333. Kemi Badenoch, Tory Party Leader

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1:50Welcome to the rest of politics extra episode with me, Rory Stewart and me, Alistair Campbell. And really why we're doing extra episode because because Kenmy Badenock has just been elected as the leader of the conservative party. And it's something that would traditionally have been really, really big news. I mean, obviously this is the party that has dominated British politics for 200 years. And she's now the leader of the opposition in parliament. Am I right in saying that it may not have got quite the coverage and focus and public enthusiasm that this thing might have got a few years ago or is that just a perception?

2:30No, I think it's, I think in terms of public enthusiasm, yes, I don't think there's, I don't think you get that many people sort of, you know, talking about it as intensely as they might have done a few years ago. But it's led to, you know, you're an Australian still, I'm in the UK, it's led the news all day. And it's been getting a lot of commentary and she'll be, she'll become overnight pretty much a near household name in Britain. And then as she sort of develops in the job over the next few years, she'll become well known around the world. And that's, you know, as I say, you're in Australia, you know, as well as I do now, just how closely people in Australia, for example, follow our policies, I bet you get asked about it tomorrow.

3:10I think it's, and I think also the fact that she's the, she's the first black leader of any of the major parties. She's the second conservative leader of colour after she's soon, now, and she's the fourth woman. And of course, Labour have had neither, apart from two interim leaders, Margaret Beckett and Harriet Harman, they've had neither a female leader nor a black leader. So that's getting a lot of interest. I think she'll try and play that down because of course, she's very kind of anti the whole sort of what she calls the woke agenda. But it's, I know you're going to talk us through the process of delivery, but let me just give you a few, a few numbers to start off.

3:51So she got 53 ,806 votes, Robert Jenry, the man she defeated in the final, 41 ,388. So it's the closest Tory relationship rate of recent times. The result, when announced, revealed that the membership of your party has shrunk to 132 ,000, which is the lowest level ever. And it's 40 ,000 down since the last vote in 2022. She's the sixth Tory leader in nine years. She's leading a party now of just 121 MPs. She's 44 years old, MP for North Moistestics. And this is interesting. Her majority at the election, it was a new seat, but her previous seat was Safran Walden, where she had a massive majority, well over 20 ,000.

4:38And the majority of this time was 2610. So that's kind of pretty marginal in modern language. But listen, she's going to be, it's a very interesting choice. And I've been, while you've been asleep in Brisbane, I've been talking to lots of your former colleagues and I'll be able to give you a bit of a feel for what they're saying. Very good. I'm glad, glad that she got your finger on the pulse of Tory party. Can I just give a quick introduction to who she is and people who've been following news will have got a level of this. But what's interesting about her is that although she was born in Britain, she left Britain when she was very, very young little baby and lived largely in Nigeria, a little bit in the US, till she was 16.

5:15Her father was a doctor. Her mother was a professor of physiology. She's from the Europa community in Nigeria. And that meant that when she was on that commission that Cameron set up to look into international development, she was quite unusual. I felt this in Parliament in having spent 16 years of her life growing up in a developing country. And she has in a way that very few MPs do an instinct for the rest of the world. I mean, many, many MPs increasingly are quite perocule. They've grown up in small towns. They've become councillors. They've joined parties quite young. They haven't travelled very much.

5:49She does have an instinctive understanding for the world outside the United Kingdom. And she's been quite interesting in using that. I wondered whether it was a good strategy to give a lot of speeches saying, you know, Britain's much better than Nigeria. And you know, I grew up in a country with which I had no electricity and a lot of crime. And I thought that was a sort of people might feel, well, that's a bit of relevant and it doesn't touch their lives much because they can't really relate to what it's like growing up in Nigeria. But in fact, it was fine. Just to remind listeners about this, and obviously I ran unsuccessfully for the Tory leadership myself.

6:22And broadly speaking, that the system hasn't changed. I think it's quite important for our democracy to understand how this system works because when we were in office, when the Conservatives were in office, this was literally the way a Prime Minister was chosen. And it's a way currently someone who has a good chance of being Prime Minister is chosen. Basically, a short list is created. MPs nominate themselves to be the leader. And you can have a situation where it feels like the grand national 12 or 13 MPs can nominate themselves. They're then whittled down usually in rounds of voting by the MPs themselves, the members of parliament, the Conservative MPs of whom, you know, when I was in the House of Commons, there'd be 300 and something.

7:04Now there would be 121. And once they've got to the last two, the last two are then presented to the Conservative Party members in the country. And the number one big fact there is that when my mother was a member of the Conservative Party in the 1950s, there were two and a half million members of the Conservative Party. Today, as you've just pointed out, there are just over a hundred thousand members and they are older and more right -wing than the general population. So one of the things that's happening, and this is an innovation, this wasn't traditionally the way that Conservative leaders were chosen, it was something brought in by William Hague.

