Kemi Badenoch has recently marked her first anniversary as leader, and much of the commentary (to the extent that the Tories manage to garner any commentary) has focused on one thing: the fact that she can now be formally challenged for the role.
The significance of this milestone should not, however, be overstated. Unlike the Labour party, the Conservatives do not really have an internal regime governed by rigid rules. The one-year grace period for a new leader is simply a rule adopted by the 1922 Committee of backbench MPs, and they could dispose of it simply by changing their minds.
In truth, Badenoch’s leadership is in a sort of twilight zone. Whatever glow surrounded her early days as leader has long since faded, dimmed by the slide in the polls that began immediately upon the conclusion of last year’s leadership contest and extinguished completely by the rout at the local elections in May.
A good party conference in Manchester has done little to change this trajectory. It certainly staved off any immediate panic, but it didn’t tell the Tories anything they didn’t know already – to wit, that Badenoch can use the spotlight to good effect when events point it at her.
The much more important question was whether she had the ability or the appetite to win the spotlight in the modern media’s fiercely competitive attention economy, and this she has so far failed to do. A year ago, this looked like a basic misjudgment – that the party could afford to take its time with five years until the next election – but nor has she been able to pick up any momentum from conference, with the Tories falling back off the media’s radar during October.
All of this is reflected in the polls, which tell a story that would make life difficult for any leader. After last year’s general election the Conservatives gained on Labour until November, then went into an immediate slide. Reform UK overtook the Tories’ average polling in January, and a couple of months later there was a much sharper collapse as Nigel Farage’s party picked up lots of Tory switchers.
Badenoch has since stabilised her polling. But it has plateaued only at the same level at which the Conservatives lost two-thirds of all the seats they were defending in the most recent local elections, and that is a full seven points down from the position she inherited last November.
In light of all that, and the modern Tory party’s penchant for regicide, it is perhaps surprising that her leadership appears as stable as it does. But one by one, the buttresses that have propped it up are starting to crack.
First, there was the perfectly fair argument that any new leader needed time to make their mark; her first anniversary probably signifies the expiry date of that one. Second was the concern that the party really needed to stop disposing of leaders quite so quickly. But it is far less momentous to replace a leader of the opposition than a prime minister, and this concern is likewise losing its potency.
Perhaps the most important one remaining, at least for the critical MPs who make up the swing votes, is the want of an alternative. Badenoch secured the leadership in part by adroitly positioning herself to MPs as “not Robert Jenrick”, and to those MPs that remains the core of her appeal.
But even that is losing its force. The problem is that while “not Robert Jenrick” was a majority proposition, it was also a fundamentally negative one. By sticking to bromides about Tory “values” and refusing to offer her own diagnosis of what went wrong between 2010 and 2024, Badenoch assembled a coalition that doesn’t agree on anything.
She’s now in a vice: every move she makes towards Jenrick’s policy positions, such as on the European convention on human rights, reduces the case for these MPs to stand by her. But neither they nor she has an alternative case to make. What was once said of the Labour right in the 1970s is equally true of today’s Tory centrists: “They had principles, and they had preferences, but they had no ideas.”
Unhappily for Badenoch, the main buttress to her leadership today is the looming shadow of next year’s local elections. On current polling they would be just as brutal as this year’s, and risk gutting the party’s representation not just in another swath of English local government, but in the Scottish and Welsh parliaments too.
The basic political calculation of the overwhelming majority of those Conservatives who have despaired of her leadership is simple: that it is better for them if Badenoch owns those elections. The sand in the timer runs out in May.
Henry Hill is deputy editor of ConservativeHome
