Badenoch: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced

Bookies’ favourite warns members there are no second chances if they make wrong leadership choice

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Gordon Rayner, Associate Editor, 15 October 2024


Kemi Badenoch has warned Tory members the Conservative party will cease to exist if they choose the wrong leader.

The shadow housing secretary said that “we have one chance to get this right”, telling members that the current leadership race is an “existential” moment for the party.

In an interview with The Telegraph, she said: “Assuming we can just do this [again] in 18 months’ time is not serious. There will be no second chance.”

Mrs Badenoch, the current bookies’ favourite to become leader of the Opposition next month, said she would be “Labour’s worst nightmare”, partly because she would nullify any attempts to portray Conservatives as prejudiced.

In a direct attack on her rival Robert Jenrick’s pledge to quit the European Convention on Human Rights and portray it as a Leave/Remain issue, she said: “Trying to recreate the referendum is not something people want to hear right now.”

Mrs Badenoch said accusations she is running scared of TV debates with Mr Jenrick are “hilarious”, pointing out that she is also accused of crossing the street to start a fight and “they can’t both be true”.

The leadership contender, 44, spoke to The Telegraph on the day that ballot papers were posted out to Conservative Party members, who will now choose between her and Mr Jenrick. The winner will be announced on Nov 2.

She voiced concern regarding conversations with colleagues who think that if they regret the choice of leader they can just hold another contest in 18 months or so.

She said: “If we get this wrong, there’s not going to be a party. There’s no second chance. We have one chance to get this right.

“This endless tossing out leaders as if they’re just disposable has been one of the things that has damaged the party brand.

“People want to see some stability and some certainty. This is not the time for more psychodrama. We need to get serious and I think members are very serious about wanting to pick a leader for the long term, and they are looking very closely at which candidate best represents their views.”

She added: “They want somebody who has conviction. They want somebody who has been consistent. They want someone who tells the truth and who champions and fights for conservative values. And I think that I’m the candidate who most represents what they are looking for.”

Mrs Badenoch said that for the party to hold another leadership election halfway through the current parliament would not only be a waste of time and money but would be “disrespectful to the country, to the members”.

The choice of leader comes at a time when the Conservatives face an “existential” threat because of the rise of Reform UK and the resurgence of the Liberal Democrats.

She said: “We are having our lunch eaten by everybody.

“If we lose a chunk of our party to the Lib Dems, they could become the opposition. So in the country, the Reform vote is critical for us to win back, but in Parliament the Lib Dems also pose a significant threat.”

Mrs Badenoch said the next leader needs to address the threat from both the Left and the Right and must be able to “represent the common ground”.

Worries about immigration are shared by Lib Dem voters as well as those who backed Reform and the Conservatives, she argued, as are the importance of family, personal responsibility and personal freedoms.

Mrs Badenoch said Reform UK, which is more popular than the Conservatives among under-35s, had attracted the youth vote because “young people like the new thing”, adding: “We have to be that new, exciting thing again. We have to be the ones who are offering hope.”

‘It’s about the mission’

If the bookmakers are right, Mrs Badenoch will be the fourth female leader of the Conservative Party and the first black leader of any mainstream party in the UK when the result of the leadership race is announced on Nov 2.

But Mrs Badenoch is focused on being “Labour’s worst nightmare” if she becomes leader of the Conservative Party.

The shadow housing secretary believes she knows Labour’s weak points better than Mr Jenrick and that her ethnicity will make it harder for Sir Keir Starmer to portray people on the Right as prejudiced.

As the Tory leadership race enters its final three weeks, Mrs Badenoch said it was an honour to be compared by some colleagues with Margaret Thatcher, but insisted: “I need to be my own person.”

She is anxious to get past personality politics and persuade the Conservative Party it needs a wholesale rethink of its plan to transform the country.

“I don’t want anyone to assume that this campaign is all about my personality,” she says. “It’s why my campaign is not called Kemi for leader. It’s called Renewal 2030. It’s about the mission.”

That mission is a return to traditional conservative values, which in her view have been eroding as successive Tory governments have given too much ground to the Left.

Asked to define conservatism, she says: “Conservatism, for me, is about personal responsibility, a belief in individuals, in families, to have more control and freedom over their lives, rather than the government making all of the decisions for them.

“There is a place for government, but government should do the things that only government can do very well, rather than getting involved in everything and doing everything badly.”

It is a message Mrs Badenoch has been taking round the country as she and Mr Jenrick continue an almost endless odyssey of constituency associations, talking to party members and fighting for every vote in a race that is shaping up to be much closer than others in recent memory.

As we speak, she is meeting members of South Northamptonshire Conservative Association, which was retained for the Tories by Sarah Bool at the general election after its previous MP, Dame Andrea Leadsom, stood down.

The venue for their event is the sprawling Whittlebury Park hotel and spa, which is within earshot of the Silverstone motor racing circuit. Golfers and well-heeled country types wander through its corridors, passing ladies in towelling robes fresh from their Balinese massages.

Mrs Badenoch has no time in her schedule for such relaxing pursuits as she is off to Nottinghamshire as soon as her event here is wrapped up.

Supporters of Mrs Badenoch argue only she can offer the sort of change that the Tories need to shake them out of their current torpor and that Mr Jenrick will be seen by the public, fairly or unfairly, as more of the same.

