Kemi Badenoch isn't working

New Statesman​

5 days ago

They still recall the times when she was magnificent. 20 October 2020. Britain's virus-afflicted care homes resembled Goya paintings but the House of Commons was discussing Black History Month. The member for Saffron Walden, the minister for equalities, was not amused. 'I want to speak about a dangerous trend in race relations,' she began, speaking quickly, clearly, angrily. She was the only Tory cabinet minister to have been raised in Africa. The only Tory cabinet minister who was raised in a former colony. And she was the only Tory cabinet minister who, it was said, truly understood – and valued – what made Britain great, because she could see it through the eyes of an immigrant. The mere physical fact of her – a black woman, not a white man – said that she was not like the other Tories; not born to rule; not willing to take Britain for granted; not able to decadently assume the country could carry on with things going wrong all the time and still be the same Britain she loved.
Kemi Badenoch stood up, her hands cutting the air, her fingers jabbing towards the bewildered Labour MPs. She attacked critical race theory: 'Blackness as victimhood… whiteness as oppression.' It was one of her subjects, like the debates around trans issues and the Black Lives Matters movement, like so many things she talked about that seemed so important in October 2020. The speech was clipped up and shared online. It went viral. Interviews followed with magazines and newspapers. She grounded her politics in her personal story and was rewarded with attention.
Boris Johnson's government had its share of ministerial casualties, including the man himself, but Badenoch continued to rise. She presented herself as no nonsense, no compromise, combat ready. She would rout the 'woke mob', shatter the 'metropolitan elite'. She would restore sanity to art galleries and gender clinics across the land. Older Conservatives, the fundraisers and the media barons and the lords, purred in delight. If they squinted hard enough, the Lady came into view. They had found their saviour.
Badenoch was good with them, too. She flattered their egos and listened attentively, treating them, at their own estimation, as the party's elder statesmen. They swooned. In their heads they made her prime minister. Her elevation would show the lefties they weren't bad people. And they wouldn't have to give up their beliefs either. She was one of them. Supporting her allowed these old men to feel progressive without having to change. She would own the libs. They would have no answer to her magnificence. She was everything the party needed to bounce back after the calamity of 2024. She was a winner.
Where has that Kemi Badenoch gone? Since she became the Leader of His Majesty's Opposition nine months ago, the job appears to have swallowed her. Power has not liberated her to take more risks, break more taboos, or set the agenda. Instead, it has become her prison. I have spent months talking to Conservatives about their leader – donors, MPs, think-tankers, ex-special advisers and cabinet ministers, journalists, constituency organisers and ordinary members. And as their party wilts under the relentless advance of Reform UK, one fact has become clear: many who backed Badenoch enthusiastically a year ago have turned against her and her team of advisers, regarded as lightweights and sycophants. Worse still, they feel deceived about who she really is and what she represents. They are counting down the clock until November when she can be challenged under the party's leadership rules. Kemi isn't working.
For about six weeks after Badenoch became leader last November, a different story appeared to be developing. The Tories were quietly creeping up on Labour in the polls. 'The message is clear,' boomed Alec Shelbrooke MP on 13 December. 'We are back on the road to credibility.' Within two weeks that nascent credibility lay shattered when, on Boxing Day, Nigel Farage celebrated a 'historic moment' as Reform UK surpassed more than 130,000 members to become Britain's biggest right-wing party.
Badenoch reacted to Farage's announcement by accusing him and Reform of 'manipulating' the public and 'coding' fake figures. Badenoch didn't just claim that Reform's figures were bogus. She used her background as a software engineer to cast doubt on the authenticity of the online ticker that showed new members joining in real time. She claimed the ticker was automated, preprogrammed to show an increase regardless of what real people were doing. 'Farage doesn't understand the digital age,' Badenoch posted. But Farage's numbers were real.
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Whereas Badenoch was relying on her own digital know-how, Reform had a genuine expert on their team. Not only had he built the ticker, he was able to identify the precise error Badenoch had made. It was a lethal moment. Secure in the knowledge that his numbers were real, Farage went in for the kill and threatened legal action against Badenoch. Witnesses in the Leader of the Opposition's office later told of an atmosphere of acute embarrassment as it dawned on Badenoch that she had misunderstood something that fell under what she claimed was her specialist subject.
