Kemi Badenoch will be the next Conservative leader. Here’s why.

08:39 BST - 04/09/2024

To the surprise of absolutely no-one, when the Tories suffered a landslide defeat after 14 miserable years in power, our embittered & humiliated now-former PM Rishi Sunak handed in his notice (though he does intend to stay on as an MP a-la Theresa May). As such, a roiling 6-person competition for who will succeed him as the leader for the heavily-battle-damaged Conservative party has been quietly chugging along for the past couple of months, not really taking up that much of the media’s time… rather lowkey, really.

In order to be an eligible candidate for the leadership election, one must be a Conservative MP (obviously - a non-MP leader is minor party bullshit!) & one must secure the nominations of 10 other Conservative MPs before the process begins. Obviously, after such a crippling loss the playing field has been slimmed significantly - the favourite for leader prior to the election was the now-unseated Penny Mordaunt - & the candidates that managed to bag the nomination are as follows:

• James Cleverly, the current Shadow Home Secretary;
• Kemi Badenoch, the current Shadow Housing & Communities Secretary
• Priti Patel, the former Home Secretary;
• Robert Jenrick, the former Minister of State for Immigration;
• Mel Stride, the current Shadow Work & Pensions Secretary;
• & Tom Tugendhat, the current Shadow Minister for Security.

I have been somewhat vocal about my belief that Kemi Badenoch will be the one to win the nomination & become the new Leader of the Opposition. As a matter of fact, I am so confident that she will win that I have placed 20 of my hard-earned pounds in the hands of the nearest bookies in the hope of winning a bet.

I’ve explained my reasoning to friends & various Discord VCs, & despite it not being particularly controversial I shall also explain it here because I feel compelled to write it down somewhere.

Why it won’t be Stride

Mel Stride is a completely unremarkable man & his campaign reflects that. It’s a fairly unambitious affair, with talk of having to regain the public’s trust after the complete & utter shitshow that was July’s elections. The one other thing his site mentions is wanting to overhaul & decentralise the party apparatus to increase the autonomy of local branches in matters of campaigning; a policy clearly designed to appeal to the grassroots, but not really something substantial enough to cut it as his #1 issue.

He was just another Literally Who backbencher until Rishi gave him the Pensions Secretary job, where he gained prominence as the one guy willing to be raked over the coals by TV news interviewers in order to praise Rishi’s regime with all of the fervour of a North Korean news anchor. He hasn’t really done much to build up much of a fanbase both among the Tories & with the public at large, & no amount of localist policies is really going to capture the imagination of the grassroots or his colleagues in the Commons.

Why it won’t be Tugendhat

Tom Tugendhat is something like the Mitt Romney of the Conservatives; the preferred fap material to centre-right pundits & columnists desperately praying for an imagined “moderate” to return the Tories to an imagined past of civility & tidiness. Like Mel, he’s promising to clean the party up & end infighting, along with promising not to break any promises, which of course is definitely a promise you can trust him not to break. His “moderate” chops only really emerged recently when he ran against Truss for the leadership position back in 2022; he was mainly known for his very hawkish foreign policy takes (which got him sanctioned by China) up until then.

Tugendhat’s campaign is the sort of thing that has a lot of appeal to factions of the press & a contingent of his fellow MPs. However, it’s really not something I can see having any appeal to the grassroots, & no amount of mentioning that he served in Iraq is really going to make up for that, to be honest. “Honest respectable lad who can pick up & dust off the now-reviled conservative party” is a rather overrated political archetype, in my opinion.

Why it won’t be Patel

My God, Priti Patel… how times have changed. The woman who was once the feared & loathed face of the heartless Tory hard right has spent her stint in the backbenches increasingly overshadowed & left behind by the very rightwards lurch that she helped create thanks to her masterminding the catastrophic & dubiously-legal Rwanda Scheme. I don’t particularly see her regaining relevance any time soon now that there’s a bunch of other MPs doing her shtick but louder - her actually condemning the recent race riots that happened rather than using the opportunity to yell “TWO-TIER KIER” has, in my eyes, sealed her fate. Priti’s time in the limelight is over, the party has moved on.