Will she be Labour’s worst nightmare?

“The team that I’m putting together will be Labour’s worst nightmare, not just me,” she says.

“I understand them better than they realise. I know where their weak points are. I know that they do not start with principles, or certainly, they don’t have the same principles that we do.

“You look at what they’ve done with VAT on private schools. It’s a tax on aspiration. They don’t believe in aspiration, we do.

“They assume that everyone in the country is like them, and that is not the case. You look at what happened on race, where they tried to paint the UK as a racist country, and a lot of people wanted just to just let them get away with it.

“I stood firm on that, and I also exposed a lot of their hypocrisy. They want to paint people on the Right as being prejudiced, and they know that with me there, they will be unable to make that case convincingly.”

She laughs at the fact Labour portrays itself as a meritocracy. “They’re still congratulating themselves for having the first female chancellor, pretending that this is the world’s greatest achievement when we’ve had three women [prime ministers] in our party, including one before Rachel Reeves was born.”

Mrs Badenoch, who is firmly on the Right of the party, has been compared by some of her colleagues with Mrs Thatcher – and even described as her natural heir.

“It’s the people who make the comparisons that are interesting,” she says.

“People who actually knew her. Rocco Forte, who is a great businessman. David Davis. People who knew her make that comparison.

“I think it would be presumptuous for me to make that comparison. She is an idol of mine, and I remember growing up when people would make derogatory statements about ‘women can’t do this, women can’t do that’. And you’d just say two words: Margaret Thatcher, and it would shut them up. And I would love to have that effect.

“If I could do what she did for this country, turning it around after the socialist nonsense which we had experienced, that would be amazing. It is an honour to be compared to her, but I would never make that comparison. And at the end of the day, I think I need to be my own person, so I admire her, but I am Kemi. I’m a different person.”

Mrs Badenoch, who was born in Wimbledon but grew up in Nigeria before returning to the UK aged 16, says her job if she becomes leader will be to restore trust in the Conservative Party, and to define what the party stands for.

She believes that the failings of the past 14 years include allowing a bloated university sector to grow out of all proportion to the economy’s need for graduates, and wants to significantly reduce the number of students and axe pointless degrees.

A 40-page pamphlet titled Conservatism in Crisis, to which she has written the foreword and which she says sets out the problems that the country needs to tackle, states that since 1990 the number of people graduating from university has risen from 77,000 a year to 750,000, while postgraduates have gone from 31,000 to 493,000 in the same period.

“It cannot be right that we are sending people to do degrees where they can’t get jobs,” she says. “They’re coming out with a lot of debt, and we then wonder why we don’t have people in work.”

She is aware that she could be accused of hypocrisy, having completed an undergraduate degree and a masters degree in engineering, but points out that she also undertook an apprenticeship before university, making her well qualified to make a comparison.

“I can’t remember three quarters of my engineering degree,” she says. “The apprenticeship I still remember, and that influences a lot of my thinking, the practical skills I got from that I use much more than a lot of the theory which I learnt.

“The number of graduate jobs that we have are not enough to sustain the number of people going to university.”

Mrs Badenoch says the rise of what might be termed the higher education blob feeds into other issues, such as immigration, because of the number of visas being granted to foreign students on whose cash universities increasingly rely, but also home ownership, as student debt is affecting young people’s ability to afford their own homes.

It is for this reason, she says, that Mr Jenrick’s pledge to leave the European Convention on Human Rights “isn’t radical enough” in and of itself. Instead, she says, a much wider rethink of the economy and the structures on which it is built is needed.

She says: “If we need to leave the ECHR we should do, but we’re not in government right now.

“I think a lot of people forget that we are out for five years. I want us to have a plan that’s going to work in five years time, not a plan that maybe we should have done last year.”

She adds: “I have demonstrated that I’m not playing catch up in showing people who I am. I’m not fattening the pig on market day. I have been working every day to champion conservative values.”

Mr Jenrick has grabbed headlines by saying he would make Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg party chairman if he became leader, and would bring back the likes of Penny Mordaunt, though Ms Mordaunt has suggested she would not want to work for him.

Mrs Badenoch says she would love to see many of the former MPs come back, but that offering jobs, especially publicly, is “disrespectful to the people who are in those jobs at the moment”. She says she is “not presumptuous about getting this [role]”.

Would she bring Boris Johnson back?

“I’m very much about the future,” she says diplomatically.

“He is a former MP. If there’s an association that thinks that he would be a great MP for them I think that he should be allowed to stand there. But I am not recruiting former prime ministers to say please come back. I’m trying to make sure that we are talking about the future and drawing a line under the last 14 years.”

Mrs Badenoch and Mr Jenrick will face each other in a TV debate on GB News later this month, but as things stand there will not be any other such events. Mr Jenrick says he will debate his rival “any place, any time” and has accused Mrs Badenoch of running scared, saying she is finding reasons not to do more TV debates.

She laughs when the subject is raised. “I’m not blocking any debates,” she says.

“This whole thing is hilarious. People say, ‘Kemi crosses the road to have a fight,’ and, ‘Oh, Kemi is running scared.’ They can’t both be true. It just feels like there’s a lot of mud being thrown at me, and I think people should ask why all the mud is being thrown in one direction.”