Is Kemi Badenoch getting better at being Conservative leader?

Kemi Badenoch has a hard-earned reputation for combativeness, especially on culture war issues, but at prime minister’s questions, with the murder of the teenager Henry Nowak in the headlines, Keir Starmer ended up thanking the Conservative leader for her “tone”. So is she a changed politician? Well, not exactly.

To an extent, Badenoch’s approach ahead of her weekly Commons showdown with Starmer was shaped by events. Widespread concern on Wednesday at the police response to Nowak’s murder – the student was handcuffed while he bled to death after being falsely accused of racism – spiralled into rioting on Tuesday night. The imperative not to inflame matters further was obvious.

Similarly, Badenoch has good reason to differentiate herself on the issue from Nigel Farage, who has been widely condemned for his rhetoric about the case, despite Nowak’s family urging politicians not to use the 18-year-old’s death to sow division.

“It is the responsibility of everyone in this house to bring people together, not divide them,” Badenoch said, to which Starmer replied: “Can I just first thank her for her approach and her tone in relation to this?”

A bigger clue to her motivation, however, came at the start of Badenoch’s comments, when she said the circumstances surrounding Nowak’s wrongful arrest had to be “a wake-up call to the entire country and our institutions that every life matters”.

This is different from the official government view that while the police bodycam footage of the arrest is deeply shocking, and raises questions about why officers believed the false claim by Nowak’s killer, Vickrum Digwa, that he had been racially abused, everyone should wait for an inquiry by the police watchdog before reaching conclusions.

Badenoch, in contrast, has already made firm conclusions, as set out in a Daily Mail article on Wednesday morning. The police actions were, she wrote, the fault of identity politics, in part the result of the Black Lives Matter movement. It was time, she said, to “root out all identity politics from state institutions”.

This has been Badenoch’s mantra for years. As equalities minister in the last Conservative government she oversaw a controversial report on racial disparities which largely downplayed the role of institutional and structural factors. Badenoch hailed the document as a “positive agenda for change”. Critics, ranging from a mass of academics and experts to the British Medical Association, said it was oversimplistic and at times misleading.

Contested or not, this is the lens through which the Tory leader views the response to Nowak’s murder, which has seemingly helped her blame police for being captured by race ideology, despite the trial judge saying that in the dark, and amid much confusion, it was perhaps understandable that officers did not immediately fully assess the situation.

Asked after PMQs why Badenoch could be so certain about the lessons needed from the case, her spokesperson said it was in part a response to her experience as equalities minister during the BLM era, a time when, as he put it, “she saw organisations and institutions signing up to a series of more and more extreme anti-racism measures”.

It was also, he added, a very human reaction to watching hugely upsetting bodycam footage of Nowak’s arrest. “Her reaction to it was one of a mother who imagined her son, when he is older, being in that situation, and it really hit home,” he said.

That something must be done is a common and understandable political instinct. Given the vehemence of Badenoch’s feelings, it is arguably more notable that the defining feature of her response, at least at PMQs, was to urge calm, not conflict.

Is this the sign of a leader improving in the job? That is a more complex and longer-term question. Yes, the Conservatives are second to Reform in some recent polling, but still below the ratings Badenoch inherited.

Supporters say she is nonetheless doing well amid a fragmented system, and point to her improving personal poll numbers.

Others are less sure. In an article for Conservative Home last month, Lee Cain, formerly Boris Johnson’s communications chief, likened Badenoch to William Hague, someone who also had high personal ratings but failed to take the party with him.

Cain wrote: “The country doesn’t elect leaders on the basis of PMQs, and personal approval ratings only take you so far when the party itself has nothing to say.”