Badenoch wants a battle of ideas – we should wish her well
One week before emerging victorious in the Conservative leadership race, Kemi Badenoch was asked by Sophy Ridge on Sky News whether she wanted to be Prime Minister. “I don’t think it’s about wanting to be prime minister,” she said, adding, “I think it’s not an award. It’s not like winning a competition. It’s actually a very serious job that requires a lot of sacrifice.”
It was characteristic of the woman who now leads His Majesty’s Loyal Opposition to give an unexpected answer and a response so far removed from the scripted reactions we’ve come to expect from senior politicians.
Badenoch said that her focus would instead be on “making the country more Conservative.” Coming off the back of 14 years of Conservative rule, this might seem like an odd place to start.
But anyone paying attention to her pitch for the Tory leadership would know that she believes her party failed to use its time in office to push back against the kind of orthodoxy that saw a Conservative government raise taxes to a record high, an accolade they held until Labour defeated them at the polls and set about raising them even further.
In this context, Badenoch is interested in a battle of ideas and although she is associated with culture war issues her real zeal is reserved for meatier debates. Her challenge is enormous, both in terms of party management and rebuilding from a knock-out blow, but her most important contribution to public life could well be the provision of intellectual opposition at a time when the stakes are dangerously high.
In this Herculean task, she will find a valuable primer published this week by the Centre for Policy Studies, which warns that by the end of this decade, state spending is set to increase to an eye-watering £1.5 trillion, fuelled by potentially ruinous levels of taxation and borrowing.
The report warns that without an unexpected growth bonanza (what the IFS called Labour “getting lucky” on growth) Britain faces another decade of stagnation.
This is where Badenoch can focus her fire. It won’t be an even fight (small-state conservatism doesn’t get much of a hearing at the best of times) but somebody has to lead the charge and there are trillions of reasons why we should wish Badenoch well.