Her supposed strengths – a combative communications style and an engineering background – had trapped her. Talk of the membership numbers ceased. In the four days that followed Badenoch's accusation, Reform gained another 20,000 members. 'It couldn't have gone better,' one senior figure in Reform told me. The other consequence was to give Badenoch's detractors, those who had never bought into the hype, a perfect case study in her failings. Even loyalists, some of whom had urged her not to give Farage the fight he so clearly craved, admitted that the incident pointed not just to an error of judgement but deeper character flaws.
From here, the situation only deteriorated. Not only did government unpopularity fail to boost the opposition but it sometimes seemed that the only time Keir Starmer was on the front foot was when facing Badenoch. Each month, depressed Conservative MPs hoped for good news. Each month, the polls worsened.
One of their biggest gripes against Badenoch is her unwillingness to set out clear policy positions. Instead – and this torturous process is ongoing – a series of policy commissions have been overseen by her ally Alex Burghart. The idea, as one supportive former cabinet minister described it to me last November was 'to restore intellectual credibility' while Reform and Farage inevitably fell apart.
It has not worked. 'It's a two-year, academic, internally focused exercise,' said an election-winning Tory outside parliament who believes that Reform's rise means Badenoch does not have the luxury of working out a policy platform at her leisure. 'Thinking we had time to go through this stupid process has left us like a rabbit in the headlights.' Tory strategists have begun to draw their own conclusions about the convoluted process: 'In many core areas of policy she doesn't know what she's talking about.'
Former Spads say that the Badenoch operation is 'very Upstairs, Downstairs' with star names such as Niall Ferguson helping with speeches while underpaid 20-somethings 'live day-to-day' in Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ). (Badenoch's team says she writes her own speeches.) 'They are not enabled because she doesn't trust them,' observed another Tory adviser. Her team, led by Henry Newman and formerly Lee Rowley – the latter a friend of Badenoch's who was unable to tell her bad news – echo Badenoch's inconsistencies and cultural fixations. 'I was at a private roundtable this year where Lee Rowley said we shouldn't become populist reactionaries,' said another former adviser. 'He then outlined a series of reasons why Tories lost, mostly to do with culture [war issues].'
Meanwhile, redundancies have hamstrung CCHQ. 'There is no CCHQ,' said a prominent backbencher, who pointed out that there are only two members of staff who work in comms. The once all-powerful Conservative Research Department has a much-reduced headcount. A continuing stream of donations is being used to pay off debts incurred during last year's election. Several former special advisers interviewed for this profile have been asked to work for current Tory shadow cabinet members for free. The party's heralded northern HQ in Leeds is set to close for lack of funding, while CCHQ's main office in Matthew Parker Street, Westminster, may soon have to be abandoned due to its expense. The appointment of a new CEO, Mark McInnes, a veteran who performed the same role in Scottish Tory HQ, is not seen as a game-changer.
A melancholy introspection has taken hold. Senior Tories have compared being interviewed by the New Statesman to a 'therapy session'. At a series of private dinners in recent months, the former leadership contender Tom Tugendhat has gathered young Tories to prepare for the future. At one, Tugendhat despairingly challenged the guest of honour, Robert Jenrick, 'Why shouldn't I join Reform?' There have also been moments of low farce. A key member of Team Badenoch was locked in a toilet by a pair of right-wing journalists at a recent Westminster party. He was told he wasn't allowed out until he helped them get rid of her. There is also raw contempt. Richard Holden, the former party chairman, told a recent private dinner, according to one witness, that the shadow cabinet was full of non-entities. With his usual gift for gentle understatement, Dominic Cummings has called Badenoch 'lazy, brittle and delusional'.
Despite her pugilistic reputation, Badenoch appears to have little appetite for fighting back. Six months after the run-in with Farage, and with his party clearing 30 per cent in national polls, Badenoch no longer factors into Reform's decision-making and is rarely discussed at its Millbank HQ. 'Nigel just says stuff like, 'She's a nice person.''
