year as leader – not unlike a Rocky film in itself – it now seems a prescient choice of song. Kemi, in the past month, has finally come out punching.
It was Badenoch’s tour de force response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget of Broken Promises, that seemed to change her fortunes
Perhaps the wait was unavoidable – few newly-elected party leaders have had to face so many difficulties in their first year. There have been the patronising put-downs and haywire political bluster of Keir Starmer across the way, answering her questions with a dementing haze of irrelevancies and non-sequiturs. There were credible rumours in May of a plot against her leadership, with Dominic Cummings prophesying she’d be gone by the end of year. Right-wing columnists undermined her weekly, while ‘secret politicians’ on her own side did the dirt on her as well.
In Parliament, a few seats down, was the lean and hungry Robert Jenrick – a man who got 46 per cent of the leadership vote, and whose rictus smile on her election seemed to guarantee a future of Badenoch having to look constantly in the rear view mirror or wear a stab-vest 24-7. On the benches opposite, sitting smugly on his poll rating, was the lupine Member for Clacton, a man who’d reportedly vowed to ‘destroy the Conservative party’ and seemed to have made a good start. As late as conference time, Channel 4’s Cathy Newman was crowing: ‘Every senior Conservative you speak to here […] says that they think Kemi Badenoch will be out by December, by May, certainly before the General Election.’ Where was the nimble, hard-hitting leader many of us envisaged before her election in November 2024?
‘No policy announcements until 2027,’ Kemi declared in January, but it seemed politically reckless and a gift to other leaders who wished to roar ahead. You understood the Ming vase strategy, but with poll ratings plummeting at times to 16 per cent, what the Tory leader was carrying so cautiously across the slippery floor seemed less Ming vase than plastic flowerpot. Was she wasting time or following a drumbeat of her own?
Then the fightback, slow at first, began. At the conference, we finally got a clutch of policies: on cutting borrowing and taxes, abolishing stamp duty, giving rebates to the young, and axing the carbon tax. Badenoch’s speech had clarity and grit, though the polite applause which greeted the sign-off – ‘We have a mountain to climb, but a song in our hearts. And we are up for the fight!’ – didn’t sound like a ringing endorsement.
She had survived, but for how long? On 21 November, the Daily Telegraph prophesied: ‘Tories on course for just 14 seats at election.’ It seemed Kemi was on the ropes once again.
It was Badenoch’s tour de force response to Rachel Reeves’s Budget of Broken Promises, that seemed to change her fortunes and to remind many of us (we were forgetting) why we’d supported her in the first place. The speech, a ferocious twenty-minute demolition of Reeves’s chancellorship, had a pitch-perfect, pitiless precision to it, comparable to a Chloe Kelly goal or one of Mike Tyson’s threshing-machine KOs. The Chancellor, Badenoch said, was ‘spineless, shameless and completely aimless.’ She had ‘promised stability and delivered chaos.’
In response to Reeves’ ‘whining’ objections she’d been ‘mansplained’ to death over the budget, Kemi was blunt: ‘Let me explain to the Chancellor, woman to woman, that people out there are not complaining because she is female; they are complaining because she is utterly incompetent.’ The PM should sack Reeves but couldn’t – their fortunes were too closely intertwined: ‘So we’re stuck with them both – Laurel and Foolhardy.’
Anyone who’d felt (with some justification) that Badenoch was unable to land blows, to set the momentum or dominate the House – that her own ‘eye of the tiger’ had been so much wishful thinking – had their assumptions at last served back at them. That we’d had to wait for it an entire year since her election made 2025 seem, in boxing terms, like the longest rope-a-dope in history.
The speech went duly viral, loved and loathed in equal measure – both signs, you might think, she was doing something right.
But it was still just a speech. While Kemi’s personal trust rating is now all but equal with Farage’s, the Conservatives hover, according to the latest Politico poll of polls, at 18 per cent – one point above Labour, eleven below Reform. Back in late August, Reform was polling 14 points ahead and the Tories were in third place: the gap is visibly narrowing.
Badenoch, in recent outings, seems to have refound her mojo, with even the Guardian asking: ‘Is the Tory leader finally cutting through?’ For all the deliberate reticence on policy, it’s becoming clearer what she is about: a state that should ‘do less but do it better’; work over welfare; leaving the ECHR; promoting some apprenticeships instead of university; rejection of economy-sapping Net Zero initiatives – ideas many voters will get behind if they trust the person voicing them. In the end, in this Age of Anger, swathes of the electorate will support the leader who best and most forensically articulates their rage – one reason Kemi’s budget speech was such a landmark for her.
She can still score own goals. Her falling into the trap recently of allowing the press (and a host of Christian ministers) to paint her as a political Cruella de Vil, opposed to welfare on principle, was a blundering misstep. There are also those May elections coming up which, barring a miracle, will bring few rays of sunshine into the new Tory HQ. Nonetheless, they should hold their nerve, accept that building back from last year’s wipeout was always going to be an agonising process, and that being seen to stick with a leader – after so many farcical changes at the top – is part of their brand recovery.
Besides, there are reasons for (a limited) optimism. This year’s political conclusion, to adapt Churchill, isn’t the end of the Tory mountain-climb, nor even the beginning of the end – but it is definitely the end of the beginning. ‘Kemi Badenoch… you have heard of her, haven’t you?’ Farage smirked at the Reform conference this year, to dutiful titters from the crowd. At the end of 2025, following Kemi’s eleventh-round comeback, it’s safe to say the answer is now: ‘Yes.’
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