There was an air of unreality about Kemi Badenoch’s end-of-year interview on Radio 4. It felt like listening to a new football manager who has taken over a team that is on the slide. They’re not going to rush, they’re taking their time, playing themselves in, working out strengths and weaknesses, which gaps need filling and the players they can afford to discard.
The trouble is, all the while they’re getting beaten, the season is running out and the threat of relegation moves ever nearer. For Manchester United and its new coach, Ruben Amorim, think Tories and Badenoch.
Of course, Badenoch does not want to repeat the same mistakes of previous leaders; of course, she wants to get it right and not go hell for leather down a path that only serves to weaken the party even further. She has, as well, the luxury of knowing that Labour has a thumping majority and there will not be a general election until 2029. Why not sit back and watch Sir Keir Starmer and his colleagues mess things up, let them do all the work for you?
That would be fine if there was only Labour to worry about. But there isn’t. There’s a new competitor, who, every day that passes, is gaining more and more ground.
Her inaction is only highlighting Nigel Farage’s drive and growing confidence. Who hogged the headlines with his trip to meet Elon Musk and seal potentially the biggest political donation in UK history? He did. Who was out, meeting and greeting hunt-goers, traditionally a bedrock of Conservative support? He was. Who was celebrating on camera as his fledgling Reform UK’s membership seemingly overtook the Tory total? Farage.
In business terms, Farage is gaining market share. Badenoch complaining that his numbers were cooked was the equivalent of the football boss moaning about referees out to get their team – it does not affect the result, crucially it does not reverse the momentum.
Relying on the view, which Badenoch appears to be, that your organisation has been around forever – that it’s produced numerous prime ministers and not for nothing is it regarded as the most successful political campaigning body anywhere in history – is not enough.
It’s akin to the Lord King of Wartnaby the late chair of British Airways, refusing to take Richard Branson seriously and worse, failing to accept that anyone else did. His was the “world’s favourite airline”; Virgin, headed by a bearded, ex-hippy who wore baggy jumpers instead of a pinstripe suit, had no chance. Look what happened: Virgin grew in popularity and ate away at BA’s hegemony; the latter tried not to be seen to be concerned in public, while privately launching a “dirty tricks” campaign against the newcomer. When that unravelled spectacularly, King’s company was a laughing stock, no longer worthy of that “favourite” title.
It was only when BA returned to basics, improving its customer service and competing on price and reach, that some sort of order was restored. But the damage had been done: BA never recovered its former lustre.
As the party of business, the Tories should understand this. Coincidentally, the current and mounting travails of that community present them with an immediate opportunity to hit back and to slow Reform’s apparently relentless and accelerating rise.
Business distrusts Farage. He was the promoter of Brexit – a cause that, ironically, sparked palpitations among Badenoch’s predecessors and saw them respond in kind. He’s cheeky and irreverent, given to broad brush gestures and grandstanding rather than supplying concrete detail. His economic policy remains sketchy, likewise how he will bolster a City and industry fighting ever-fiercer globalisation. Posing with the protesting farmers and hunters is all very well, but Britain’s high streets, company offices and industrial estates are suffering.
On the evidence so far, Labour does not have an answer. It’s intent on milking the “£22bn black hole” inherited from the Tories as continued justification for tax rises – increases which fall on business, only adding to its woes. Starmer is going out of his way to appease his trade union backers, bringing in workers’ protection laws that again serve to add to the pressures confronting businesses. For their part too, the City and industry feel badly let down, even betrayed, by a Labour administration that wooed them constantly in the run-up to polling day, to then clobber them once in office.
By not saying anything, Badenoch is allowing a vacuum to be created. She must know as a matter of urgency that your opponents happily step into vacuums you leave. At present, she can come out and swing business, the Tory pillar down the ages, behind her. Farage, though, is definitely no fool. Let him present his “10-point plan for strengthening Britain’s shops and businesses’” say, and that window is lost – Brexit or no Brexit, such is their desperation.
What does business want? Favourable treatment from Donald Trump’s US (Starmer’s appointment of someone in Lord Mandelson who in the past has been an outspoken critic of the incoming president, as ambassador to Washington is a gift in this respect); meaningful trade deals; closer ties with the EU (yes, Kemi, that may require some nose-holding but it must be done); easier immigration not harder, for those with the skills employers need; reduced and simplified business taxes; less red tape and stifling regulation; genuine reform of business rates.
Get that lot and more out there and the Tories could restore their reputation among business, boost their coffers, stop donors moving to Reform, and regain lost ground. Cogitating is not the answer; doing nothing is no longer an option. Just as in football, the league table does not lie.