Meanwhile, Badenoch's preferred tactic has been to hide. Media appearances, never prolific, appear to have become even scarcer. According to those who have watched her operate up close, she has developed a habit of vanishing into her AirPods and iPad. Senior Tories complain that she is difficult to reach before 11am. (Her team says her working day starts 'early'.) She rarely leaves London to campaign in the regions. Asked on Westminster stages what her economic plan is, she talks instead about the social issues that fuelled her rise, from gender clinics and trans people to a new concern: abortion. Evenings are spent 'doomscrolling' and making calls to editors and producers about trying to spike negative stories about her. Her husband, Hamish, absorbs the worst tweets, the ones she can't face. She is 'fragile' and 'frightened'. At PMQs Badenoch's hands shake as she reads her lines from a piece of paper. Her backbenchers notice. On television, when she rouses herself to appear in the studios, Badenoch blinks more than she used to. Her donors notice. This is not someone who is enjoying the job.
Some of those who know her well, including those who once believed that she had something special, think the loss of confidence derives from a realisation that she is out of her depth. Her decisions as leader are not geared towards big wins but ensuring her survival. This tactic has helped her limp to the temporary sanctuary of the parliamentary summer recess. Her colleagues and party donors will head off on holiday but few expect anything to have improved by the time they return. But she is running out of time. In November her immunity from a no-confidence vote end. Most observers think a contest will follow without too much delay. When it comes, the woman facing the challenge will be almost unrecognisable from the one who entranced the Tories in 2020.
After John Major unexpectedly emerged from the rubble of November 1990 to replace Margaret Thatcher, an astonished Enoch Powell told the journalist Geoffrey Wheatcroft: 'I simply find myself asking, 'Does he really exist?'' How, Powell asked, did someone so mediocre rise to power? Why is British politics today governed by mediocrities, even as its problems grow larger and more daunting? Nine difficult months after she became leader, you could apply Powell's question to Badenoch: did she ever really exist?
The Kemi Badenoch who first beguiled the Conservative Party can be traced back to the pivotal general election of 2005. The campaign also marked the Australian election guru Lynton Crosby's debut in UK politics, and, not uncoincidentally, the first time in many years that immigration was a major issue, with Tory posters asking voters: 'Are you thinking what we're thinking?'
The Tory leader at the time was Michael Howard, whose plan was to keep the defeat respectable, then step down. His ambition was not for himself but for his advisers, a group of younger centre-right, Eurosceptic and socially liberal Tories led by David Cameron and George Osborne. The plan came to fruition with the election of Cameron as leader in December that year. The 'modernisers' had taken control of the party.
Twenty years on, it is hard to grasp just how culturally alien the Tory party had become in 2005: the subject of contempt and ridicule among those under 50. Comedians competed to invent satirical characters that embodied Tory ghastliness. It was David Walliams and Matt Lucas who promoted the most grotesque Tory stereotype of all: Maggie Blackamoor, a character played by Walliams in Little Britain. A racist, homophobic, pearl-wearing member of the Women's Institute, Blackamoor produced a firehose of vomit whenever she met a gay person or anyone who wasn't white.
When Cameron became leader in December 2005 his purpose was clear: to re-establish the connection between his party and the country. If Blair had paid tribute to Thatcher, Cameron would pay tribute to Blair. Successful, professional and ethnically diverse men and women would replace dandruffed reactionaries as the face of Conservatism. The modernisation process would give a leg up to Liz Truss, Sayeeda Warsi and Priti Patel. The surface of the Conservative Party changed. But whether this change was anything more than cosmetic was irrelevant. 'Superficiality was the point,' as one leading moderniser told me. The Tories did not want to change their fundamental beliefs – small state, low tax, free-trading Euroscepticism – but the party needed a better way to package (and so defang) its ideology.