7:40And he argued when he did it, that it was making it more democratic. I would argue it made it much less democratic because at least the old system where they were selected by MPs, the MPs were directly elected by their constituents and had a mandate directly from the public as a whole. By giving it to the party members, it sounds democratic on the surface because there are more people involved, but actually it's a tiny, tiny percentage of the overall British population choosing somebody who, in the case of Boris Johnson, all his trust or issues, who now became Prime Minister, or in the case of, of Kemi -Baitnock becomes, becomes the leader.

8:14And so as you came to the last two, really what she found was a battle between Robert Jenric and Kemi -Baitnock for the party members. Pretty high turn up, but that's 70 % of them voted. That's why it's very low. Why would you be a member and not vote? What's the point of being a member? You get a vote that's damp thing. I thought it was unbelievably low to that. That is absolutely true. So all Rory, almost a third of the members, he asked a vote for either of them. Having paid your money, that's the only thing you pay, you know, your money every year to do. I agree. And she won by, I guess, if you put in percentage terms, about 55 % to 45%.

8:56There was extraordinary spending, as you can imagine, in the week or two running in. So you could see Philip Blond, for example, who's an academic and red Tory commentator saying that Robert Jenric was going to get all the support from the north, but Kemi -Baitnock was going to get the wet liberal support, which was obviously an attempt to try to play into the hands of the right wing of the party, if the Jenric supporter. But it turned out in the end that she had very strong position. And I suppose two final things for her, how about you? She was elected to Parliament only, she was born in 1918, so she's quite young, but she was certainly very young comparatively in terms of, if you go back before the 21st century, she would have been very, very young for a conservative leader.

9:42But also she was elected first in 2017, so she's been in Parliament for a very, very short period. You know, I came in in 2010, and I remember Kemi arriving in 2017, very, very kind of bright -eyed, bushy, likable, enthusiastic, but she came in after Brexit, so she's part of her. A whole generation of MPs that didn't even go through the kind of misery of the Brexit referendum, she never saw David Cameron in office, she came in when Theresa May had, on the election which Theresa May lost her majority. And so she really, her whole experience of politics has been what for the Conservative Party has been one of the most miserable periods in Conservative Party history, the periods of Boris Johnson's implosion COVID, which locked down Parliament where they barely saw each other for a couple of years, the embarrassment of this trust, and now the worst Conservative defeat, almost on record under Rishisunek.

10:39So, so I think it's worth bearing in mind that formation not in very long on what she's seen as a Conservative Party tearing itself to pieces. Yeah, yeah. No, listen, she's got a big challenge on her hands, no doubt about that. Some of the news, Bulletin's, we're playing clips from her maiden speech, and as you say, she's only been an MP for a few years, and the clip that was most being used as one where she talked about, it's a bit like sex, if it's not messy, it's not working, and that's the only bit I saw. I don't even know what the issue was, so I don't even remember her made the speech, but I think presumably it was a reference to Brexit, isn't it?

11:19But either it's Brexit or it's politics or it's parliamentary procedure, I don't know. I guess what that revealed to me is the one thing she's always been very, very good at is getting attention and finding the sort of, you know, the phrase and the a bit John Sonian really, she sort of, and I see he said that she's going to bring a bit of what was it, zippen -zappel, zangan -zippel, zangan -something rather, he came up with some ridiculous new phrase today, very glad to see by the way, or that your book, which has been out for about 15 years, is sort of outselling his, which is only been out for three weeks.

11:53And as I say, once you press the emergency podcast button and said, you know, I'm about to go to bed, but don't you think we should do something about Kevin Badenock, I have been ringing around a few of the MPs that I know, and it has been really interesting actually because there's such a variation of view. And you've spoken, you say to 10 % of the... Well, I'm into double figures. I'm into double figures. I've only 120 while, so I've almost said. And I would say the view is very from, and it won't be surprised you to know that most of the Tories that I know are your sort of Tories, and there aren't that many of them except of course for David Davis or you make like that.

12:39But I do know, I do know someone the right as well. And I've also talked to a couple who lost their seat. And I think the general view is that she is as emerged as the best of a not very good bunch. I was very surprised how much people felt that actually, you know you and I, when we were doing our live shows and cleverly, everybody was saying it should be cleverly. I got the few of the MPs that they didn't think that would have been a good outcome. And they thought that she was the best of those who put her name forward. The general view I got was that generally it would have been a disaster that they felt he was pandering so far to the right that there might as well be reform already.

