Kemi Badenoch has a massive ego and unshakeable self-confidence. Her electoral problem is the very clear mismatch between that and her actual ability. She claimed in a 2024 interview with Sky News that she “never has gaffes” and never needs to “apologise for something", adding: “I never have to clarify, because I think very carefully about what I say." This looks to me like hubris, and if she actually believes it, she's the kind of person who would go all the way down a catastrophically bad road and take an entire nation with her, just to ‘prove’ she hasn’t made a mistake. A little self-doubt is a wonderful thing.
Mrs Badenoch seems to think she is Margaret Thatcher reincarnated. She's written a treatise on her political philosophy, The Right Way, emulating Thatcher’s own effort in 1975: The Right Approach. More on this below.
Launching Badenoch's document, the party says it applies a series of principles, "as well as Kemi’s engineering mindset that means looking for causes rather than quick fixes across the economy, energy, government and wider society, providing the intellectual framework from which the Conservatives’ programme for government will be built."
It has been endorsed by right-wing luminaries such as Robert Tombs, Peter Lilley, Andrew Roberts and Sir Niall Ferguson, Brexit supporters all.
She demonstrated the limits of her 'engineering mindset' in a cringeworthy interview on LBC with Nick Ferrari; it was obvious she hadn't got a clue about how even the basics of her own £10 billion so-called Britannia Shield would work (this, by the way, is a prime example of how we tend to do things in this country. Pluck a big, round figure out of the air and ask: will it solve the problem? Answer: no, but it will at least look as if we’re doing something. It’s the worst of all worlds, wasting money and leaving the problem unresolved). It shows she is quite happy to drop £10 billion on a project that she admits she doesn’t understand. Experts say it would probably need £80 billion to be effective.
When does an opposition party develop its own multi-billion defence programme anyway? I don't believe it's ever been done before. Does the MoD agree? What next, will Reform UK commit to two or three more aircraft carriers? Restore might go for our own Trident system.
Two of the most serious threats to the UK come from climate change and another pandemic. Her response is to scrap the Environment Agency and build an iron dome against Russian drones.
On page 27, discussing Net Zero, she says: "In 2020, the Climate Change Committee [CCC]estimated that its route to Net Zero would cost £957 billion."
The figure is exactly double what the CCC report actually gave, a schoolboy error that came about because someone didn't understand a spreadsheet, according to The Guardian. Was it Badenoch herself? Did nobody check it? I bet she doesn't ask anyone to do that. We should be told where a half-trillion-pound 'mistake' came from. Perhaps she could reverse a lifelong habit and 'clarify' her thinking?
On her Inheritance Tax proposals, announced to great fanfare and cheers at the end of her party conference speech, Dan Neidle of Tax Policy Associates has taken a look and claims the figure of £6 billion given as the tax revenue foregone is wrong and could be as high as £10.9 billion, nearly double, because the rich would be hugely incentivised to not downsize or even to purchase expensive property and so take advantage of IT not being levied on family homes, only on cash assets.
Of all the troubles we have in Britain, I really don’t believe cutting IT should be in the top fifty. It only impacts a very small number of wealthy estates. Neidle also calculates that 99.9% of the benefit will go to the richest half of the population:
We'll have a full analysis of the Conservatives' proposed inheritance tax cuts tomorrow. But, for now, three charts. 1. Who would benefit from the cuts?— Dan Neidle (@danneidle.bsky.social) 7 October 2026 at 19:30
These are the kinds of mistakes made by those who don't understand the issues but are convinced they do, and then fail to consult experts because they think they are experts and "never have gaffes." It's a dangerous thing anywhere, but No. 10 is the worst possible place.
In another recent interview, she admitted the single market was “a great thing” if only it didn’t come with freedom of movement. This was also Mrs May’s position, and that of plenty of other Tories. If such a principle was a good one, we would have trade borders between the different parts of the UK and even between counties! It makes zero sense.
And that issue is perhaps an even bigger problem for her; defending Brexit. In another interview, she was asked twice if Brexit had been good for London and refused to give an answer. It's hardly a ringing endorsement of what might be described as the most far-reaching Tory policy for decades. How will she ever manage if Burnham puts the issue to the electorate again?
The Tories are currently in third place, on about 19%, and it’s hard to see how she can break out of the political doldrums without (a) joining a coalition with Farage or (b) offering policies which are actually popular with the majority. At the moment, Badenoch has definitively ruled out (a) and has published a policy platform likely to appeal to a wealthy minority, so (b) is out of the question absent a humiliating U-turn, which she is congenitally incapable of.
The right in Britain is hopelessly split and almost certainly will not unite. Can anyone seriously imagine Farage serving in a Badenoch cabinet, or vice versa? Rupert Lowe wouldn’t serve in either or be asked to.
Lewis Goodall has a good Substack blog pondering the 'strange myth' about her leading a Tory revival, considering that the Conservative Party is currently polling lower than they did in the 2024 general election.
The main thrust of her conference speech was in pledging tax cuts and spending commitments, which sounds a lot like the Truss approach to government. The tax cuts will be financed by spending cuts, mainly falling on welfare recipients in yet-to-be-defined areas. This is after fourteen years of prime ministers doing nothing other than look for cuts to the UK welfare state. Badenoch behaves as if the system is still full of waste and fraud.
Her pitch to voters is almost completely reliant on them having short memories and forgetting that the issues she is promising to solve were created by a government of which she was a part, along with many of her shadow ministers. The 14-year Tory governing period included Brexit, the mishandled pandemic, Johnson sleaze, and the disastrous Truss/Kwarteng budget, all delivered against a backdrop of brutal spending cuts coupled paradoxically with the highest tax burden in history. It is a shocking record.
None of it bodes well for the prospects of a Badenoch administration. However, that seems highly unlikely, given they could only manage a lowly third place in the recent Holborn & St Pancras by-election, just pipping Reform UK into fourth.
She is the darling of the party faithful in the same way that Corbyn was popular with socialists between 2015 and 2019. But on the doorstep in deepest Yorkshire, he was politically toxic - as anyone who campaigned for Labour in the 2019 general election knew. I think a shock awaits Tory activists.
Thatcher's approach
In her political essay from 1975, Thatcher had this to say about privatisation:
"The long-term aim must be to reduce the preponderance of State ownership and to widen the base of ownership in our community. Ownership by the State is not the same as ownership by the people."
I think she naively believed ordinary people in our community would buy and hold shares. She wanted to increase home ownership as well as the number of shareholders among the general population, creating a more Conservative voter base. Home ownership was 54% at the time, rose to 71% by the early 2000s and is now back down at 64%.
What we have now are sink estates, a lack of social housing and essential utilities owned by foreign governments and venture capitalists milking the consumer for everything they've got. In spite of it all, Badenoch insists water privatisation has been a success, even as recent polling puts support for public ownership at 82%. This is hardly chasing votes is it?
Badenoch claims the water companies are badly run and renationalising them won’t help. Her analysis is badly flawed. I would suggest it’s virtually impossible to conclude that all the water companies (many with multiple owners since privatisation) have suffered exactly the same kind of greedy, incompetent management. The obvious common thread is privatisation.
Nationalised industries did lose money, but too often it was due to politicians preventing unpopular price increases or trade unions making impossible demands. Management may have also been incompetent, but they were often government-appointed sinecures for friends of ministers.
Running a monopoly at a loss ought to be impossible. If they are all badly run, it says a lot for British private sector management. It would be better to have them in public ownership. At least we aren't trying to manage them at arm's length.
