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Conservative Party conference is now well underway here in Birmingham, with the four candidates seeking to succeed Rishi Sunak as leader all battling to make their case to the grassroots and fellow MPs.
Nonetheless, the upbeat tenor of each candidate’s pitch — promulgated at impromptu rallies and slightly more official-looking fringe events — sits uneasily with the Conservatives’ wider post-defeat mood.
Former Tory MPs who lost their seats at the last election are here reacquainting with ex-colleagues and reminiscing, presumably, about the good ol’ days of government. This is a Conservative Party reckoning with the political irrelevance so recently imposed upon it by Britain.
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Accordingly, manifold theories are doing the rounds as to why the public lost faith in their Tory rulers. And with the conference fringe in full flow, there is no shortage of forums to debate them.
Proffering her view today is Liz Truss, who is “in conversation” with The Telegraph’s Tim Stanley as I write. Among other tenuous assertions, she has just claimed that the Conservative Party would have performed better at the election under her leadership.
But today: some thoughts on Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative leadership campaign, and what the row over her position on maternity pay reveals about the race.
Another Kemi Badenoch row
he row over Kemi Badenoch’s comments on maternity pay, no matter what the individual at its centre might insist, matters.
On Sunday morning, the leadership contender was conducting a pre-conference media round — touring the makeshift broadcast studios alongside her fellow Tory rivals — when she was questioned over her stance on business regulation by Times Radio’s Kate McCann.
Asked if Britain has “the right levels of maternity pay at the moment”, Badenoch responded: “So, maternity pay varies depending on who you work for, but it is a function, whereas statutory maternity pay, it is a function of tax, tax comes from people who are working, we are taking from one group of people and giving to another, this in my view is excessive.
“Businesses are closing, businesses are not starting in the UK, because they say that the burden of regulation is too high…”
“So maternity pay is excessive?”, McCann intervened, sensing a story.
“I think it’s gone too far the other way in terms of general business regulation, we need to allow businesses especially small businesses to make more of their own decisions”, Badenoch added.
The press, and crucially Badenoch’s Conservative rivals, quickly seized on the comments. Speaking to a conference fringe event, Tom Tugendhat was the first to explicitly rebuke his competitor’s position, saying he wanted to see “strong maternity and paternity pay”.
Badenoch’s foremost rival, Robert Jenrick, also wasted little time before chiming in. “I think the Conservative Party should be firmly on the side of parents and working mums who are trying to get by”, he told another Tory fringe gathering.
With the story burgeoning, Badenoch’s camp was forced to issue a response. It was predictably dismissive. A source close to Badenoch suggested her initial comments had been widely, even deliberately, misconstrued. Pinning the blame for the row on her Conservative competitors, they warned against “infighting” and further “internal conflicts”. “Kemi obviously supports maternity pay”, the source added, “and was making a case for lower regulation — something she always aimed for as business secretary.”
But this row, notwithstanding the Badenoch camp’s scornful judgement, is genuinely instructive for a few related reasons.
Firstly, with a selectorate as small as 121 Conservative MPs, the slightest sense of a political misstep can take on a real, outsized significance. The margins are absurdly fine this campaign: remember, Jenrick beat Badenoch by 5 MPs in the second round of voting; Badenoch only bested Cleverly by 7. Ergo, even if this row alienates but one or two Tory parliamentarians, the finely balanced state of the race could shift relatively markedly.
But more than this: the row looks set to harden incipient doubts many Conservatives already possess about Badenoch. It is well-acknowledged that the former business secretary’s strengths do not lie in courting support behind the scenes but, rather, in the fiery cauldron of political conflict. A common refrain uttered by Badenoch’s supporters is that their candidate will return the Conservative Party to “first principles”. It’s a line intended to capitalise on Badenoch’s deeply held values, and her patent willingness to profess them.
Badenoch, the pitch runs, is the most “true blue” in this blue-on-blue contest. And there is reason to believe this trenchant style has an audience among the Conservative faithful — who perennially rank Badenoch as their favourite senior Tory.
But the maternity pay row isn’t the first time Badenoch’s expression of her core principles, empowered by her firebrand demeanour, has rocketed the Conservative candidate into the headlines. As such, for those undecided Conservatives — especially MPs whose favoured candidate has been knocked out — the controversy likely epitomises Badenoch’s pitfalls as a political operator.
Badenoch’s reflex approach to criticism — to counter first and clarify later — often just ensures some obscure controversy spirals further. Certainly, the ex-business secretary’s rolling rows don’t exactly speak to the strict discipline and competence that many Conservatives consider necessary to the party’s electoral reassembly.
And vitalising these points is a tale as old as politics itself: that a champion’s assumed strengths ultimately augur both their — and their associates’ — downfall. It’s a story familiar to many Conservative MPs who had front row seats to the respective rise, decline and falls of two recent standard bearers: Liz Truss and Boris Johnson.
But this weakness also speaks to a larger problem facing Badenoch this campaign — one rather more totemic than the substance of any single row.
Badenoch’s appeal among the Conservative grassroots is not solely about election victory, fleeting as that can prove, but advances in the wider “culture war”. Her combative, headline-grabbing mode of politics bodes well among specifically Tory selectorates — who admire her stringent and unapologetic adherence to principle. But it is far less clear how this approach plays with the public at large.
The noisy, heavy-handed politics of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, which leapt onto every passing “culture war” bandwagon before eventually careering off course, was roundly rejected by voters at the last election. For all the troubles Keir Starmer is currently facing, his commitment to pursue a politics that “treads a little lighter” on people’s lives successfully capitalised on Britain’s collective fatigue of Johnsonian scandal, Trussite chaos and Sunakian performance.
Badenoch, with her ability to ignite a blazing row at a moment’s notice, could well be viewed as the “continuity chaos” candidate — picking up on a thread strung by Johnson and still not severed by the close of Sunak’s administration. In the end, Badenoch’s abrasive politics could stymy the Conservative Party’s bid to signal that it has truly changed.
Moreover, as Starmer will attest, the public tends to listen to the party of opposition fleetingly (and often only when they expect them to win). It means the next Conservative leader faces an immediate uphill struggle as they seek to reconfigure their party’s reputation for aimless performance. Badenoch, as her supporters oft-note, has a unique ability to cut through the media noise like few other politicians. But she tends to do so by creating more noise.
This would make Badenoch not only the “continuity” candidate, as far as the wider electorate is concerned, but the “risky” candidate too.
Lunchtime briefing
Report into Conservative defeat warns pact with Nigel Farage would be ‘catastrophic mistake’
Lunchtime soundbite
‘Britain has become more of a European-style economy and less of a capitalist economy over the past fourteen years’
— Former prime minister Liz Truss suggests the Conservative Party actually made the UK more “socialist” over fourteen years in government. She said: “I think we’re already in socialism. We are already a socialist country. The government is spending 45 per cent of GDP.”
Now try this…
‘More Mr Nice Guy: can affable but gaffe-prone James Cleverly lead the Tories?’
The Guardian’s Eleni Courea reports.
‘This Tory conference reads like a familiar story, risking a longer spell in opposition‘
The FT’s Stephen Bush writes that the Conservative leadership frontrunners appear to prescribe moving the party closer to its activist base. (Paywall)
‘James Cleverly favourite Tory leadership candidate among British public, new poll shows’
Via The Independent.