Until 2005, Blair's Britain had not been particularly kind to Kemi Adegoke. Having grown up in Nigeria, she arrived in Britain in 1996. She attended a further education college, eventually studying computer systems engineering at the University of Sussex. Adegoke found that she was classed, in her words, as 'black' in Britain and placed within a 'black culture I didn't recognise'. In Nigeria, her family were upper middle-class, ethnically Yoruba and, until the country began to slide towards military dictatorship in the mid-1980s, wealthy. For most of Badenoch's youth 'the family were doing well by Nigerian standards', her distant cousin, Feyi Fawehinmi, told me. He emphasised that by the time the Adegokes sent Kemi to Britain in 1996, as the Nigerian economy tanked, the family had suffered a significant loss in status.
Her status declined further in Britain. In her telling, teachers expected little from her because she was black – 'the soft bigotry of low expectations' as she later condemned them. She was encouraged not to apply to Oxford.
At the University of Sussex, as she later told an interviewer, she was 'surrounded by stupid, lefty white kids who didn't know what they were talking about'. Nobody treated her with the deference she had enjoyed as a child. Her father was a clubbable member of the Yoruba elite: a member of the Ibadan Grammar School Old Boys Association and the Lagos Lawn Tennis Club. At his memorial service in Nigeria in February 2022 a tearful Badenoch summed up his life: 'He liked everything to be done properly.' He was conservative and patriotic; the inspiration of Badenoch's life whom she sought to follow. In the eulogy Badenoch gave to her father the respect is clear: 'He knew I cared about Nigeria, and that I still love this country as much as I love the UK.'
Kemi Adegoke's experience was made all the harder because she had a certain idea of Britain. She read Enid Blyton novels as a child. Blyton's stories are heady patriotic fantasies that portray an unchanging England of rock cakes and cucumber sandwiches. Blytonland, if it ever existed, was already crumbling when Adegoke imaginatively entered it in the Eighties. By 2005 it had all but disappeared.
Badenoch's experience of Britain was so dispiriting she toyed with a return to Nigeria. Through her mother, Badenoch is related to Yemi Osinbajo, who was vice-president of Nigeria between 2015 and 2023. In 2005 Osinbajo was the attorney general in the Lagos state government. Her friend Taiwo Togun told the Times last year that Adegoke met a Nigerian political figure in 2005 but they belittled her and said something about how 'she would never make it'. And so she returned to Britain, lost.
Badenoch described her state of mind in 2005 to Jordan Peterson on his podcast in February. 'I had done everything I was supposed to do,' she told the Canadian. She had her A-levels, her degree, and a job at a technology company. 'I still wasn't happy. I didn't know what I was looking for.' She was suffering what she called 'a quarter-life crisis'.
It was at this point that Kemi Adegoke – a lonely computer engineer in south London – joined the Conservative Party and found what she was looking for. Within a few months she was attending her first event, a Christmas party in London organised by the Tories' youth wing. She chatted to the future MP Conor Burns who found her 'strikingly interesting'. Adegoke was British but foreign. She was a product of empire who reminded older Tories, at a subliminal level, what Britain used to be. She had good manners. She didn't swear. She enunciated. She venerated traditions and her elders.
The next day Burns emailed Francis Maude, the modernising party chairman, telling him to get in touch with Adegoke as well as get her on to the candidates list because 'she's the future of the party'. Maude soon met Adegoke and shuttled her into one of the policy commissions set up by Cameron. Her 'quarter-life crisis' was over.
Every need the 25-year-old Adegoke had would be fulfilled by the party. It was the only British institution that seemed to recognise her; it acted almost like a second family while her own were in Nigeria (Fawehinmi said that she had tried several times to bring her parents to Britain without success). Through the party she also met Hamish Badenoch, whom she would go on to marry and have three children with. The party gave her status: as a parliamentary candidate in Dulwich in 2010; as a member of the London Assembly in 2015; and, in a profoundly vindicating moment for the girl who had come from Lagos 20 years earlier, as the newly elected member of parliament for Saffron Walden in 2017. Within two years she was a minister.
The Conservatives lived up to Badenoch's Blytonland idea of Britain when the rest of the country did not. It was still old-fashioned and hierarchical. These were her tribe: like her father they wanted things to be 'done properly'. The Conservative Party allowed her to transform from outsider to insider and to wield the power her father never achieved in his own career in Nigeria. Politics let her be a somebody in a country where many immigrants are ignored, looked down upon or even despised. The Conservative Party was the means of her ascent. The modernisers who met Adegoke saw in her the spirit of the times, the essence of 2005. As one of them told me: 'She was new Britain.'
