Kemi Badenoch is the future of conservatism

The Tories suspect they’ll lose the next election; the battle for leader after that is the one that counts

Here’s my prediction. The Tories will lose the next election. There will be an almighty battle for the soul of the Conservative Party. Kemi Badenoch will win. How’s that for an opening paragraph?

To take a few steps back, this leadership campaign is a dud. The broadcast media calls it “bitter” and “personal”, but it’s neither: it’s polite, it’s dull, it features two competent administrators who disagree over one, albeit profound, point about taxes. Rishi would balance the books, then cut taxes; Liz would cut them now, unleashing growth that balances the books down the road. “I’m with her,” but it’s hardly Hillary v Trump, is it?

The broadcasters talk about “blue-on-blue” warfare because it gets ratings, but also because they don’t understand Tories, who they assume are Neanderthals. The phrase, “it’s up to the Conservative Party to decide,” is delivered in a tone that suggests our next PM will be chosen by a grand council of the Ku Klux Klan.

Meanwhile, much of Westminster is apathetic. Some MPS suspect Boris will be missed; others are furious at the treatment of Penny Mordaunt, the only candidate whose character was truly assassinated. Government has largely stopped functioning: Putin could ring ahead to say he’s about to invade and he’d get an answerphone.

Tories are asking themselves what they’ve actually achieved in office (inflation, welfare and immigration are out of control) and there’s a widespread expectation that they’re going to lose to Labour – hence why intelligences greater than our own are already trying to figure out who will make the biggest splash in opposition. There’s probably greater interest in the men and women who lost the leadership election than for the brave kids who made the final round. We’ve our eye on one in particular.

“The name’s Badenoch, Kemi Badenoch.” That’s Bay-denock, by the way, not Bad-ee-nock as I keep hearing on TV (Barack and Kamala had to be pronounced correctly, but no one bothers when the subject is a Tory).

Look, if Special K goes all the way to leader of the Tories, it’ll be because of her ideas and her talent for putting them across. But she is a black woman and, of course, there are going to be a billion think pieces written about it. All I’ll say for now is what she has said: she is proudly Nigerian; growing up in an unstable country for 16 years can make you appreciate what we’ve built in Britain; and Nigerians tend to be, contrary to what the Left presumes, quite Right-wing.

Millennial conservatives are comfortably globalised; they are also into truth-telling. Badenoch’s voice rings with the impatience of a cohort that has fallen so far behind that it doesn’t have time to waste on lying, so expect the Tory party of the future to say that you can’t spend what you don’t earn, that the Left’s obsession with race is divisive and that a trans woman is not a woman.

Moreover, the coming conservatism will be aggressively civilisational. Rishi and Liz are the last gasp of Thatcher; the goal of their politics is to help people make more money, to live independently.

The new conservatives dislike taxes, too, but they sense that the Right has been wrong to shy away from cultural issues on the false assumption that they are a fringe debate. In reality, if you’re not fighting the culture war, you’re losing it, and you can’t have a good economy if your society is decadent. The way that lockdown has transformed popular attitudes towards work risks becoming a case in point.

If you don’t make a compelling case for markets, family, church or nation, support for all these will die and the West will weaken – while other systems, Russian or Chinese, dominate the globe.

Kemi Badenoch speaks for conservatives who think Britain is in serious danger of cracking up. They read Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson; they watch Thomas Sowell on Youtube. I like to bench press to Malcolm Muggeridge, which is the most Right-wing thing you’ll read all day.

The belief that the culture war is not incidental but central is going to be resisted by party elites, which is why I imagine the battle for opposition leader will be far more interesting than this contest, for there will be those who will argue that a confrontational style of conservatism isn’t conservative at all. “Is it not the Tory mission to build consensus?” they will ask. And a lot of MPS simply won’t like being told they are wrong.

Last week, Michael Gove, explaining his support for Badenoch said that working with her: “I had the experience that I must imagine that Cabinet ministers had in the early 1980s, in finding that some of the verities that they had held dear were being taken apart brick by brick by a young woman who was easily their intellectual superior.”

That’s quite an endorsement. It’s also a warning. Just as the wets had to give way to Thatcherism, anyone who wants to be on the Badenoch bus, or compete with her, has to embrace a more muscular politics.

For myself, I rather enjoyed Boris’s style of government, lazy and arch, the Roger Moore-era of Toryism. But the Kemites would have us put down our Martinis and cigars, saying that if we want to keep ’em, we’ll have to fight for them; lose some weight, punch below the belt. It’s all about to go a bit Daniel Craig in the world of conservatism.