The hype about Kemi Badenoch has yet to be justified and may yet be a false dawn
Published 13th Oct 2026, 06:00 BST
As Westminster’s conference recess has ended and MPs are meant to consider the real world rather than the one they imagine in their flights of fancy, the likelihood of an early general election is coming into sharper focus.
I have it on good authority from my Labour contacts that the party is mobilising, such as candidate selection in the seats it does not hold (and is unlikely to win) – a necessity if the government is to be ready to go at the drop of Andy’s cap. At the very least, it allows him to take a decision knowing he is ready to go – or see out the full term, without a personal mandate.
Then there are the reports that the Prime Minister is seeking to abolish the need for proof of identity to vote in time for next May’s council elections, when any early general election would most likely take place. Why this is believed to be advantageous to Labour is a question that elicits cynical guffaws and raised eyebrows.
Only in Britain will you need to prove you are old enough to access the internet, using proof of identity, while deciding on who creates laws, sets taxes and extends welfare benefits requires no identity at all. Proxies for the dead can laugh all the way to the polls.
Reform party making the running
John Healey’s first Budget looms at the end of the month – with the Institute for Fiscal Studies estimating the government now faces a shortfall of £35 billion to balance the books. After imaginary rabbits are pulled out of hats there is, would you believe it, another week’s parliamentary recess. Maybe MPs will need it to recover from hearing of the state of our public finances?
This is the background upon which the leading opposition parties must prepare for battle, with Reform and the Conservatives still vying for who will be best placed when the starting gun is actually fired. Nigel Farage and his still growing Reform party have made most of the running over the last two years, so much so that all the other parties have turned to train their attacks on him and his team, more than the Labour government.
For two years in a row, the Conservatives have had disastrous English council elections and have now lost their place as the lead opposition in the Scottish Parliament and Welsh Senedd. This put the leadership of Kemi Badenoch under sustained pressure, but due to her aggressive performances at Prime Minister’s Questions against the technocratic Keir Starmer, she was able to assert herself and get a grip of her party.
While Tory polling remains stubbornly below its 2024 general election low of 23.7 per cent, Badenoch has enjoyed positive personal ratings that have helped keep the party in the race. That is not to say she is a Prime Minister in the waiting. Badenoch’s judgment at times still appears rash and lacking self-awareness.
Her support earlier in the year for a former neo-Nazi who did jail time being a prospective Tory council candidate was one such example – and her speech last week praising the late Jeffrey Archer, a convicted perjurer, was juxtaposed against implied criminality of Reform MPs, none of whom have faced any charges.
Tories’ red meat turns out to be anaemic
While offering Tory conference attendees tax cuts is red-meat politics, it often falters after closer inspection. Last year it was abolishing stamp duty (later qualified to only the first property and not including trading in equities, which badly need the help) and this year it was abolishing inheritance tax (IHT), which was later qualified to only raising the nil-rate threshold on the family home.
A pattern is developing that points to grabbing headlines with bold, appetising policies only for the scrutiny of the recipe’s contents to reveal a low-calorie, fat-free and less-than-tasty offering.
Instead of simplifying the tax code, as promised by Badenoch, the qualifications and exemptions for her suggested tax cuts will actually add to it. For instance, Labour is bringing pensions into the purview of IHT but Badenoch’s modest increase of the threshold still includes Labour’s damage to pensions.
Indeed, the raising of the IHT nil rate (on only the family home) will distort behaviour further by incentivising the retention of large houses rather than downsizing and releasing capital – because that capital would be liable to IHT whereas the property would escape it.
These type of tax changes on property have the look of appealing to the relatively wealthy and those who are of property, and fit neatly with attempts to win back seats from the Liberal Democrats in the more prosperous shires in the south of England. It is difficult, therefore, to dismiss the possibility Badenoch has settled for the Conservatives being a regional party rather than a national one.
14 years of betrayal
Badenoch appears to be targeting pockets of support in, say, unionist redoubts in Scotland and home counties seats in England, while leaving the Reform to fight Labour in the Red Wall seats across the north.
This ignores the fact that Reform’s support is much broader than the Red Wall, having eaten the breakfast, lunch and dinner of Tories in Essex, East Anglia and swathes of the Midlands. This is because the public has not yet found it possible to forget or forgive the Tories for 14 years of repeated betrayals.
Another example of Badenoch’s leadership narrative is she is changing the party, demoting those who failed in the past (ignoring that she herself failed to scrap thousands of EU laws).
For now, it’s no wonder the saying “you cannot trust the Tories” still resonates for too many voters who, having been bitten at least once, are still twice shy.
Brian Monteith is a former member of the Scottish and European Parliaments and editor of ThinkScotland.org