13:22One of her, one of the people who did vote for her, and not first time around, but voted for her from the third vote onwards, said she is right wing, but she's not crazy, which is why she avoided the whole ECHR debate, the European Convention with draw or not debate. And they also said, and he said to me, you should be, you should be very pleased about this because you're always going on about the importance of sticking to strategy. Her strategy was to avoid too much specific policy. Which is sort of Ming Vaz, right? It is a Ming Vazish. It was making it all about positioning rather than specific policy.

14:00And it's interesting, you mentioned David Cameron, I hadn't realized of it this, but when David Cameron became leader, he settled at these five policy commissions. And she was on one of them, even though she was not in Parliament. She was on the one that was chaired by Peter Lillian about globalization. Yeah, which I remember, which Bob Gildoff was part of, too. I did quite a lot with that. Yeah. I remember. So one of the people I talked to who is quite close to it said that he thinks she will take that sort of approach to policy, have a very long term approach to policy development, really come in hard from the start as a campaigning opposition leader.

14:37Said to me, for example, you and I talked about the farms issue on the inheritance tax and small farms on the main podcast this week, said, I bet you that will be her first big campaign. So we shall see. So deliberately avoided policy. Even though people were saying this was a mistake, she stuck to that strategy. But then on the other side, I had people one who said absolutely hopeless, totally divorced from real people's lives, doesn't understand the real world at all. And somebody who said, somebody else said very clever, very astute, not to be underestimated, labeled making a big mistake if the underestimate, underestimator.

15:14Somebody else said not fully formed, but very moldable. Lots of them talked about her temperament, impetuous, not a people person once said, she doesn't suffer fools gladly, which when your leadie Tori had peace, is a major handicap. So I think the general feeling I got was that although they think the whole thing has lasted too long and it's not been very exciting and it hasn't caught the public imagination at all, that if you're going to pick a lead rat this time to make life difficult for labor, which is part of the job, then far better to have her than Robert Generate. That was the kind of general view I got.

15:53I've been thinking about this a little bit. One thing that we've not done and maybe if we geekily going to do at some point is to do a really detailed analysis of who the conservative MPs left in the House of Commons are. I mean, one of the striking things for me is that with the exception of Jeremy Hunt, none of the really big beasts of the David Cameron or Theresa May cabinets are still in Parliament at all. There are a few of the kind of old guard, but many fewer than there would have been. I think we've talked about this a bit, the big difference traditionally between the British Parliament and for example the Dutch Parliament, where the oldest member of Parliament is how to build us the right wing politician who's only been in since 1997 and the British Parliament traditionally.

16:39People hung around for 30, 40 years and there are a few of those still left in the Conservative Party. So people like John Wittingdale, Ian Duncan Smith still around, but broadly speaking, it's a very, very new Parliament. Yeah. And of those who've been in longer, they were not the big sectarian's estate under Cameron or May. So it's going to be very interesting seeing how she forms it. I noticed amongst her last minute endorses, she managed to go all the way from people like Harriet Baldwin who would be traditionally more on the left of the party and was a supporter of Jeremy Hunt over to Jeffrey Cox, who people might remember as the kind of sort of fruity voice to Attorney General, who was more on the Brexit side.

17:22Just a bit on the point of the team. So I don't know, I kind of remember what the final number of ministers that there are in the government, but it's in three figures. Once you take all the sort of junior ministers and so forth, the whole front bench, she's only just got over three figures, 121. So she probably have to have a sort of slim down shadow team to some extent. There are some, I'm just looking through the list now, Gavin Williamson still there, Andrew Mitchell as you say, still there, pretty Patel still there. I wouldn't be surprised if she put Patel back where she was before, the Home Office, Shadow Home Office.

17:56Will she give a big job to Tom Tugan Hat? Might he go somewhere in the sort of foreign affairs defense area? You've got people like Laura Trott, Claire Coutinho, Caroline Noakes, Julian Smith, who was the very good Northern Ireland secretary, I thought I'm a real fan of Julian and it would be good to see him back in a serious position doing serious stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and I'd like to see Mel Stryde, Tom Tugan Hutton, James Cleveley used to properly. Yeah. Do you think, by the way, that she will lead them into the next election? As I said earlier, she's the sixth leader in nine years. The other thing that MPs are saying to me tonight is that they genuinely feel that they're back in the game in a way that they didn't think they would be for a long, long, long time.

18:43And they may be just sort of whistling in the end on that. But they basically think that Labour's got off to a terrible start. No, I think they may be overstating it, but you know, you can see why. And one of them said, for example, I think I thought when we lost the election, we're going to be out for at least three terms. I'm not sure about that anymore. But I'm still not sure that the Tory party is ready to settle down because the truth is, one of the other MPs said to me that, you know, the most important appointment is not going to be shallow for and so to do, not going to be shallow chance.

