14 October 2024

Does race matter in British politics?

By

This has been the Wacky Races leadership contest. It is impossible to confidently predict which of Kemi Badenoch or Robert Jenrick will now emerge as Conservative Party leader. 

Cock-ups and botched conspiracies saw Conservative MPs eliminate James Cleverly by mistake. A handful of his own voters cast a hapless tactical vote. More important, numerically, was that most of Tom Tugendhat’s 20 supporters thought that the final vote was primarily a choice of a runner-up. Cleverly fell just three votes short of making the run-off.

So Jenrick versus Badenoch is an accidental leadership run-off. It will have different dynamics from the contest that the campaigns were preparing for.

With a candidate from the rival wings of the party, about a third of members on the Right would have been likely to vote for whichever of Jenrick or Badenoch had made it through – and up to a third would have been pretty sure to vote for the rival. Who won and by how much could have come down to a swing segment on the centre-right of the party.

Now, party members across the spectrum of views all face a choice that they did not expect. There will be a fierce battle to be the more authentic candidate of the party’s Right. But the most up-for-grabs votes may be from those party members who would have been surprised at the idea of backing Badenoch or Jenrick – but who must now choose between them.

The campaign was always likely to matter – as the dramatic shifts of opinion during the week of the party conference showed. With Badenoch and Jenrick both having mixed reviews that week, a televised leadership debate could have a dramatic impact too – including in showing which of the candidates might try to extend their appeal more broadly across the spectrum of party opinion.

Kemi Badenoch has begun as the bookmakers’ favourite – but it is not clear if she does begin with quite so strong a lead as many think. She has led Jenrick in ConservativeHome member surveys by 13 points and 20 points – but by only four points in a YouGov poll. The ConservativeHome survey is a large opt-in survey of verified party members – with over a thousand participants, almost 1% of the entire membership. Those who take part will tend to have higher levels of political activism than the average member. This suggests that Badenoch has momentum among the highly active – but the survey may serve less well as a guide to the views of the membership as a whole.

In the 2019 and 2022 contests, ConservativeHome surveys underestimated support for Jeremy Hunt and Rishi Sunak by about 10 points. It is not clear what that might signal for a Badenoch-Jenrick contest.

One thing that will not decide the contest is Badenoch’s ethnicity. That Liz Truss defeated Rishi Sunak led some, who found that result unfathomable, to assume that race may have been decisive – and to ask whether the Conservative membership could vote for a black leader.  But this is simply a zombie theory – requiring absurd contortions of logic once any evidence is considered.

After all, no man has ever yet beaten a woman in a Conservative leadership run-off either, based on the same sample size of one selection out of the four Conservative contests to go to the membership. Badenoch defeating Jenrick could make that score two-nil to female candidates – but that would hardly show that gender had become a significant hurdle, or even an insurmountable hurdle.

How does this theory explain how Kemi Badenoch was preferred to both candidates that summer by a 60-30 margin? If race cost Sunak support, how did he get 15,000 more votes than Jeremy Hunt’s leadership campaign in 2019? All the 2022 result firmly proved is that 43% of Conservative members did vote for one specific ethnic minority candidate. That is obviously not the ceiling for a non-white Conservative. That would require the absurd premise that none of those who voted for Liz Truss (who happened to include both Badenoch and Cleverly) could vote for a different ethnic minority candidate to Rishi Sunak.

In the post-conference ConservativeHome survey, the two minority candidates had 57% of first preferences and the two white candidates 31% of the vote. The most common first-second preference combinations were Jenrick/Badenoch (48%) and Tugendhat/Cleverly (47%).  The least popular was Jenrick/Tugendhat, at just 5% – because politics and factions are obviously central while candidate ethnicity is marginal.

A toxic racist online fringe insist on calling Badenoch by her maiden name – Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke – and say that she should be regarded as African, not British. Yet this is rather more common among the likes of those expelled by Reform for being too racist than those inside the 2024 Conservative Party. That the overwhelming majority of Conservatives can vote for an ethnic minority co-partisan who shares their politics is not in serious doubt. Whether it is 95%, 97% or 99% who could do so would be a matter for reasonable debate. But even the marginal impact of a toxic fringe is complicated and offset by some strident right-wingers who see having a black champion of the anti-woke cause a potential asset for putting the anti-racist Left back in its box.

Badenoch says that she wants skin colour to be no more relevant than hair colour – but even a meritocratic society is a bit more complicated than that. Time for a thought experiment. Imagine she had an alter ego, let’s call her Kate Badenoch. A combative Conservative rising star of Scottish descent, Kate’s gender-critical views and jokes about jailing civil servants bring her both plaudits and brickbats. Maybe our imaginary Kate Badenoch’s marriage to an affluent Nigerian banker would still enable her to pen a Mail column entitled ‘Why SHOULD my mixed-race children have to pick a side – just to satisfy the identity politics zealots tearing our society asunder?’. However, one can imagine the white British parent of the same mixed-race children would probably get fewer column inches.

The truth is that both Badenoch’s political voice and its reception do reflect her formative experiences – as a young black female Conservative, born in Britain before being schooled in Nigeria. Her self-identity as a first-generation migrant who ‘chose Britain’ when she returned as a 16-year-old can make her more optimistic than those like Jenrick who talk about the pace of change as an existential threat to British identity. Yet Badenoch and Jenrick’s contrasting life experiences have led them to broadly similar political perspectives on the Conservative Right. It is for the party to now decide which will make their more effective champion. 

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Sunder Katwala is Director of British Future and author of ‘How To Be a Patriot’.

Columns are the author's own opinion and do not necessarily reflect the views of CapX.