Kemi Badenoch ran for Conservative leader promising to be a unifier, and her first Shadow Cabinet certainly seems to have been constructed in that spirit.
Vanquished rivals Robert Jenrick, Priti Patel and Mel Stride all received frontbench roles (James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat both indicated they wouldn’t take one). She has also made appointments from both the Left and Right: Neil O’Brien is in as Shadow Education Minister, while the new co-chairman of the party, Nigel Huddleston, sits on the board of the Tory Reform Group.
Of course, she couldn’t have excluded too many people even if she wanted to. The brutal reality of July’s shattering defeat, and the inexorable expansion of the payroll vote over the last couple of decades, is that there are now fewer Conservative MPs than there are Labour ones with government positions.
Exclude those who have either chosen to return to the backbenches, those chairing select committees and those who few leaders would ever consider for a frontbench position even in Opposition, and Badenoch simply did not and does not have room to leave people out; even as it is, a lot of Tory MPs are going to be wearing two hats just to fill all the positions.
This acute personnel shortage has another big implication, too. With such a small talent pool to draw upon, the Conservative leader simply cannot afford to have more than a handful of resignations. One or two, perhaps – there is a ‘break glass in case of emergency’ Jeremy Hunt on the backbenches – but no more.
As a result, her appointees will (or at least, could) have enormous say over the policy direction of the Tory Party over the next few years. That spells trouble.
Badenoch’s victory in the leadership contest was more than a little bit like Keir Starmer’s at the general election. By saying absolutely nothing that would frighten the horses, she was able to win support from all wings of the party, especially One Nation figures opposed to Jenrick’s explicit proposals for major policy changes on things such as the ECHR.
The upshot of that, however, is that nobody who endorsed Badenoch for leader feels that they have committed themselves to anything. People like William Hague praised her for sticking to broad principles, but the previous government went to its grave perfectly capable of talking about its nominal principles.
That wasn’t where the problem lay. The problem was its apparent inability to govern in accordance with them: Rishi Sunak boasted of being a tax cutter even as taxes went up; successive manifestos promised to get a grip on immigration even as net inflows soared. TS Eliot probably best summed up the challenge:
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
Badenoch has promised to lead by consensus. But there is no consensus within the Conservative Party where it really matters. The words, the incantations of Toryism – ‘small state’, ‘personal responsibility’, ‘lower taxes’ – still come easy. But the implementation does not. That’s why ‘party unity’ ended up paralysing Rishi Sunak’s Government, and why it may well do the same to Badenoch’s Opposition.
Of course, in opposition that’s easier to get away with. You can, as the Leader did on Kuenssberg on Sunday, simply say that you’d cut taxes without cutting services. Trade-offs are hard, but there is no immediate imperative for an opposition to make them.
The problem is that the Conservative Party needs to confront these issues. It won’t be able to make credible promises on cutting taxes or immigration until it can at least explain to the voters why it failed to do so last time.
Yet none of Badenoch’s appointments suggest the rightward lurch some of her critics outside the party feared. Stride, in the Treasury role, is a One Nation type, while Jenrick, one of the most cogent immigration restrictionists, has been shunted to a role that doesn’t really touch on the issue, although O’Brien’s deployment to education could augur some tough promises on international students (he’s the author of ‘The Deliveroo Visa Scandal’).
There are all sorts of things that could trip Badenoch up over the next couple of years. But assuming she doesn’t self-destruct, her leadership will stand or fall on whether she is able, or indeed even willing, to try and force the Conservative Party to confront a lot of hard truths and difficult choices it would rather avoid.
But with the shrunken parliamentary party giving her very little leverage, Badenoch may well end up, despite her imperial leadership campaign, a prisoner of the Shadow Cabinet.
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