What Kemi Badenoch gets wrong about opposition strategy

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Good morning. Kemi Badenoch delivered the first major speech of her leadership yesterday, in which she said that the last Conservative government had “got it wrong”.

The speech was deliberately timed to come at the same time as the net migration figures. This morning, ONS data shows net migration to the UK has provisionally fallen by 20 per cent in the year to June 2024, while the figure for 2023 has been updated to 906,000 — a record annual total.

Badenoch’s theory behind doing this speech was the same as the theory behind doing her first PMQs on Donald Trump: it increases the likelihood that what she has to say will be written up in the papers and more importantly that it will make the news bulletins. That’s all very well, but it also comes at the cost of introducing her to the public badly.

One challenge for any opposition party is that there is always a reason you are in opposition. If you don’t acknowledge that reason, it is difficult for you to return to power. Go too far the other way, however, and your leadership becomes a prolonged exercise in telling people that your last government was awful — a bad way to try to win power.

Now, even if you get those things wrong, you might get lucky. A global economic shock or some kind of localised scandal might mean you win by default. In 1970, Labour responded to its electoral defeat by moving sharply to the left, but returned to office in 1974 anyway because Ted Heath’s Tory government underperformed and was undermined by global economic headwinds.

Although it is early days and she could in theory improve, so far, Badenoch’s leadership is one that might get lucky, rather than one which shows any signs of being able to win the next election proactively. I reflect on why that is the case and her first big announcement below.

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Adapt to win

How is Kemi Badenoch’s leadership going? Not, I would say, all that well.

Regular readers can join the chorus with me at this point: I prefer to use Ipsos data because it is the UK’s oldest pollster and that makes it easier to draw meaningful historical comparisons. And the meaningful historical comparison is that Badenoch’s underlying numbers compare poorly to Keir Starmer’s at the start of his leadership, poorly to David Cameron’s at the start of his leadership, poorly to Tony Blair’s at the start of his leadership, and poorly to Margaret Thatcher’s midway through hers, when Ipsos’s polling starts. Indeed, the favourability rating is not much better than Starmer’s now.

In general, politicians become more unpopular over time, not less. While she is less disliked than Starmer, she is also less known. Past performance is no guarantee of future results, but if we look at Starmer’s standing today and that of Badenoch’s, this is a combination that spells “Labour government re-elected”.

I don’t think that is particularly surprising. Successful opposition parties tend to move closer to the position of the party that beat them. This year Keir Starmer’s Labour party shifted towards the ground that Boris Johnson occupied. (It helped that Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak both moved away from that ground.) David Cameron, upon becoming leader of the Conservatives, positioned the party closer to Tony Blair in 2005. (It helped Cameron’s election prospects, too, that Gordon Brown had been hit by the global financial crisis.)

Tony Blair moved Labour towards the 1992 Conservative party. (It helped, too, that John Major had been hit by the fallout from Black Wednesday and his fractious party.)

In the 1950s, Labour fought not one but two elections in which they were agnostic or outright hostile to ITV — which launched in 1955 as the first commercial channel — and the various manifestations of the affluent society. It eventually won when it moved away from those positions, just as in 1951, Tory leader Winston Churchill helped his party back into power by accepting much of what the Labour government did.

Now, yes, there are two big exceptions to that — both in the 1970s — when a series of external shocks hit both the Conservative government of 1970-74 and the Labour ones of 1974-79. That might happen again. But even then, both parties were running on a platform that shared one crucial thing: a recognition that the postwar model was running out of road and badly needed some form of change.

So I don’t think it is surprising that Badenoch, who has rhetorically positioned herself away from where Starmer won in 2024 and where Johnson won in 2019, is polling poorly.

She is right, of course, that the last government’s broken promises on immigration are part of why they lost trust. But the Conservatives did not oversee high levels of immigration because David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak were all intensely relaxed about it. They did it because we have an ageing population with a certain level of expectation about the quality of public services and the level of tax we will pay.

Essentially everything costs three things: people, money and energy. (I will discuss the last of those another time.) If you make promises on lowering immigration without being willing to cut your cloth accordingly on public services and tax, you can’t keep those pledges, nor will you be able to go into an election with a credible plan to keep them. If Badenoch wishes to propose a hard numerical cap on immigration, it’s likely that whichever number she pulls from the ether will be matched, or exceeded, by Nigel Farage.

Now, as we have just seen with Labour and tax, making impossible promises is not a barrier to victory if the cards fall your way — but it is a significant limitation on your ability to govern effectively. Badenoch is neither demonstrating how the Tory party has changed nor setting it up well should it return to government. While events may well propel her into Downing Street, she looks to be making many of the same mistakes both of unsuccessful oppositions past and of the defeated Conservative government.

Now try this

One of the highlights of the London Jazz Festival for me was seeing Nikki Iles’ orchestra at the Vortex (my local jazz club, as it happens). You can listen to her latest record Face to Face here. I think “Wild Oak” is my standout track.