Five things Kemi Badenoch must do to win

Good morning from Birmingham. Ahead of Kemi Badenoch’s speech to Conservative Party conference, here are some thoughts on the broad things opposition leaders need to do to be successful.

Lessons in Kemistry

What should an opposition party do to improve its standing? The usual checklist is as follows:

1. Get a popular leader, or at least one who is less unpopular than their rivals.

2. Move towards the party that defeated you. There is usually a reason why voters picked it, which should give you a clue about what direction you need to move in.

3. Neutralise your areas of weakness. In our country, for the Tories that typically requires that they minimise fears that they will knacker public services; for Labour that generally requires it to minimise fears that it will spend like a drunk in a casino.

4. Convince voters that you are competent and that you’ve changed.

5. Form a viable programme for government.

Tony Blair and David Cameron are examples of opposition leaders who made the transition to government by pulling off all five.

Keir Starmer managed four but failed the fifth point on forming a viable programme for government, which is why his premiership got into trouble so quickly.

And Margaret Thatcher has an outsized grasp on the imagination of most UK political parties because she is the only opposition leader since the war to have managed to pull off all of the steps other than the second on moving towards the party that defeated you.

Whether it is a Labour or Conservative opposition, parties do not like having to move towards their opponent. So the usual failure mode of an opposition leader is to construct all sorts of narratives about why they are a Thatcher-like figure and why this is a 1979 moment where they win not by moving to the centre but by shifting away from it.

The paradox of the Conservatives under Badenoch is that they are succeeding on the first point on leader popularity. But they are consciously not moving towards the party that beat them in 2024; they are not, per the polls, neutralising their areas of weakness; and most voters do not think the party has changed.

(They are also very far from having a viable programme for government. But the election is three years away, so I don’t think that tells us all that much at this stage.)

A big part of why Badenoch is popular is that her House of Commons appearances have performed well on social media, most importantly on Facebook. Under Starmer, people responded positively to her confidence in attacking a government they came to intensely dislike.

This is a great asset — there is a reason why I put it first on the checklist! — not least because it gives Badenoch the political latitude to go about achieving the other four points. The big question for her in her speech today, and more broadly, is whether she is willing or able to do so.

Now try this

I had a lovely dinner last night at Blacklock, a small chain that has spread from London to Manchester and, crucially for our purposes, to Birmingham. Food, service and company were all exemplary.

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