Kemi Badenoch and the Potential Death of the UK’s Conservative Party

Kemi Badenoch speaking during Prime Minister’s Questions on November 6, 2024. Photo courtesy of the House of Commons.

As UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stood drenched from the rain on the steps of 10 Downing Street calling for a general election, the proverbial writing was already on the wall. After 14 years of Conservative rule and five prime ministers that resulted in austerity measures leading to the highest child poverty rates in the UK since before World War II, a cost-of-living crisis, and a disastrous (Br)exit from the European Union, the end of Tory rule was imminent. Despite efforts by the Conservatives to hold on to their blue wall of traditional Tory constituencies across England, when the clock struck ten on the evening of July 4, there was no doubt that Sir Keir Starmer and the UK’s Labour Party would be moving into 10 Downing Street. For even the most pessimistic political observer, it was still shocking to see how disastrous the election was for the Tories. When the dust finally settled, the UK’s oldest and most successful political party had lost 251 seats in Parliament, including all of its seats in Wales, 12 of its cabinet ministers’ seats, and former Prime Minister Liz Truss’s seat. The worst election result in the Conservative Party’s 190-year history was followed just a day later by Rishi Sunak’s resignation as its leader, throwing the Tories into a leadership crisis worthy of a Shakespearean tragedy.

Having lost several top politicians, the scramble for leadership began, with six candidates throwing their hats into the ring. While James Cleverly, a more moderate MP, emerged as an early front-runner, a shock twist in the third round of internal party voting saw Cleverly eliminated from the race with Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick left standing as the final two candidates. It was Badenoch, who had previously described herself as an “enemy of wokeness,” called “not all cultures equally valid” when discussing Britain’s immigration policy, backpedaled on her promise to cut carbon emissions, and denounced maternity pay as “excessive,” who would eventually emerge victorious with 57 percent of the final vote.

The Conservative Party’s leadership contest had been understood by many as an opportunity for the Tories to redefine themselves amidst their recent misfortunes at the ballot box, with more moderate Conservatives, such as former Conservative MP Justine Greening, feeling that the Party’s long-term survival depended on them gaining back the political center it had ceded “to the Labour and Liberal Democrat parties, alienating millions of voters turned off by the constant culture warring.” James Cleverly, the more centrist candidate who, in early polling in the Leadership race, was the general public’s preferred choice, would have been the best choice for long-term survival. However, by electing Kemi Badenoch, a more right-wing figure, as Party Leader, the Conservatives have shown that they have failed to learn any lessons from the last general election when they were soundly defeated at the ballot box. Instead, the Tories have decided that their best course of action is not to rebuild and expand their current voting base but to double down by focusing on regaining populist, right-wing voters that had formerly been part of the Conservative rank and file that had defected to join the Reform UK Party and rejecting progressive positions on core issues of concern for voters under 30—two moves that could prove fatal to their long-term electoral prospects.

While it would undoubtedly help the Conservative Party in the short-term to regain the swath of the electorate they lost to Reform UK, the defection of these voters has underscored that many Conservatives have become permanently disillusioned with Tory governance and its many public failures and scandals, especially on the issue of immigration. The second most common answer given by Conservative party members as to why the Tories lost the general election was their failure to tackle immigration. Moreover, 86 percent of Reform UK voters when polled said they believe that migrants coming to the UK across the English Channel should all be immediately removed from the country and prevented from ever returning.

Polling data from the general election also showed that in the long-term, the Conservative Party is at risk of becoming entirely electorally irrelevant if they fail to reform their current platform, as many young voters are turning away from the Conservatives and other right-wing political parties in droves with only 8% of 18–24-year-old voters casting a vote for the Conservatives in the last general election. Overall, the percentage of young voters casting their vote for a center-left or left-wing party increased slightly from 73% of 18–24 year-old voters in the 2019 general election to 75% in 2024. The Tories, therefore, will need to take drastic measures to appeal to younger and more progressive voters if they have any chance of sustaining the Party’s future electoral relevance in a rapidly changing Britain. The election of Kemi Badenoch as Conservative leader can, therefore, only be described as consistent with the Conservative Party’s current lack of self-preservation, showing that the Tories have once again fallen folly to their hubris in choosing to pander to right-wing voters in a desperate bid to regain a footing with the aging electorate of 50+ year-old voters that voted for Reform UK in 2024—something it seems they have failed to do in the months since the Conservative Leadership election, as Reform UK managed to surpass Conservative Party membership numbers for the first time.

With this leadership contest, the Conservatives demonstrated that they lack a long-range strategy and are instead solely focused on their Party’s short-term future. By refusing to chart a new path forward, the Conservatives have potentially dealt themselves the equivalent of a political ‘death sentence’ at the ballot box with the election of Kemi Badenoch. For a Party that once boasted the likes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher among its members, it is a disgrace that the Tory’s only hope for future electoral relevance will primarily rely on the Labour government failing to deliver on any of its economic promises in the next five years. To hope for a failure of the British economy and a corresponding erosion in the standard of living of the British people is a damning statement on the state of the modern Conservative Party and is wildly out of line with the DNA of a party that was once seen as the champion of middle Britain.

Caitlin B. Anderson (GS ’25) is a staff writer at CPR studying political science and Middle Eastern and European Languages and Culture through Columbia University and Trinity College Dublin’s Dual BA program.