Kemi Badenoch’s conference speech in Birmingham has framed the Conservative Party‘s task as nothing less than ‘a battle for the soul of this nation’, as the party attempts to rebuild its intellectual foundations after a heavy election defeat. The occasion has been accompanied by some unlikely theatrics, but the substance beneath the showmanship deserves attention.
Tapestries, Clarkson and the conference floor
The gathering has not been short of spectacle. A mock-up of the Bayeux Tapestry, retelling the story of British politics under Labour’s first two years in power, has drawn considerable footfall from delegates. By most accounts it has proven one of the more popular offerings at the conference, eclipsing at least one of the headline speakers in the queue for attention.
That headline speaker was Jeremy Clarkson, whom the party lured to address the hall from the main stage. Surveying the audience from that vantage point, he quipped that ‘a lot of people seem to have come dressed as seats’, a line that landed as a wry acknowledgement of the party’s reduced circumstances. Empty chairs notwithstanding, securing such a prominent public figure was, on any reading, something of a coup for the party’s organisers.
Clarkson, described by the party’s own supporters as the nation’s most famous farmer, drew attention that might otherwise have been harder to generate. Opposition parties rarely set the news agenda with ease when the government retains a spring in its step, and the Conservatives are still raw from the scale of their defeat.
Kemi Badenoch conference speech and the Thatcher parallel
The more substantial offering, however, arrived before the conference even opened. Badenoch published a 30,000-word essay titled The Right Way, explicitly modelled on the party’s 1970s document The Right Approach, which set out Margaret Thatcher’s political philosophy in the years before she took office.
That original document, produced roughly 50 years ago, stated that ‘the Conservative approach entails living within our means, paying our way in the world, mastering inflation, reviving the wealth-creating part of the economy and encouraging all those on whom it depends.’ The problems of today differ in their particulars, but Badenoch’s essay argues the remedies run along strikingly similar lines.
Her essay sets out the moral and economic case for a smaller state. It argues in favour of ‘private ownership and competition within a free market overseen by light-touch regulation.’ It also turns the criticism inward, lamenting that under successive governments, Conservative ones included, ‘responsibility has been drained away from individuals, families, businesses and communities by a state that grows not because the public wants it but because fewer and fewer things are expected to happen without it.’
That is an uncomfortable admission for a party that spent more than a decade in government, but the candour is deliberate. Badenoch is attempting to draw a clear line between the party’s recent record and the direction she wishes to take it.
The context matters. Labour has been extending state involvement into an increasing range of areas since taking office, and Badenoch’s essay is explicitly offered as an alternative account of how Britain should be governed. Where Labour sees an expanded public role as the answer, the essay argues the reverse: that the accumulation of state responsibility has itself become part of the problem.
In her speech, Badenoch promised ‘a battle of ideas’ as the organising frame for the years ahead. The Thatcher Foundation archives the thinking of the leader whose approach Badenoch is consciously invoking, and the comparison will be made whether or not Badenoch invites it. Whether this iteration of Conservative renewal catches on depends in no small part on whether the party can demonstrate, in practice and not merely in print, that it has learned from the decade it spent in power.
The 30,000-word essay is where that argument begins. The Birmingham conference is where it goes public.
