Badenoch’s speech may just have bought her a bit more time as Tory leader

It suits Labour to portray its battle with Reform as the only struggle that matters. Reform is even more incentivised to portray the Conservatives as defunct. So the central strategic challenge of Kemi Badenoch’s closing speech was to convince everyone that she and her party are still relevant to the fight for Britain’s future.

In the hall, she was a success. This was a well-constructed speech that carried an argument and was delivered with more confidence than might be expected from someone leading a party that is languishing in a poor third place in the opinion polls.

In contrast with the crass and leaden attempts at humour by some of her hapless colleagues in the shadow cabinet, she landed some well-crafted gags. Those at the expense of Peter Mandelson, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves drew hearty laughs. “My family,” as she referred to the party, warmed to her invocations of true blue tropes about enterprise, freedom and personal responsibility.

The Tories have spent much of their time in Manchester searching for potentially attractive points of distinction with their rivals. Withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, on the alleged grounds that it will help address the small boats, doesn’t do the trick because Nigel Farage got their first.

So the Badenoch battle cries include the Thatcher vintage claim that only the Tories can be trusted to control spending. “Whether it’s [Keir] Starmer, Farage, [Jeremy] Corbyn or [Ed] Davey – all these men are shaking the same magic money tree.”

Her headline-seeking “retail offers” included a promise to cut household energy bills, abolish business rates and scrap stamp duty on primary residences, apparently to be paid for by bearing down on the welfare budget in a way that the Tories didn’t manage when they had the power to do so.

Doctors will be banned from going on strike, police stop-and-search will be tripled and the Climate Change Act repealed if Badenoch ever becomes prime minister. “If” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

To someone watching from outside the Tory tribe, there was plenty of cognitive dissonance. In the course of a complaint that the state has become too big, she lamented: “Since Brexit and Covid, the size of the civil service has swollen by over a third.” Nowhere was there any acknowledgment that at least a part of that expansion may have something to do with the growth-sapping rupture with the EU that her party instigated.

She claimed they should be proud of the “great things” they did during 14 years of government to 2024, including five years in coalition with the Liberal Democrats, which rather failed to account for why these glory years ended with the most abject defeat in the party’s long history. There was a single fleeting acknowledgement that people “are still angry with us”.

Though billed as a speech that would confront “hard truths”, it swerved addressing why the Conservatives are even less popular now than they were at last year’s general election. There’s only so much truth the battered Tory party can take.

Badenoch’s speech was rousing enough to lift the spirits of her immediate audience. That matters to her because a demoralising performance would have increased rumblings about a challenge to her leadership.

Senior Tories, including some who generally think she hasn’t got what it takes, came away opining that she has bought herself a bit more time. Whether any of it will sound at all convincing to the electorate is much more moot.

Photograph by Danny Lawson/PA