On 19 July 2017 the newly elected MP entered the House of Commons to make her maiden speech, which has formed the basis for her Toryism ever since. Less a speech than a personal story, Badenoch described doing her homework by candlelight in Nigeria 'and fetching water in heavy, rusty buckets from a borehole a mile away, because the nationalised water company could not get water out of the taps'.
She praised Britain for its 'opportunity' and its 'freedoms'. Looking to Britain as an 'African girl' she saw it as 'a beacon, a shining light, a promise of a better life'. Brexit was 'the greatest ever vote of confidence' – a phrase that also appeared in the Spectator's leading article on 2 July 2016 – in what she called 'the project of the United Kingdom'. Brexit, a vote instigated by opposition to large-scale immigration, was reinterpreted by Badenoch as a 'vision of global Britain'.
Here was 'Badenochism', less an ideology than an idea of Britain wrapped up in her own migrant story. Badenoch's Britain is a 'project' in which anyone can thrive – as long as they are as self-reliant, strong, brave, decisive and formidable as Badenoch. Even as she plays classic Tory notes – paraphrasing Burke and praising Thatcher – her self-presentation is pleasingly subversive to conservative ears. She is a black woman – 'I am often inexplicably confused with a member of the Labour Party' – and therefore not supposed to be right wing. She could say things other Tories feared to say out loud.
A year before entering parliament, Badenoch had worked briefly for the Spectator. Ex-colleagues have noted the strange effect Badenoch had on older white men, including the magazine's then editor, Fraser Nelson. 'Fraser was admirable in his desire to help the disadvantaged, and her story was tailor-made for him,' one said.
They allege that Badenoch's deeply personal maiden speech was in part written by Nelson, her old boss. Did he fancy himself as kingmaker? 'It was exciting to create the next leader of the Conservative Party,' one old long-term former colleague of Nelson's said.(Nelson did not respond to a request for comment. Badenoch's team said this was 'untrue'.)
After becoming minister for equalities in February 2020 Badenoch used the role to pick fights with woke campaigners detested by Tory grandees and grassroots alike, such as the trans lobby. She was demonstrating her ideological credentials while also showcasing her abilities as a street fighter, a useful skill inside the kill-or-be-killed prison yard that Tory politics was becoming.
By the time that Boris Johnson's political career and government imploded in June 2022, Badenoch had done enough to allow her to make her most audacious move yet: to stand for the Tory leadership and, by extension, become prime minister.
Some in her circle were nervous. They feared this bid from a relative newcomer might appear hubristic and backfire. But Badenoch was fortified by the enthusiastic backing of the latest older white man in her life: Michael Gove. Unsuccessful in his own bids for the leadership, Gove brought experience to the campaign as well as a contacts book stuffed with political and media heavyweights.
Her outsider bid was launched at Policy Exchange on 12 July 2022 – a speech reportedly delayed because Badenoch ordered an aide to Deliveroo her a McDonald's breakfast before she addressed the assembled politicians and journalists. At a televised debate five days later, Badenoch declared herself 'the candidate for the future'. MPs, party members and journalists agreed that she was the liveliest of the contenders. Polling showed that if she made it into the final two, she would probably win the members' vote.
By the time Badenoch was eliminated from the contest she had achieved her real objectives: leapfrogging her contemporaries into the Tory front rank, ensuring a cabinet job and giving herself an excellent prospect of becoming leader of the opposition in the event of a general election defeat.
The scale of the Conservative Party's 2024 loss was, however, so great that it nearly cost Badenoch her seat. In 2019, she won re-election in Saffron Walden with a majority of 27,594 – 63 per cent of the vote. It was one of the safest seats in the country. In 2024, in the renamed but largely unchanged seat of North West Essex, her majority was cut to 2,610 – 35.6 per cent. Nationally the median age of a Conservative voter was 63.
