KEMI Badenoch ‘has the X-factor’. She ‘can cut through to voters’ in a way nobody else can. She is the ‘anti-woke’ warrior, in tune with the zeitgeist. She is an ‘engineer’ who understands ‘complex systems’ and ‘gets stuff done’. She will neutralise Nigel Farage and Reform. And she will return the demoralised Tories to glory.
That’s what we were told last autumn when one member of the Tory elite class after another lined up to endorse Kemi Badenoch to become their next leader.
But only three months on, like most things the Tory elite class get their hands on — from our economy to our broken borders — Kemi Badenoch’s leadership is turning into a disaster.
Just look at the polls. While the idea of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch was always deeply seductive to a certain kind of Tory — white, baby boomer, Oxbridge graduate, status-conscious, morally righteous, loves having their conservative beliefs projected back to them by a black woman — the idea of Kemi Badenoch is definitely not igniting the same reaction out there in the wider country.
Far from it. In fact, were you to look objectively at the latest polling you would conclude that the Tory party, which the disillusioned masses put on life support at the general election last year, is finally about to be wheeled off to the mortuary.
While pretty much every Tory MP I have met in recent weeks has said openly they do not think Badenoch is up to the job, the polling also paints a clear and consistent picture: by every available measure, the Tory party is getting weaker, not stronger.
For a start, the party’s average level of support across all polls is continuing to slide into historically uncharted territory.
Since the week before Badenoch was crowned leader, the Tory party’s average support has continued to collapse from an already derisory 26 per cent to just 21.6 per cent today. In one poll, it’s as low as 18 per cent, a shocking number for one of the oldest and most successful political parties in the world.
That’s not all. Far from enjoying a honeymoon period, Badenoch’s personal leadership ratings are also falling through the floor.
According to YouGov this week, just 17 per cent of Brits — not even one in five — hold a favourable view of Badenoch, down five points on last month. More than half the country think unfavourably of her.
This means her ‘net rating’ has now slumped to minus 34, which basically means she is about as popular on these islands as Meghan Markle, which is saying something. Not even half of her own Tory voters say they like her.
Last week, pollsters Opinium found the same as YouGov. There has been no honeymoon: things are just getting worse.
Compared with November, when Badenoch became leader, they found voters today have become noticeably less likely to think Badenoch ‘sticks to her principles’, ‘is brave’, ‘is decisive’, ‘is competent’, ‘is a strong leader’, ‘is able to get things done’, ‘is likeable’, ‘can be trusted to take big decisions’, ‘is trustworthy’, ‘represents what most people think’ and ‘is in touch with ordinary people’. Only small minorities thought these things to begin with and even smaller numbers think them today.
But here’s the truly killer statistic — just 18 per cent of British people think Kemi Badenoch ‘looks like a prime minister in waiting’. Not even one-fifth of the country think this.
‘Give her more time,’ they’ll say, ‘it’s still early days.’ Maybe. But then maybe first impressions in politics, once they’re established, don’t really change.
The key problem for Badenoch is not just that ‘she’s not cutting through’; it’s that many people have already decided they don’t really like her and they certainly don’t like what she represents — the Tory party.
While only 17 per cent of Brits think favourably of Badenoch, only 24 per cent think favourably of the party she’s leading. The negatives are reinforcing the negatives while voters have simply tuned out of Tory Land. They’re just not interested in the Tory party any more.
There’s something else going on here which is even more significant. The rejection of Badenoch, the rejection of the Tories, is especially strong among the party’s previously core, pro-Brexit, culturally conservative voters who once underpinned the Brexit realignment.
After betraying these voters by promising to lower immigration only to morph into the most fanatically pro-immigration party in British history, the Tories, for the last three years, have been haemorrhaging support among these voters. But now their support is collapsing to entirely new lows. After taking one look at Badenoch, after watching the video in which she advocates mass immigration, and after watching Badenoch bring back the very people like Priti Patel who helped destroy this country by presiding over Boris Johnson’s mass immigration disaster and then just shrugged their shoulders, even more of these voters are now, understandably, running for the hills.
People tend to forget this but there was a time when the Tories once held three-quarters of all Brexit voters in the country. It was a remarkable achievement and one that reflected the party’s success at leaning into that post-Brexit realignment.
