An interesting speech full of hard truths? Kemi Badenoch is clearly rattled | Gaby Hinsliff

9 hours ago 1

Well, finally. Only eight years on from kneecapping the economy and crowing “you lost, get over it” at anyone impertinent enough to notice, a Conservative party leader has tacitly admitted the painfully obvious: Brexit was an act of wilful negligence by a government that dragged Britain out of its most important trading relationship “before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”. There wasn’t a considered Plan B, just a government frantically trying to catch itself up as it went along. And that’s only the start of it, Kemi Badenoch argued this week, in the first interesting thing the Conservative party has had to say to the nation since its bone-crushing defeat.

Successive Conservative governments dating back to David Cameron’s had promised to get immigration down but hadn’t thought through how to do that either, she pointed out, and consequently achieved the opposite. (You may well think the country would be even worse off had they succeeded but, either way, whipping up public anger against something and then blithely delivering more of it is the height of irresponsibility.) They bound themselves in law to achieving net zero by 2050 but only worried afterwards about how exactly they might do it. Each time, she conceded, Conservative governments told voters what they wanted to hear and gambled on working it all out later.

Though she has made similar criticisms before, drawing them together this punchily illustrates both Badenoch’s biggest strength as a politician – that she is an original, capable of saying what nobody else would – and her greatest weakness, which is that ironically she doesn’t always seem to think things though first either. Well, maybe it takes one to know one.

Keir Starmer will be gleefully mining this speech for ammunition to use against her, as will Nigel Farage: these are the arguments he’s been weaponising against the Tories for months. And she may just live to regret trashing all her predecessors back to Cameron, including those in whose governments she served.

But the perennially impatient Badenoch has at least skipped the traditional five opposition years of refusing to face up to why they actually lost. The Conservatives were pulverised last July less because their agenda was too unpopular – everyone wants a livable planet, a narrow majority famously wanted the Brexit they were sold if not the one actually delivered, and like it or not, 70% of Britons currently think levels of immigration are too high, according to YouGov – but because they didn’t actually do it. That failure poisoned the well for conventional politics in general, reinforcing a belief many people (however unfairly) already held that you can’t believe a word politicians say, and fanning a populist wildfire that now threatens to burn the Tory house down.

Brutal honesty, Badenoch has concluded, is the only way out. The emperor herself will just admit to the regrettable past absence of clothes, and hope that knocks the wind out of the little kids laughing and pointing.

Only 10 weeks into her leadership, she is already at the stage of having little dignity left to lose. Reform is no longer nibbling chunks off the Tory vote but swallowing it in great hungry gulps – 15% of 2024 Sunak voters have jumped ship in six months, according to YouGov – and the fact that this speech was so obviously pitched at Reform voters only confirms how rattled the party is about that. Nobody is really listening to what the official opposition is saying, and her erstwhile rival Robert Jenrick is nipping unsubtly at Badenoch’s heels. Though the kind of lengthy, evidence-based postmortem that leaders traditionally conduct into such a whopping defeat would carry more weight than a leader just backing her own hunches, in fairness for once her hunches look about right. And coming clean about past mistakes in dramatic fashion is probably her best chance of moving off the defensive on to her beloved attack.

It frees her to argue that Starmer also said what everyone desperately wanted to hear last summer about fixing public services without putting up ordinary people’s taxes, and is only now grappling with the reality of trying to make that happen in a world of ominously flat GDP growth. It frees her to accuse Rachel Reeves of being panicked into accepting whatever revenue-raising ideas the Treasury throws her way. In theory, it frees her to accuse Farage of promising the earth while being remarkably vague about how he intends to deliver it, though maybe don’t hold your breath.

But unfortunately, it also leaves wide open the question of what exactly the new Conservative party will be selling, if not the same old magic beans. Things that people definitely don’t want, but that they’re getting whether they like it or not? All her talk of hard truths suggests as much, but the lines in the speech the audience applauded most enthusiastically – that the victims of grooming gangs waited too long for justice, that Britain can’t take in everyone who wants to come – were inevitably the ones that are anything but hard for a Tory audience to accept, and voters will be no different. Or is she going to somehow succeed where everyone else has failed, in mysterious ways that – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – she is simply not at liberty to explain right now?

Still, the candour is refreshing, much like someone throwing their drink in your face is refreshing. For the first time in ages, the Conservatives have our attention. Now what?