How Badenoch will use Tory template of another 'outsider'

The thing to understand about Kemi Badenoch is that, for all her manifest shortcomings, she is not stupid.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Over the last few months, the incoming leader of the Conservative Party has given every indication that she, and those near to her, have given her future strategy some serious thought.

The question to which “Kemi” is the correct answer is: “How do we unite a shattered, electorally thrashed, ideologically obsessed party addicted to plotting?” Without overdoing the analogies too much, the Kemi answer is the template provided by Margaret Thatcher in opposition, from 1975 to 1979.

Thatcher, too, became leader after the Heath government fell almost exactly half a century ago and the party was trounced in two successive electoral defeats, the latter of which going down as one of the worst in its history. There then followed a period of drift and confusion over what the party stood for, with the new Labour government embarking on a series of classic tax, spend and borrow initiatives (the real precursor, by the way, to Starmerism).

Thatcher, like Badenoch, a relatively junior member of the cabinet, and not universally popular with colleagues, challenged Heath and won the leadership, with some skilful campaigning. Both could be said to be “outsiders” in terms of class and background. But, then again, the Tory party has always had a talent for accommodating and promoting to the leadership those with a “different” backstory: Disraeli the Jew, Bonar Law the Canadian, Major the Brixton boy.

What did Thatcher do next? What she didn’t do was to invent Thatcherism and do what she was later able to do over more than a decade in government. No – unmistakably a woman of the right who’d had private qualms about the Heath government’s statist instincts and interventionist tendencies, she felt she had to build an inclusive shadow cabinet and to develop new policies carefully and as collegiately as possible. The later, radical policies, the purge of the “wets” and the arrogance, came much later, when she was well ensconced in power.