Badenoch's close call went largely unnoticed amid the carnage. Those who spoke to her in the aftermath found her in a state of shock. It seems likely that her confidence had been dented by the realisation that the party she aspired to lead stood on the edge of the abyss and that her own personal redoubt, which she had counted on as a safe base, was as precarious as any remaining piece of Tory territory.
At the first meeting of the shadow cabinet in the aftermath of the election defeat, Badenoch launched a broadside about Rishi Sunak that was later leaked to the Times. She called Craig Williams, Sunak's parliamentary private secretary, a 'buffoon', and pointed to Sunak's disastrous gaffe over 'D-Day' as the source of the Tories' downfall. The next day Badenoch posted on X: 'It's a shame our discussions in the shadow cabinet were leaked yesterday.' It was the first act of her leadership campaign. Badenoch's comments to the shadow cabinet that day may not have been off-the-cuff remarks. A private notebook from the £1,240-per-night Dorchester Hotel seen by the New Statesman – filled with handwriting that seems to match Badenoch's own – contains a scribbled mind map that outlines the points she made at that shadow cabinet meeting, from the word 'buffoon' to a note: 'Unforced Errors — D-Day'. The words mirrored her criticism of Sunak's gaffe, which was later leaked to the Times. The notebook also contains affirmations about public speaking linked to the heading 'Personal Improvement': 'Breathe, breathe, breathe'; 'Pause, Pause, Pause'; 'You are a serious person who does big things'; 'Pivot to attacking Labour when uncomfortable'; 'Remember you are the standard bearer of the right'; 'Don't let people think you are easily wound up'.
Badenoch's team says that 'Kemi does not believe she has lost her notebook'.
Despite such leaks – and the scale of the defeat the Conservatives had suffered – the reality is that the Tories were almost immediately forgotten as Keir Starmer's new government got off to the worst possible start, enjoying no honeymoon amid the Southport riots, Waheed Alli freebie scandals, winter fuel payment outrage, and Sue Gray soap opera.
This unexpected turn of events may explain why the Conservatives held a buoyant leadership contest in which the deeper problems facing the party were largely ignored. Having made it through to the final round with the support of less than a third of the party's remaining MPs, she appealed to the membership with her classic pitch: 'I am Labour's worst nightmare – they can't paint me as prejudiced.' Two months later, she discovered it was not Labour's opinion of her that mattered, but the views of those to her right. She would not be the 'standard bearer of the right' for long.
Essex girl: Badenoch campaigning in her Saffron Walden constituency. Photo by Brian Harris /Alamy Live News
Kemi Badenoch was an answer to a question posed by the modernisers in 2005: how can we make the Conservative Party a successful force in modern Britain? Badenoch rode the wave created by attempts to solve this question. But both the question and the answer have turned out to be fantasies. Modern conservatives are no longer at ease with diversity. The modern Conservative Party is not even at ease with itself – or its leader.
Where Badenoch was once the darling of the Tory right, to many on this wing of British politics she now seems passé, if not complicit with the worst instincts of modernisation. In today's harder-edged Britain, the subjects she obsesses about appear small – even quaint. The new issues dominating public life are deep, raw, dangerous: migration, ethnicity, identity, belonging and economic failure. On each, she struggles to offer a coherent vision.
Badenoch remains fixated on 'cultural issues'. During an 'in conversation' event with Charles Moore at Policy Exchange on 23 June, billed as the moment she would at last unveil an economic programme, Badenoch kept drifting away from Moore's questions. Asked how she would 'dramatise' economics as Mrs Thatcher once did, Badenoch began to talk about 'where being a woman' had an impact on her views, the 'extraordinary' recent change to abortion laws, and the 'sterilised' transgender 'kids' to whom she had spoken in her office. Moore, a long-time supporter, didn't seem to notice that an economic programme was not forthcoming. The material issues that now formed the basis of political debate – housing, crime, migration, inflation – had passed Badenoch by. She has been constantly outflanked by Jenrick from the right on many of them.
Some of Badenoch's most trenchant critics are part of what has become known as the online right, a wild and influential hinterland of Substacks, podcasts and YouTube channels in which terms like 'remigration' and 'revolution' are common parlance.
