Hell yes, she's Badenough

It’s not been going very well for Kemi Badenoch. I didn’t suppose it was ever going to on account of her being superficial, lightweight, and by all accounts, abrasive. But her Achilles heel is her previous lobbying for more immigration. That should have disqualified her from leading the party. She is simply not in a position to go on the offensive. Her party’s own record is bad enough, but her personal complicity has hobbled her before she’s even got stuck in.

Saving me the trouble of any deeper analysis, Simone Hanna's assessment of Badenoch in The Telegraph is damning. Badenoch, she says, "has offered little in terms of practical solutions to anything at the top of most voters’ agendas, at the exact moment the nation is crying out for something beyond student idealism. She remains fixated on the optics of “owning” her opponents as if she were a 2015 YouTuber, ignoring the fact that she leads a political party on the very edge of survival".

She concludes "Her inability to rise above petty squabbles and her preference for culture wars soundbites over clear policy leaves the party ill-prepared for the challenges ahead. This might in part be forgivable if she were good at the media stuff, but waffling on about not being scared of Dr Who and descending into a spat with the vice president of Nigeria suggests she’s not especially adept at this either".

I might also add that, very soon, Badenoch might well be out of material. Wokery was already on its last legs, and with trans activism on the backfoot, and even Labour taking a more sane approach, there is diminishing use for a politician like Badenoch. There’s a real sense of “vibe shift” since the election of Trump, and all things woke are going the way of the dinosaur.

Worse still, Badenoch is in no hurry to set out any policies. If she doesn't sort out the party's stance on immigration, there won't even be a Conservative Party - and few would miss it.

The absence of policy is explained by a quote in the Spectator yesterday. "People keep saying 'Where are your policies?'. I feel like I am going to be opening a restaurant in four years’ time and people are demanding to see the menu right now,’ she says. ‘Trying to get people to be patient, I think, is one of the big challenges. People want instant gratification".

If this is what Badenoch is thinking then she's a bloody fool. A party circling the drain cannot afford to keep voters guessing. We should not be left to wonder what the party's priorities are - not least because the local elections next year are make or break for the Tories and Reform. The Tories also have to rebuild trust. If Badenoch is waiting to see which way the wind is blowing in 2029, it doesn't matter what Tory policy is because nobody will trust it.

Simone Hanna remarks that Refrom's continued progress "only underscores the Conservatives’ vulnerability under Badenoch. Instead of addressing the threat of Farage’s Right-wing bona-fides by refocusing on bread-and-butter issues, Badenoch hasn’t yet even tried to see off this insurgency. If that sounds like weakness, it’s because it is – and voters can sense it".

Were it that Robert Jenrick secured the leadership, he would already be running with much of his policy base, having defined much of it during the contest. Having resigned as immigration minister, he at least has the credibility to go on the attack - on what is to be the defining issue of the next election. The penny must drop soon that the Tories have made a very serious mistake in choosing style over substance.

For the moment, Badenoch is new enough in the job to be excused a few teething troubles, but there are now two (questionable) polls that put Reform ahead of the Tories, and if that starts looking like a trend, I don’t imagine the party will wait very long before the knives come out with a view to installing Jenrick. It seems like their only hope of survival. Jenrick is the only man who can rebuild trust.

Badenoch’s intellectual incoherence, though, is not unique to the Tory party. Reform's approach immigration is almost as much of a mystery being that the party offers little more than contradictory slogans. Meanwhile, Farage seems determined to purge immigration hard-liners. Lacking a philosophical foundation, and warmly embracing the likes of Tim Montgomerie, suggests the party could be every bit as split on the issues as the Tories if Reform ever came to power.

As such, it does not follow that Reform will automatically benefit from Tory disarray. There's a growing perception that Reform is morphing into the Tory Party 2.0, which means that voters in "left behind" places could just as easily stay at home again at the next general election.

With no great enthusiasm for Badenoch or Farage, with neither willing nor able to lay down policy, we shouldn't get carried away with the idea that Starmer will lose the next election. Voters have a tendency of putting up with dysfunctional Labour governments when the right is in disarray. It's possible that neither party deserves a vote in 2029 and again the apathy party wins by a landslide.

There is, however, that nightmare scenario where Reform wins by default, relieved from having to produce policy by Badenough's absence from the field. We could see just enough stay-at-home Labour voters to give Reform the edge.

In that scenario, there’s a real risk of right-leaning voters being just as disappointed as they were with Boris Johnson. It’s still the case that the Reform party doesn’t have a codified reform agenda and, as I’ve discovered in my recent dabblings with policy, fixing Britain’s problems are not quite as simple as Farage assumes. However well-intentioned Reform may be, reality is unlikely to cooperate with their fanciful ideas.

It’s clear that Badenoch has no concept of what needs to be done, thus nobody is waiting with bated breath to see what she comes up with, and Reform couldn’t possibly be worse, but it seems likely that power would be wasted on Reform without some sort of plan.

Getting current levels of immigration down doesn’t really address the issues. It’s conceivable that Labour might even manage it, and if they address the indefinite leave to remain issue, they stand a good chance of undoing the Tory mess. To really get a grip, though, you have to recognise why immigration is such a mess to begin with.

Fixing immigration is going to require a structural overhaul of the care sector, the NHS, universities, and local authority enforcement bodies. There are then a number of hostile environment measures needed to put an end to the pull factors. There is no evidence that Reform has given this any thought. They’re still talking about Royal Navy pushbacks in the Channel, which has no chance of working.

I’ve made many a prediction that the lack of an intellectual foundation would probably destroy Reform before it got near power, but if on the off chance they somehow win before they’re ready, and they end up making as big a mess as the Tories (with little to show for it), the public may quietly conclude that we aren’t voting our way out of this mess.

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