Two aphorisms are often used to describe the Conservative party. The first is that its “secret weapon is loyalty”, and the second is William Hague’s description of it as “an absolute monarchy moderated by regicide”.
Any student of history can see the tension between those statements. The stability of a monarchical system usually depends on the extent to which it neutralises competition for leadership; when any competent general thinks he can take a shot at the throne, as in the later Roman Empire, they swiftly make a habit of it, with predictable results.
The structural problem with the modern Conservative party is that it has become more and more an “absolute monarchy”, at least on paper—it was none other than Hague who gutted what remained of the institutional party in 1998, concentrating power over conference and selections in the hands of Conservative Campaign Headquarters (CCHQ)—at the same time as its MPs have unlearned the habit of loyalty.
For that reason, the fragility of Kemi Badenoch’s leadership is not entirely of her own making. The Tory leadership is these days a very difficult brief. But that will not make ambitious colleagues sheath their sickle-bladed question marks over her future—and in any event, she has at the least co-authored her current misfortune.
Badenoch won last year’s contest with the same tactics she used to great effect in building her profile as a minister: avoiding the limelight except to make carefully chosen interventions on her favourite topics, such as gender politics. But such methods, dependent as they are on the press coming to you, are much better suited to government than opposition.
She also defeated Robert Jenrick by scooping up votes from James Cleverly after the left of the party, despite having roughly half of the Conservatives’ 121 MPs, managed to tie its own shoelaces together and fail to put a candidate in the final two.
Again, good tactics have led to strategic difficulties: by not committing to even a diagnosis of what went wrong before the 2024 election, Badenoch attracted a broad coalition of MPs content to hit the snooze button on the very painful and divisive reckoning the party needs with its 14 years in office. As a result, none of her supporters have committed themselves to any particular policy position, and with so few MPs she cannot really afford more than a handful of shadow cabinet resignations.
Downplaying the ideological question also means that Badenoch’s ability to do the job of leader of the opposition day-to-day (through victories in the House of Commons and wooing the press, for example) is more load-bearing than it was for, to choose the example for which her supporters constantly reach, Margaret Thatcher—and as described above, she does not seem well-suited to the role.
All of this is compounded by Jenrick, whom most of the party’s remaining donors favoured and to whom several are choosing to donate instead of the party. He is playing up to the role of Prince over the Water for all it’s worth, energetically intervening on areas well beyond his justice brief (often with videos much more slickly produced than anything cash-strapped CCHQ can manage).
One would have to be extraordinarily naive not to recognise this as a shadow leadership pitch—a reminder to Tory MPs that they have an Arthur, and he’s not wasting his time sleeping beneath Avalon.
Jenrick’s supporters believe, probably rightly, that if there was another leadership contest in the next couple of years their man would be the overwhelming favourite. Neither Cleverly nor Tom Tugendhat are widely thought to be inclined to run again, and there isn’t obviously anyone else from that wing of the party with the profile to take him on. At the same time those right-wing MPs being talked up as future contenders, such as Katie Lam, the MP for Weald of Kent, are too new to parliament to be a realistic near-term threat.
The critical question then is whether they can peel away from Badenoch enough MPs: either those who actively supported her as a right-wing candidate, to whom Jenrick can offer more red meat, or those who simply wanted to block him, to whom he can at least present himself as a more energetic and media-savvy alternative to the incumbent.
Badenoch is thus, as is so often the case in current Conservative politics, being pulled in two directions. The more she moves to the right on issues such as the European Convention on Human Rights, the more she reduces the difference between herself and Jenrick—in the eyes of those who backed her to stop him—as coming down to their perceived competence gap: if you’re going to have the Jenrick agenda, why not the man himself? Yet if she tacked left, MPs who thought her the next Great Right Hope might jump ship.
Time will tell, of course. Rab Butler, Reginald Maudling, Edward du Cann, Michael Heseltine… in its long history the Tory party has had far more princes over the water than kings. But if Badenoch cannot show real progress by next year’s local elections, a critical mass of her colleagues may decide it’s worth the risk to rise and follow Bobbie.