19:13It's going to be the chief whip because the chief whip is going to have the job of holding all these different factions together because even though it's a smaller number, it's still a pretty factionised party. That's what she's going to have to get on top of. And it's going to be very, very hard to do that while you're trying to set a new policy direction. Well, it's very difficult to notice, isn't it? And my goodness, it's a hard inheritance. Here's a couple of things I think that you, how you might make the case for, I think one of them is, as we've often discussed, we're in a world of anti -incumbency.

19:43I hadn't realised in Australia that every party winning an election had run two terms since, like, 1931. And yet, if there's a possibility that this Labour government here is going to lose after one term. And I think, although when we've been going around the country, everybody's pretty confident that Labour and Britain will win two terms, I'm not sure in the modern world where people get impatient so quickly, and where social media drives an enormous amount of that rage and anti -incumbency, whether that is an opportunity. I think the second thing is that she clearly has a form of charisma. She's very, very on a personal level, very likable, engaging.

20:25There's something very special about somebody who was able to run credibly for the leadership. Well, she's sort of running in 2019, but she ran when Johnson stepped down. And she managed to beat even in that one, that was the one that ended up as the standoff between Liz Truss and Rishisunak. But even that, she beat such a java -grant shaps, Jeremy Hunt, Nadem Zahawi, Tom Tuganhart, and made it into the last four when she'd only been in Parliament. She'd never been in the cabinet. She'd only been a very genius minister. She's really got people like Michael Gove behind her. And that's partly because it's not just that she's bright and sparky, but she was very loyal to him during his leadership campaign.

21:03And people appreciate that in politics. And I guess the Conservative Party also senses that we're in a more populist raw age. And they're slightly missing the more electrically palatable bits. I'm coming up with a sort of pompous way of saying they're missing bits of Boris Johnson I didn't like, but they are looking for that kind of secret source where they feel people can whip up the conversation, get the attention, get things going. Now, of course, that can go horribly wrong. It went horribly wrong with Boris Johnson. And of course, Liz Truss was a big person forgetting media headlines for saying outspoken things and being outrageous, and that in in the end, work out well.

21:41There's no doubt she's better at kind of capturing media attention. And she does have people like Gove and his entourage who help on that. But she does make mistakes. And I think she acknowledges that she made a very bad mistake when she talked about maternity pay being a bit of a, you know, she's sort of very dismissive of maternity pay. Well, when you married a very, very wealthy investment bank called Hamish, then you probably don't have to worry about as much other people do. I thought what she said about autism during the election campaign was awful. Really say autistic kids get special treatment, which I think you'd be really hard pressed to set that up against a factual analysis.

22:21Very dismissive of the minimum wage, said that had that throw away remark about, you know, 10 % of civil servants ought to be in prison, a bit Trumpian, a bit Trumpian on that. And, you know, maybe as you say, maybe that's what works in politics. But I think she's going to have to be very, very careful. One of the people I spoke to is quite close to her said that she's not going to go down this whole sort of woke agenda the whole time. That was what she was doing when she was a qualities minister because she felt that was her job. But I don't think she'll be able to resist on some of the sort of culture war issues.

22:54And I think there's a sort of danger, I think, in it in our politics. I don't think we're yet like the United States. I hope to God with that. I also talked a couple of labor people about her. There was one labor MP in fact, quite a few labor MPs were tweeting, you know, early Christmas present for labor. And I always go, I don't think you should do that stuff. Why do they do it in sending? Because I recognize that. That's the sort of trope, isn't it? What is it that they think they're doing when they're doing that? They think they're saying, well, they're trying to set the agenda on they they're trying to.

23:22Yeah, they're trying to say nothing to worry about, not up to it. And I think you should take the opposite approach. You know, I'd be very dismissive of both Bade Nother and Generick. Yeah. But I think once, you know, she's there now and you have to really have to think about how she's got there, why she's got there, why has she been able to win? As you say, coming from, you know, virtually standing start a few years ago. And so one of the more thoughtful people on the labor side, you know, really said not to be underestimated, very, very pugnatures, very tough, quite thoughtful, more thoughtful, maybe than people realize.

23:54But where she has real vulnerabilities is on her economic views, I think, a way out of Kiltrow where most of the country are. And she could slip into this cultural stuff and you're not going to outflank Farage on this stuff. And interestingly, one of these MPs read, I don't know if you know this, told me that John Curtis, one of our favorite pollsters, did a presentation to the Tory MPs before the last election, where he showed them the data, showing that every time that they went off on sort of highlighting immigration as the big issue, the big challenge, politically the people who benefited from that were reform.

24:29In other words, you're playing their game for them. And this guy who's on the right of the party, by the way, pointed out to me that there are way more Tory voters who would say that their alternative vote would go to the Lib Dems way more than would go to reform. So that's another danger. I think she's going to be very, very wary of. Okay, Anna Sturt, quick break and then back for more, Beaton Ock.

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