This is what I advised Boris Johnson to do when I briefed him: lean into the realignment not only because it offered a more durable electorate, comprised of a broad coalition of workers, non-graduates, pensioners and cultural conservatives but because it is also ‘geographically efficient’. These voters are spread across the country more efficiently than urban liberals in London, Oxford, Cambridge and Brighton.
Had the Tories remained committed to this realignment by supplying it with the right policies, including slashing immigration, defending the borders and vigorously opposing the Woke like Trump has done, they would have completely realigned British politics around an entirely new political and cultural zeitgeist.
But the Tories did not remain committed — quite the opposite. Instead of representing and respecting their new voters, the status-conscious Tory elite class did what the status-conscious Tory elite class always does: it preferred to listen to the likes of Gavin Barwell, William Hague, Iain Martin, Fraser Nelson, Rory Stewart and countless other urban liberals who masquerade as conservatives and have never come close to winning a general election.
‘Don’t be too right-wing!’ they said. ‘Stay away from the hard right!’ they said. ‘Don’t be like Nigel!’ they said. ‘Put Rishi Sunak in!’ they said. ‘No, wait, Kemi Badenoch!’
So as millions of voters watched this car crash, they deserted the Tories as the Tories had deserted them. By the time the hapless technocrat Rishi Sunak was done with the party, the share of Brexit voters who found the Tories appealing had plunged to 35 per cent. Today, under Badenoch, it’s fallen even further, to just 29 per cent.
In this way, a once solid and structurally sound electorate completely imploded because these voters can now sense what the Tory elite class knew all along: the people who run the Tory party never really wanted these voters, nor even liked them. Having to pander to pro-Brexit, anti-immigration, cultural conservatives, having actually to ‘be conservative’, was just too inconvenient and low-status for the Tory elite class in London. Better to hold one’s head up high, put in some leaders who are fashionable in SW1, and definitely not be like Nigel, even if the result is electoral oblivion.
Where have these voters gone? Unsurprisingly, they’ve continued to defect en masse to Nigel Farage and Reform, the one movement that does take them seriously and offers what they want.
An end to the extreme experiment with mass uncontrolled immigration. An exit from the European Convention on Human Rights so we can actually deport foreign offenders and control our borders. Genuine, unequivocal opposition to woke ideology. And an unapologetic commitment to the principle of national preference — that in everything from housing and the economy to foreign aid, British workers, British families, British children, will be prioritised in their own country to which they’ve contributed for generations.
This message is connecting. Shortly before Badenoch took over, Reform was averaging less than 19 per cent of the vote and attracting one in ten people who voted Tory in 2024. Today, Reform is averaging more than 26 per cent of the vote and attracting one in four people who voted Tory in 2024. Remember, this is after Reform had already taken one-quarter of the Tory party’s 2019 voters last year. Nigel Farage, in other words, is continuing to cannibalise the Tories.
What all this reflects is that as Kemi Badenoch fails to captivate the nation or even register among voters, it is now Nigel Farage and Reform, not the Tories, who are inheriting the realignment and becoming the main beneficiary of it. Crucially, the share of Brexit voters who are now supporting Reform is continuing to rocket, from 23 per cent a year ago to 49 per cent today. Reform, then, is not just the protest party the Tory elite class would like you to think it is: it is an electorally strong, coherent, and geographically efficient movement that is anchored in the same trends that have propelled Trump forward in America.
Kemi Badenoch is not neutralising Reform. Far from it. She is putting it on steroids. Reform is rapidly moving from being a significant but manageable threat on the Tory right flank to becoming the dominant right party in a two-party system. It’s finished ahead of the Tories in all but one of the most recent ten polls. More people think favourably of Farage than they do Badenoch. It’s cannibalising the Tory vote at alarming speed. And it’s much better positioned than the Tories to sweep through areas where the Tory brand is now utterly toxic, including the Labour heartlands.
The Tory elite class will tell their party not to panic, that if you vote Farage you get Starmer. But they are deluded. Such is the scale of change that is now taking place in British politics, such is the unpopularity of Kemi Badenoch, and such is the palpable dislike of the Tory elite class and all they have done to contribute to the destruction of this once great country, that this narrative is now being turned on its head. Today, it’s not ‘Vote Reform, get Labour’; it’s ‘Vote Tory, get Labour’. And the members of that out-of-touch, virtue-signalling, sneering, self-interested Tory elite class only have themselves to blame.
This article appeared in Matt Goodwin on February 20, 2025, and is republished by kind permission.