It is in this ungoverned space that hostility to Badenoch takes on a distinctly racialised tinge. Her Nigerian heritage – once thought by Tory modernisers to be a strength – is now seen by young right-wing types as a weakness, especially as her party struggles to keep up with Reform on illegal immigration and asylum. Their criticisms are beginning to be echoed by older right-wingers.
More dangerous still to Badenoch's prospects is a very specific charge. It is said that she is failing to press home political attacks on the small-boats crisis because she is worried it will invite scrutiny of the way her parents got her citizenship. The accusation that Badenoch is an 'anchor baby', that her parents took advantage of British citizenship laws in the early 1980s to get their daughter a passport, has circulated for some time on the fringes of Tory and media circles, and been denied in the past by Badenoch. 'It's the elephant in the room,' said one source regarding the way Badenoch got her British citizenship.
They compared Badenoch's parents, in crude terms, to small-boat migrants crossing the Channel. Listening to them attack Badenoch in private, it becomes clear that for some Conservatives Badenoch is a proxy for their fears about migration – and worse. There is a clear strain of racism in these remarks. They cringe when she asserts that her ascent from Nigeria to Tory leadership is proof that Britain still works. Worse, they find it offensive. Britain doesn't work. That's the problem.
'While the idea of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch was always deeply seductive to a certain kind of Tory,' the former academic and Reform mouthpiece Matt Goodwin wrote in February, unsubtly implying that Badenoch is not British by using her full name, 'The idea of Kemi Badenoch is definitely not igniting the same reaction out there in the wider country.' The optimism that marked an older generation of Conservatives like Fraser Nelson and boosterish Tory leaders like Johnson has given way in certain parts of the right to an astral pessimism about Britain, its demographics and its future. There is a deep pathos to Badenoch's slow-motion retreat into herself, refusing to face the reality of her position. 'She tries to keep everyone together and they stab her in the back,' said her former staffer. 'You think you belong. You think you are attached to this institution. But it's full of backstabbers.' According to the former staffer, Badenoch does not think the criticism directed at her is racist. After all, if the Conservative Party was racist, how could she have ended up leading it?
In February, Nelson, now a columnist at the Times, where he continues to boost Badenoch, appeared on the Triggernometry podcast. Nelson had recently been fighting with the online right on X over mass migration. These younger Conservatives did not like Badenoch. Nelson's sunny conservatism was no longer in vogue. Pushed on migration by the podcast's co-host Konstantin Kisin, Nelson began to talk about 'the concept of Britishness and the project of the United Kingdom'. What is the concept of Britishness, asked Kisin. 'Britain as a country is the cradle of opportunity… it's a place recognised the world over… where you can make whatever you want of your life.' Nelson put forward the idea that outsiders 'like Kemi Badenoch' are better at describing Britain than people born in the country: 'In Kemi's maiden speech she was saying as an African girl she looked to Britain as a shining beacon on a hill, where you could make whatever you wanted of your talents.' It was the latest of several references Nelson has made to the speech since 2017. The idea of Britain as a project, the notion that Britain could only be seen clearly by those who chose to move to the country, that Britain was a 'beacon' or a 'light': Nelson's language was unmistakably similar to Badenoch's speech.
'Kemi is simultaneously Britain's greatest critic and greatest beneficiary of identity politics,' a prominent backbencher told me. She rode the modernisation wave that began to wash over the Tories 20 years ago to the top of the party. 'Francis [Maude] sees her as the ultimate achievement of that period of modernisation,' they said. 'But that model was superficial.' The New Right thinks the modernisers got everything backwards. They gave in to the superficiality of politics in the Noughties, while ignoring the real, structural legacies of Blair's Britain: immigration, the European Convention on Human Rights and, as they see it, the capture of institutions by 'woke' enemies of the Conservative Party. Badenoch was the final offering of modernisation – just as its intellectual underpinnings had collapsed. The result, Badenoch's critics argue, is an anachronism. Her team pinned male and female signs to gender-neutral toilets in the offices where she launched her first leadership campaign in 2022. Three years on, Dominic Cummings and smaller influencers talk openly of a coming civil war fought on ethnic lines.
