Kemi Badenoch on Where She Plans to Take the Tories

‘It’s like a start-up,’ Kemi Badenoch explains of her new job, as she plumps down on a sofa in the Spectator offices. A month into her tenure as Conservative party leader and she is discovering the upsides to being out of power. ‘Everyone around me in the leader of the opposition office is there because of me – not because they happened to be there when I got there. That changes the dynamic quite a bit.’

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She says her job between now and the next general election is to rebuild the Tory brand. That means getting young people to join the party. ‘A lot of young people are terrorised for being Conservatives and we have to defend them. And that’s one of the things that I will want to do, to bring back the fun. If you don’t have the young you don’t have the fun, that’s for sure.’

On policy, several commissions will soon get under way. ‘Alex Burghart [in the Cabinet Office brief] is working on the framework but I’m taking my time in making sure we think about how you deliver a policy commission that’s going to get results,’ she says. Two models are being looked at: ‘Mrs Thatcher’s and David Cameron’s, which I worked on back in 2005-06, the one on globalisation.’

Badenoch is looking around the world for inspiration. ‘I am very interested in how radical you can be on the right, [such as] Javier Milei in Argentina. I remember when he had those white boards and he was ripping everything down and he was saying “Afuera! Afuera!”. I loved it but I was thinking, “Would that work? I don’t think people will like that”. So it isn’t just the fact that he’s been doing it, but that it is working.’ On migration, she cites Italy’s Giorgia Meloni as an example to learn from (‘We have a mutual admiration society’).

She recently went to America, where she met J.D. Vance, the incoming vice president. ‘It’ll be interesting to see what the Donald Trump-Elon Musk partnership is going to deliver with government efficiency,’ she says. ‘My diagnosis of what is wrong with our country is that we have stopped being entrepreneurial and become bureaucratic. The middle class has changed from people who grow things, like farmers, or people who build or make things. It’s skewed towards people who live off the law in one form or another, whether that’s regulation, compliance in banking, HR or government contracts.’

A radical approach, she says, is required on immigration even if she has stopped short of calling for Britain to leave the ECHR. ‘I use the phrase “liberalism has been hacked” – and when I say liberalism, I mean classical liberalism, not the American hard-left liberalism. Many of the issues that people call “woke” – it’s really socialism and communism wearing the cute outfits of the civil rights movement… Our asylum system is exploited because we’re using a system that was built for the 1950s. In an age of global travel, people can get around the whole world and get information instantaneously.’

Does that mean rethinking refugee conventions? ‘It’s everything,’ she says. Two of her frontbenchers, Robert Jenrick and Neil O’Brien, co-authored a paper for the Centre for Policy Studies thinktank which suggested that visa decisions should be based on nationality, noting that the average Australian immigrant to the UK earns much more than the average Somali. Is that something she would consider? ‘We’ll be looking at everything,’ she repeats. ‘I haven’t read the CPS report, but I have seen parts of it referenced.’ As equalities minister, she tried to commission work on what makes some migrants more successful than others. ‘The data just was not there. We need to go out and get that data… We need to give ourselves time and, to use a phrase from the New Labour era, think the unthinkable.’

But does she have time? Keir Starmer may be failing on his own terms, but he is not Badenoch’s only opponent. She faces a threat from Nigel Farage and the Reform party. What’s her plan? ‘We just have to focus on what the Conservatives are about now and not worry about Reform in the immediate term. Of course they are a competitor, but right now I am the leader of the Conservative party and that is my focus.’ Her first big test will come in the spring’s local elections. A campaign plan is being drawn up which includes reforming the candidate selection process following complaints of cronyism during the general election. ‘The way we start winning is first by earning the trust of the people but also by being the very best version of ourselves,’ she says. ‘If you are in a competitive market, you need to make sure that you have the best product.’

Farage is confident his party will win more council seats than the Tories. Is the idea of working with Reform a red line for her? ‘I’ve always said that we need to make sure that we build a coalition of people who share our values,’ she says. ‘There are many people who will vote Conservative who will not vote Reform. What I’m trying to do is maintain the coalition that we do have. Of course, if there are campaigns that we could collaborate on, we would do that with any party. What I’m saying is, I don’t treat Reform as different from any other party.’

Badenoch is, however, ready to fight. Her Nigerian heritage often comes up in conversations about her straight-talking style. But she says this misses the point. ‘I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identify less with the country than with the specific ethnicity [Yoruba]. That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped in with those people.’

Badenoch is proud of her Yoruba heritage. It’s given her a ‘very strong identity about who you are, where you come from, traditions and so on’ – including her maiden name, Adegoke. ‘Somebody once told me when I was very young that my surname was a name for people who were the warriors. They protected the crown and that’s what I see myself as doing. I am here to protect and I will die protecting this country because I know what’s out there.’

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