But Kemi Badenoch, contender for the Tory leadership, hasn’t signed up to politics as usual. A revealing debate with Robert Jenrick on GB News suggests that maybe, just maybe, she’s introducing a more grown-up conversation to our politics.
Some years ago I read of an experiment where a team of boys competed with a team of girls as to who could finish a complicated task fastest. Once the starting gun had been fired, the boys rolled up their sleeves and got stuck in. The girls sat down and planned how they would tackle the problem. The girls won.
One experiment hardly establishes a gender divide. But I was reminded of this story watching the Conservative leadership debate on GB News between Robert Jenrick and Kemi Badenoch. Jenrick would surely lead the boys team. Full steam ahead with leaving the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) and setting a cap for immigration numbers. We can be sure of this because he told us so, a number of times. Curbing the numbers, deporting illegal immigrants within days, immigration was the theme he hammered home. And as leader, we could be assured Robert Jenrick was determined to meet these challenges.
Right from the off, Badenoch took a very different approach. ‘This leadership contest is not a test of who can make the biggest promises’, she said. ‘It is about character, it is about conviction. We are not in government any more, it doesn’t matter what our policies are right now, we cannot deliver them. We are in opposition so let’s use that time wisely’.
As she continued, we might have wondered if before the debate one of her team had found a draft copy of her opponent’s speech on a House of Commons photocopier. Except that she could pretty well guess what he would say. Jenrick’s speech was everything one could expect from a politician who commentators charge with shifting to the right.
Policies matter, as a Jenrick spokesperson pointed out after the debate. But the reality the Tories face, as Badenoch recognises, is no one will be interested in their policies for the next few years.
Her speech was not the kind of ‘blue-on-blue’ personal attack Central Office wanted leadership candidates to abjure. Badenoch only namechecked Jenrick once. But it was intensely personal in consistently undermining his simplistic, one-dimensional responses to the existential threat the Conservatives face.
Both candidates were asked what they thought their opponent’s main weakness was. Jenrick declined the invitation. Badenoch did not, responding that she thought ‘the ECHR argument is not the right one. I think that is the biggest weakness. I think that will divide our party, it will mean that the in-fighting and the squabbling will continue. We need to come to a consensus’.
She was open minded on the issue and pointed out there were positive aspects to the ECHR. In other words, it’s kind of complicated, Robert, and we should first weight up the trade-offs involved.
There was also a clear divergence on how to deal with another big vote loser: the factionalism and divisions with the Conservative Parliamentary party. Jenrick favoured giving the party a good talking to. ‘Let’s end the drama, let’s end the excuses, let’s deliver again for the people of this country’, he said.
His offer was to be a leader who would lead from the front, point the way ahead and who the loyal troops would rally behind and follow. Twice he said he wanted to be prime minister. There’s a lot to be said for ambition but his speech was more about him than the party.
Once again Badenoch response reflected a deeper understanding of the Tories’ existential plight. ‘I know so many of you are sick and tired of the infighting,’ she said. ‘It happens when you don’t get a consensus.’ She took an undecided position on leaving the ECHR because there was ‘no point in having policies without trust’. She said she wanted to build a ‘consensus’ – that word again – first, before setting out her policy position.
The GB News studio audience of Conservative members clearly preferred Badenoch’s pitch to Jenrick’s. Before the debate pollical hacks like me would have assumed a failure to commit to a robust policy on immigration would have exposed a candidate as weak and indecisive. But policy promises are a debased currency and have contributed significantly to disillusionment with democratic politics: a disillusionment that resulted in Labour winning just 34% of the vote at the General Election, the lowest vote of any party with a majority since the last war.
Conservative promises – and Labour’s more recent ones – seem to assume that government is a Farrari ready to zoom off and take them to the promised land. Instead ministers step into a clapped-out old banger that struggles to reach 30 mph, frequently breaks down and encounters road works ahead.
There’s a supermarket own label that invites us to ‘Taste the difference’ and you can certainly taste a difference with Kemi Badenoch. If you’ve ever wondered why our prime ministers spend so much time being filmed for TV news reports, here’s Kemi on the media.
‘I don’t just go on media for the sake of going on media. I go on media when I have something to say. That is how we run things.’
And here’s Kemi replying to a question about whether Brexit has been a success.
‘Some of it has been a success but some of it has not because we are far too scared to take advantage of the opportunities.
‘Signing trade deals, yes, cooperating with countries…. but also looking at how we can have smarter regulation… One of the reasons why Brexit has not been as much of a success as it should be is we didn’t start with a plan’.
Will Kemi Badenoch’s frank and fearless approach to the challenges we face as a society and a nation begin to change our political discourse? Will politicians become more grown-up, more honest, less bombastic? It’s not something one would put more than a fiver on, though the result of the Conservative leadership election may tell us something.
We should remember that the Tory membership voted for Liz Truss, who was not around as PM long enough to build trust and consensus, though it appears this was hardly her style. Conservatives cannot afford another bad choice.
Kemi would shine against plodding Sir Keir. She would also face the arch-populist, Nigel Farage. Although she would not invite him to join her party, she said Farage ‘speaks with clarity. He speaks with conviction’. A signal to Conservatives they need a leader with the same clarity and conviction. Kemi versus Nigel would be a debate worth buying tickets for.
Badenoch is risky. Perhaps at times too frank and fearless. But she doesn’t just represent the Tories’ best hope. She’s their only hope.
Brian Morris runs a media and communications training company.
