Can Kemi Badenoch’s new policy idea save her from local election disaster?

Another ‘culture war’ talking point from the Tories is aimed at neutralising the threat from Nigel Farage but, says Sean O’Grady, it seems unlikely to prevent a council election humiliation for their leader

Badenoch is spinning as hard as she can to manage expectations (PA)

Kemi Badenoch is facing a difficult set of local elections, with Nigel Farage threatening, as the prime minister put it in the Commons today, to “eat the Tory party for breakfast”, and Robert Jenrick, whom she defeated for the leadership last year, making his availability to replace her all too obvious.

Yet she declares that she will take her time to get her Conservative Party’s policies right and won’t be hurried on the detail. Critics say there’s a policy vacuum; she says she’s an engineer who insists on a plan to underpin every policy, and that there is plenty of time to get things right.

Some wonder how long she has got left to do so...

Is there a new policy?

Yes indeed, and it’s a typically “Kemi” signature one, focusing yet again on a “culture wars” issue. Even as the stock markets crash, the dollar slides and the IMF slashes the UK’s growth forecasts, Badenoch wants to end the recording of non-crime hate incidents by police forces in England and Wales, except in a few cases. She says they cause the police to waste time “chasing ideology and grievance instead of justice”.

The government says that the move “would prevent the police monitoring serious antisemitism and other racist incidents”. The previous government, in which Badenoch served, in any case introduced guidelines to prevent trivial and non-intentional incidents from being included. Badenoch says the guidelines are ignored, “so it’s time to get rid of them completely”.

What’s it got to do with the local elections?

Not much. It’s a central government matter, and there aren’t even any police and crime commissioner elections happening on 1 May. It suggests an obsession with the culture wars stuff, which might be fine if Farage wasn’t better at it.

Badenoch is spinning as hard as she can in an effort to manage expectations, saying that these elections will be “very difficult”. She has a point. These elections are mostly in the English counties, traditionally fertile land for the Conservatives. They were last fought in 2021, during the successful Covid vaccine rollout, when Boris Johnson was at the height of his popularity and no one was interested in what the new and relatively obscure leader of the opposition, Keir Starmer, had to say about anything.

The Tories won two-thirds of the seats, which is unrepeatable. Opinion polls suggest they will fall far short. Badenoch’s failure to capitalise on the government’s unpopularity is worrying her followers. She’s likely to lead her party to a humiliating result, winning a lower share of the vote than Reform UK.

What will happen?

The results will inevitably be bad and, in the aftermath, there’ll be renewed speculation about Badenoch’s leadership. Starmer tried to encourage it at Prime Minister’s Questions, gesturing at Conservative MPs and saying: “Nobody believes, none of them, that she’s going to lead them into the next election.”

Starmer made a great deal out of Jenrick’s absence from the chamber as he quoted the leaked recording in which the shadow justice secretary told students last month that he was determined to unite the right and “to bring this coalition together”. According to the prime minister, this meant that Jenrick and Farage would “cook up their joint manifesto”, involving “NHS charging, a pro-Russia foreign policy and an end to workers’ rights”.

Is Badenoch’s leadership really precarious?

It’s pretty obvious that Jenrick hasn’t lost his ambition, and he’s been unusually active and successful for a Tory backbencher. He has claimed credit for the government’s U-turns on “two-tier” sentencing guidelines, and now the planned publication of crime and nationality “league tables”. He is more hardline on immigration and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights than Badenoch, and he has been ranging far off his justice portfolio on social media.

While he is on manoeuvres, others who were disappointed last time round – James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat – might also like another run.

The chances are that it will be too difficult, and bloody, to oust Badenoch this time, and that to do so would stir an even more uncomfortable debate about the Conservatives’ relationship with Reform UK. However, the Tories’ chief engineer will need to start churning out the blueprints for victory soon.