Kemi Badenoch has promised to “restore a strong economy” and “rebuild Britain’s strength” if she wins the next election.
During her keynote speech at the Tory party conference today, Badenoch told members she’d abolish stamp duty, and introduce a “golden economic rule”: at least half of all cuts to public spending made in government would be used to reduce the deficit, with the rest going on measures to boost the economy, including tax cuts.
Can her policy promises turn around her ailing fortunes – and those of her party? “It’s an undeniable truth,” said Raza Hussain at Prospect, “that the grass roots are looking for change.”
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This year’s conference felt like Badenoch’s “audition for survival”, said Prospect’s Hussain. “Everyone knows this could be her last disco before the lights go out” but there are “still plenty” of Tories who “believe in Badenoch, or at least want to”. Some “simply want her to stay because changing leaders didn’t exactly help the party over the last 14 years”.
Even Tory MPs who are “uncomfortable” with her rhetoric don’t “feel that there is much point in doing anything about it now”, said Eleni Courea in The Guardian. There’s a view that she won’t “necessarily" lead the party into the next general election, so “what she announces right now is neither here nor there”.
Some of her MPs “think the clock is ticking” on her leadership “and on the long-term viability” of the party, said BBC Radio 5 Live’s Matt Chorley, and there are grumblings, from new MPs in particular, about “a leader’s office lacking in direction, fight, even a willingness to acknowledge their existence”.
But Badenoch’s recent commitment to pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights shows that “here at least, the Tory leader is playing a bad hand rather well”, said Andrew Tettenborn in The Spectator. “Whatever a few older grandees may say on human rights scepticism”, she has “no choice but to embrace it. Forget the chattering of the urban lanyard classes; what matters is the sceptical just-about-managing from Cardiff to Clacton”.
Perhaps she can “break through” by being “different”, rather than “a pale imitation of her opponents”, said Kamal Ahmed in The Telegraph. Under her leadership, the Tories should “uniquely offer a smaller state, lower taxes and free market reforms to release growth”.
What next?
The problem is that the Conservative party, “so often and for so long the dominating force in British politics, is a shrivelled version of its usual self”, said the BBC’s political editor Chris Mason.
Next May’s elections to the Scottish Parliament, the Welsh Senedd and many English councils are “shaping up to be the moment of truth” for Badenoch, some Tory MPs have told BBC Radio 5 Live’s Chorley.
“If there are no glimmers of momentum by then,” said The Telegraph’s Ahmed, “she is finished”, and will join the “long list of Conservative opposition leaders who could find neither a way to engage voters nor a way back to No. 10”.
