Kemi Badenoch is an unknown politician who the public do not trust, Britain’s top polling guru has said.
The Tory leader has been unable to halt the decline in support for her party, which collapsed over Partygate and Liz Truss’s premiership and has been falling ever since, Professor Sir John Curtice said.
In a damning assessment ahead of the Conservative Party conference in Manchester, Sir John said: “The Tories are now barely more popular with those that voted Brexit than they are with the people who voted Remain, despite being the party that delivered Brexit.”
He told the Daily Mirror: “Has Badenoch been able to deal with the challenge posed by [Nigel] Farage and Reform? No. Has she managed to make an impression on the public? No.
“Has she basically had to change tack? Yes, because originally her idea was ‘we’re stuffed, we have to wait for people to forget the last parliament, we’ll spend a couple of years having a consultation thinking up some policy, then only begin to pop up again in the second half of the parliament, by which stage we hope the government is unpopular’.”
He added: “In practice, she has discovered to her right is Reform, which is just eating into the party. We can debate how Labour and the Liberal Democrats are dealing with Reform, but it’s very difficult for the Tories to stand up and say ‘we believe in a diverse country, and we think Nigel Farage is a very nasty man’.”
Sir John urged Ms Badenoch to use her speech at the party’s gathering to introduce herself to the public, but warned it is too late for any hope of a comeback in time for May’s local elections.
“The underlying thing with her numbers is not that she’s not popular, it’s that nobody knows who she is,” he said.
He added: “There’s always been this remarkable mismatch between her longstanding levels of popularity among Conservative activists, and her low visibility among the wider public. She wasn’t that visible as a minister, [and] she’s not that visible as a leader of her position.”
And as Ms Badenoch pledges to pull Britain out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR) to crack down on small boats crossing the English Channel, Sir John said it would be hard to adopt a harder line on immigration than Reform.
He said the Tories will struggle to win the trust of voters having “failed to deliver on the issue” during 14 years in power.
His comments came after a YouGov poll on the eve of the Tory conference showed just 11 per cent of voters believe the party is ready for government.
Meanwhile just one in five voters believe Ms Badenoch has done well as Tory leader, while nearly half (45 per cent) think she has done badly.
A seat-level forecast by the pollster found that, were a general election held today, the party would fall from having 119 MPs to just 45, while Reform would be the largest party on 311.