Why it won’t be Cleverly

Cleverly is running firmly as the Tory establishment candidate, pretty bog-standard stuff, not really trying to rock the boat. I think he’s gonna make it through the first round at least, but after such a massive defeat a guy heavily-tied to the Sunak administration & not particularly much of a rabble-rouser is not going to become leader by playing it safe & promising business as usual. Demanding that Starmer be held to account can’t hide the obvious rot in the party that needs fixing in order to become a fighting force again!

Why it won’t be Jenrick

Robert Jenrick, like Patel & Badenoch, is running firmly on a hard-right platform; deport brown people, lynch trannies, shepherd dole scroungers to the nearest Job Centre, etc. Somewhat notoriously, his response to the recent race riots that rocked the nation were to bothsides the issue; acting like the counterprotesters were just as bad as the people trying to carry out a fucking pogrom & accused the Labour administration of pro-lefty biased justice; outflanking previous face of the Tory right Priti Patel in the process.

With this in mind, a fair amount of people (including a mutual of mine) have guessed that he’s going to win the nomination, & I certainly don’t think he’s going to be knocked out straight away. However, I think the main obstacle that’ll catch him out in the end is his complete lack of sincerity. He wasn’t always part of the Tory hard-right; he was a Remainer back in 2016 & he mainly toed the party line (only really going further to the right on issues related to Israel, which he is a staunch supporter of). He rather abruptly shifted tack in 2023, decrying the Rwanda Scheme as “not harsh enough” & resigning as Immigration Minister. He’s been ingratiating himself to the party’s right ever since, perhaps sensing the increasing levels of Hitlerism among the party grassroots (he’s made trying to court Reform voters an explicit plank of his platform).

He has acknowledged this ideological shift, attempting to justify it by saying that his tenure as Immigration Minister radicalised him, but I don’t buy it & I doubt a lot of the party will, either. Badenoch’s put in the hours; she’s committed to this culture war guff, not just giving it a go because it’s trendy to do so. Jenrick’s had far less time to really distinguish himself as anything other than an interchangeable relic from the Cameron era, a period of bland people in even blander suits (though the mutual mentioned earlier brought up the rather amusing prospect of Jenrick winning the contest & immediately dragging the party back to the centre in a sort of Reverse Starmer move).

Why it will be Badenoch

Badenoch is a seasoned veteran of the Tory culture wars: she used her maiden speech in the Commons to praise Brexit, she used her stint as Women’s & Equality Minister to rig the medical authorities & provide the ground for the Cass Review, she’s railed against “critical race theory”, she’s quite literally both-sidesed the BRITISH FUCKING EMPIRE - like I said above, she’s put in the hours. She’s no pretender (unlike Jenrick), & she’s shown herself to have been able to distinguish herself from her contemporaries rather like her fellow culture warrior of colour Suella Braverman. Where her & Braverman differ, however, is that Badenoch knows where to fall in line with the rest of the party when needed.

Braverman’s so self-absorbed that she’s incapable of shutting up when she’s in danger of dragging the rest of the party down with her antics, which was how she lost the Home Secretary job & it’s why she most likely didn’t have enough nominations to run in the leadership contest. It’s no good appealing to the grassroots if you’ve alienated all your fellow MPs, not with this electoral model! Badenoch knows this, & it’s why she’s the bookie’s favourite as well as mine.

There’s only really one thing that could sink Kemi by my estimation, & that’s the bullying accusations that have emerged as of recent. They’re probably true, let’s admit it, but I’ve only really seen more left-leaning outlets cover it, it resulted in no disciplinary action or investigations whatsoever, & fellow candidate Priti Patel emerged from an identical scandal with her standing within the party largely unscathed! I’m just not seeing it being enough to hand someone like Jenrick or Cleverly the win. Still, I guess we’ll find out next month, eh? Two of the candidates will be eliminated later today & while I’m nowhere near as confident to take out a bet on this prediction, my guess is that Stride & Patel will be the ones getting the chop.