PMQs is where the story Badenoch told about herself has disintegrated most clearly. She has not been a street fighter. Graham Davies, her former performance coach, is aghast at the quality of the clashes between Starmer and Badenoch. After explaining that CCHQ no longer had enough money to pay for his services, Davies said that when it comes to PMQs she 'doesn't do the process, doesn't do the practice and doesn't like it'. He thought it showed. (Badenoch left a glowing review on his website: 'I did everything you said. You are the best presentation coach EVER! So many things you suggested were complimented on. Amazing work you did on me.') His worries about Badenoch stretched beyond PMQs. Davies, who first met Badenoch in 2017, said that she was no longer the same person. When they worked again on her leadership campaign in 2024, he realised that government had changed her. She seemed to have less energy. She was less 'bouncy' than before.
Badenoch knows it's going wrong. Ahead of the local elections on 1 May, there were briefings to prepare the ground for what was expected to be a rough day for the Conservative Party. (Her team denies this.) 'They put out there that they expected to lose 400 councillors,' said a source, 'and they ended up losing 700. The expectation management was way off.' The Tories lost 16 councils.
One prominent backbencher said that Tory MPs spent a lot of time inside a 'fever dream… lazily speculating' about whether Farage might save them by dying before the next election. Burghart has been overheard in the Palace of Westminster wondering whether an 'exogenous event' might save his party. No one I spoke to believed she would lead the party into the next election.
Badenoch loves the party, but it no longer loves her. The briefings against her question her Britishness: they pick up on her habit of drinking warm Coke Zeroes, putting four sugars in her tea, buttering every item on her English breakfasts (apart from toast), condemning sandwiches as 'not real food'. In their view, they are small but telling indicators that she does not belong in Britain. 'The disloyalty is astonishing,' said a former staffer.
But her failure, ultimately, is one of competence. She has not improved over time because she cannot accept that she is ever wrong. 'I never have gaffes,' she said once, in a comment destined to haunt her. 'I never have to clarify, because I think very carefully about what I say.' The clip has been resurrected several times by members of Reform as they have moved past the Tories to become the unofficial opposition to Labour.
The agitation against Badenoch has calmed in past weeks as the parliamentary recess has neared. In her late July reshuffle James Cleverly, despised by some in Badenoch's orbit for what they see as pusillanimous behaviour since the leadership contest, was given top billing in the shadow cabinet. Modernisation is coming full circle: Maude will now advise the leader of the opposition. Lee Rowley, Badenoch's closest confidant, left her office. She will survive her first year as leader.
No street fighter: Badenoch has been criticised for her meek attitude at PMQs. Photo: House of Commons/Handout via Reuters
On the inside, few believe any of it matters. There is no 'exogenous event' on the horizon. 'Kemi OBLITERATES Starmer…' 'Kemi EXPOSES Starmer…' scream the captions on low-view videos on the Conservative Party's YouTube channel. Badenoch is doing the minimum against Labour and being rewarded with third place in the polls. The most organised elements of her party have drifted away from her. 'People have moved to Jenrick,' admitted the former Badenoch staffer. 'The group of people uninterested in ideology moves like a weird blob. The blob finds a host, eats them alive, moves on.' Gove visited Jenrick's country home over the Easter holidays. The core of her support in the shadow cabinet, said the prominent backbencher, are 'careerists', less committed to a cause than their own advancement: '[Careerists] don't tend to die in a ditch do they?'
Other careerists, such as the former party chairman Jake Berry, have decided to join Reform. The former Remainer has discovered a previously hidden devotion to Farage. Berry is a straw, bending tellingly in the wind. Can Maude reverse the long-term decline of the Conservative Party? 'He will brilliantly implement a totally doomed plan,' said the adviser. The polls won't change and nor will the hatred the country feels for the Tory party unless it changes – and not just superficially. There is no plan to deal with this. No plan to deal with further defections to Reform. No plan now, other than one half-formed, regrettable, but rather necessary thought, scratching at the back of the minds of so many Tories: to relieve Kemi Badenoch of the leadership. To go ever further right. To get angrier. To modernise. 'New Britain' is not what it was supposed to be.
[See more: Inside Robert Jenrick's New Right revolution]
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