Soon, Sir Keir Starmer will be put out of his misery. I mean by this his apparent inability to recall that he is the Prime Minister when he stands across the despatch box against Rishi Sunak every Wednesday. Last week, once again, he referred to the Leader of the Opposition as ‘the Prime Minister’.
But now Conservative Party members are – finally – voting on who they want to replace Sunak, and next month either Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will be the opponent facing Sir Keir at Prime Minister’s Questions. Perhaps this will bring an end to the actual PM’s confusion as to what his role is.
Although, in a way, Robert Jenrick seems to labour under a similar misunderstanding. At the solitary TV debate against Badenoch, last week, he repeatedly urged that the Conservative Party ‘delivers on migration’ and said he would achieve this by pulling the country out of the European Court of Human Rights and by imposing ‘a cap on migration’.
But even if you think voters would believe, now, in any Conservative promise of an (unspecified) cap on migration, you can ‘deliver’ nothing in opposition. And there are probably at least four years to go until the Conservative Party has the chance of returning to power, following the next General Election: its policies for government will need working out slowly and carefully.
Robert Jenrick could be the person replacing former prime minister Rishi Sunak as leader of the Conservative Party next month
In that light, Badenoch’s repeated stress on the point that she is running to be ‘the Leader of the Opposition’ is more realistic. Also, it emphasises the fact that she would, with her attested combative skills at the despatch box – ask Angela Rayner, whom she has remorselessly pulled apart – be a weekly nightmare for Starmer at PMQs.
True, the value of such parliamentary performances is more in raising the morale of the Opposition than in inspiring the country as a whole: William Hague regularly bested Tony Blair at PMQs between 1997 and 2001 but a fat lot of good that did the Conservatives in terms of turning the tide of national opinion.
Badenoch, however, has a most unusual ability to hold the public’s attention. To use a much-overworked term, she has charisma. Although she is petite, she can fill a room, or a hall, with her presence. It is no criticism of Robert Jenrick, the more diligent of the two campaigners, that he cannot do the same: this is rare in politics.
The most important reason for this attribute, I believe, is Badenoch’s passion. Far too many politicians today are driven by focus groups rather than their own inner convictions. Badenoch is not like that at all. She often quotes Thomas Stowell (the black American political philosopher she reveres): ‘When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.’
At times this attitude has certainly not helped Badenoch, at least within her own party. Last year, as Business and Trade Secretary, she was withering in her remarks to Conservative members of the Commons European Scrutiny Committee, who were disappointed that she had not created more of a ‘bonfire’ of EU regulations.
In front of the Parliamentary TV cameras she accused one of the Conservatives, David Jones, of leaking their ‘private and confidential meetings’. Then she humiliated another Tory MP, Richard Drax, who said he feared ‘this bonfire won’t take place’, by snapping back, memorably: ‘I’m not an arsonist. I’m a Conservative.’
Also in the race for Conservative leadership is former secretary of state for business and trade Kemi Badenoch
The Conservative Party needs to escape from its fixation with finding ‘the next Margaret Thatcher’ – a futile mission that has led them into great misjudgment, writes Dominic Lawson
With all her talent and genuine record of achievement in Government (especially in reversing the tide of ‘gender self-identification’) not to mention her undoubted popularity among party activists, Badenoch should have walked the parliamentary stage of the leadership contest. Yet it was far from clear that she would end up in the top two to go through to the final selection by members, and this was almost certainly because she had made enemies unnecessarily.
When I mentioned this to some of her older supporters in the parliamentary party, they said something along the lines of: ‘Oh, that’s just like Margaret Thatcher, she used to speak her mind, too, and didn’t care what anyone thought about her.’ But I don’t think that’s quite right: or at least Mrs Thatcher tended to limit her intimate brutality to those at the highest level in Cabinet. Anyway, the Conservative Party needs to escape from its fixation with finding ‘the next Margaret Thatcher’ – a futile mission that has led them into great misjudgment.
They thought Theresa May was The One, not least after Kenneth Clarke was recorded telling a colleague during her leadership campaign: ‘Theresa is a bloody difficult woman, but you and I worked with Margaret Thatcher.’ Yet mere stubbornness is not a political virtue.
Then there was Liz Truss, whose tax-cutting fervour was, likewise, seen by many who should have known better, as a return to the Thatcher golden age. Yet, as my father Nigel Lawson – who actually was Thatcher’s Chancellor – pointed out when warning the party not to vote for Truss, his radical tax cutting budgets in the late 1980s were only made possible by earlier bringing the public debt under control. Truss was in fact the opposite of the risk-averse, fiscally conservative Iron Lady.
In this sense, those choosing the Conservative leader have been rather like the England cricket selectors in the period after Ian Botham retired. They were constantly trying to find ‘the next Botham’ by selecting a series of all-rounders who were not up to it – among them Derek Pringle, David Capel and Chris Lewis.
Funnily enough, the time span is the same: Thatcher was Conservative leader for 15 years from 1975 to 1990, while Botham’s Test match career was from 1977 to 1992.
And though it may not seem so to many of the elderly members of the Conservative Party, this is now long ago. For them it is a vivid memory, but for the millions of younger voters the party has lost and without whom they can never regain power, it is meaningless.
Kemi Badenoch is not and could not be ‘the new Margaret Thatcher’. She is her own woman, with her own unique style. But I believe she does have the attributes to win back those younger voters. (At the last election the age at which electors became more likely to back the Conservatives rather than Labour was 63: a portent of political extinction.)
Above all, Badenoch is an optimist, and an optimist about this country, which she loves with a fierce passion. As her erstwhile colleague at the Spectator magazine, Fraser Nelson, records:
‘She’d often be puzzled as to why so many British people had a low opinion of Britain. She thought she’d moved to the greatest country in the world and couldn’t work out why everyone didn’t see it that way.’
Or as Kemi herself said to me: ‘People seek inspiration, and we must provide it.’ Will she do that? One thing has become evident over the past few months: Sir Keir Starmer certainly can’t. There is a gap in the market, and – I hope – Kemi Badenoch can fill it.
