The Conservative Party is at a pivotal point in its history. After 14 years of Conservative-led government, we have just suffered our heaviest ever defeat and the country is saddled with the most left-wing government in decades.
The scale of the Party’s rejection by the electorate has inevitably led to the requirement for new leadership and the contest to replace Rishi Sunak is underway, with four candidates due to put their case at the Conservative Party Conference next week.
All of them bring qualities to the table. Which one should members choose?
To answer that, I think it is important to consider why we lost, what we can do to repair the damage and who is best placed to provide the leadership that is needed.
The first thing to note is that, unlike 1997, there is no love for the incoming Labour government. Despite their large Parliamentary majority, the Labour Party secured fewer votes on a much lower turnout than they achieved in 2019.
The impact of a combination of Reform UK and apathy – people not voting at all – handed seats to Labour and the Liberal Democrats that would normally be far out of their reach. It is not the case that Labour won the 2024 election – rather, the Conservative Party emphatically lost it.
There has been, and will continue to be, much analysis as to the cause of the discontent that led to the rejection of the Conservative Party. My own experience on the doorstep told me that people thought the Conservative Party had totally lost its way – no one knew what the party stood for any longer.
The perception of years of creeping leftwards, of almost apologising for being Conservative and feeling the need to couch arguments in the language of the left, almost as though that were necessary to make Conservatives seem like nice people, left natural Conservative voters bemused.
Indiscipline, infighting and a complete failure in later years to deliver on core Conservative principles – such as lower taxes, strong borders and tough law and order – added to the feeling of a party that had lost its way.
These are facts that have to be confronted because if we shy away from the reality of the diagnosis, we have no chance of fixing the problem.
The one candidate who has consistently faced this head-on is Kemi Badenoch.
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Kemi is an articulate and experienced politician of great resilience, who has shown time and again that she is an unapologetic Conservative who knows exactly what she believes in and why.
Throughout her time in politics, she has relentlessly and robustly taken the fight to Labour and regularly faces down the media when they try to derail her.
She is totally correct in her assertion that without core principles, we have nothing to unite around. In her, we have a potential leader who can talk to our values and core beliefs and use them to present the case for Conservative solutions.
A leader who can see off the threat to Reform UK without pandering to them, who can simultaneously show the Liberal Democrats for the valueless political opportunists they are. A leader who can hold Labour to account for the disaster they are already making of governing our country.
In Kemi Badenoch the Conservative Party has the opportunity to elect a leader who will put fight into the party, who will confidently re-state the case for conservatism and who will do what is necessary in the long term rather than what is convenient in the short term.
In short, a leader who can renew both our party and our country. It is vital that we take this opportunity.