Labour will recover. Kemi must win the battle of ideas

Kemi Badenoch
Kemi Badenoch

Huge congratulations to Kemi Badenoch. It is good news for the Conservative Party that we finally have a leader chosen by the membership once again, one who can begin the long task of rebuilding the Party and its appeal.

It perhaps hasn’t mattered as much as many thought that we have filled much of the autumn with a leadership campaign: Labour have been more shambolic, more incompetent, more dangerously leftist than anyone could have hoped for, and, to judge by the collapse in Starmer’s approval ratings, voters are perfectly well aware of it.

Still, it is hard to believe that Labour will be quite this bad all the way through to the next election. This morning we read that the increases in public spending in this week’s Budget have apparently landed well with the public even though they doubt it will do anything for growth. The mood of politics is still highly collectivist. So the Right has to win the argument at the level of ideas, and have a well-understood and popular alternative set of policies, if we are to get back into power next time round.

That is going to require more than putting the Labour Party on the back foot in Parliament. I have no doubt Kemi can do that and very effectively too. But let’s not forget that William Hague outplayed Tony Blair at the despatch box week after week too. It made no difference when the election came. You have to win the political arguments to win elections.

That’s the challenge now before Kemi. She’s got to be able to explain that the country is on the wrong track and needs to get onto a different one. She has to be able to turn the Party into a machine that can articulate Conservative ideas and vision at the level of principle, and show how these feed into specific policies that make voters’ lives better, maybe not immediately, but eventually. She has to show how she can bring Reform voters back, for, uncomfortable though it is for many in the Party to hear, there’s no winning any election if the Right is divided. So all this has to be based on a proper understanding of what went wrong and what has to change if we are to re-energise the Conservative Party in the country and bring back the activists who gave up on us.

That is a formidable task and it’s right that we all get behind Kemi in doing it. At the same time it must be said that we don’t really know how she is going to go about it. The major weakness of this leadership election is that there was no head-to-head debate in which the protagonists’ ideas could be really tested. That leaves us somewhat in the dark about what some of Kemi’s ideas really are. I doubt Labour and the media will let her get away quite so easily as in the campaign without setting out a clear direction of travel on the core elements of politics: tax and spend, public services, immigration as well as integration of those already here, housing, crime and justice. So the task has to begin now and show results quickly.

One last point. There will be, indeed already is, a temptation for Conservatives to crow about the fact that once again we have a leader from a minority background and to mock Labour’s failure in this regard. Please don’t. We won’t ever win an identity politics battle with Labour and we shouldn’t try to fight one.

I don’t care about the ethnic, gender, sexuality, whatever, background of the Labour front bench, of ours, or anyone else’s. I care about competence. In politics or in any other area, our Party should stand for non-discrimination on any basis other than on excellence and talent. That’s the basis on which we ran this leadership election and we should stick to it.