Unveiling her first new policy, Kemi Badenoch has admitted her party is a long way from power

By ditching net zero, the Tory leader looks as if she is more interested in fighting off Nigel Farage than winning the country, writes John Rentoul

In her speech to launch the Tories’ new policy programme, Kemi Badenoch struck a humble note.

“The public made it very clear that the Conservative Party needed some time away from government,” she said of the general election defeat. “Our job now is to use that time wisely – just as Margaret Thatcher and David Cameron did in the generations past.”

This is a good tone for the leader of a defeated party to adopt. The first rule of rebuilding after losing an election is to accept that the voters were right. In Badenoch’s case, such was the scale of the defeat that this inevitably sounds like accepting that the party is going to be out of power for at least two parliaments.

The implication of that is that the Tory party’s first task is not to try to win the next election but to fight off the challenge from Nigel Farage, who is trying to replace it as the main opposition.

Which may be why Badenoch chose to ditch net zero as her first big policy. Opposition to the cost of going green is – immigration aside – one of the main planks of Reform’s platform.

Badenoch made the announcement with some skill. The speech itself – and the awkward questions asked afterwards – will be drowned out by today’s headlines on welfare cuts and the Trump-Putin phone call. But she secured the front pages of the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph this morning by issuing a preview of the speech. By the measure of news management: job done.

But the policy itself is essentially defensive. She may be right to say that the 2050 target for net zero is “impossible” but it is not a message that broadens the base of Tory support.

Public opinion on climate change policies is contradictory. People support net zero if they are asked a soft question but they don’t believe Britain will hit the target, and they are divided about whether the country should lead if other countries hold back.

To a politician seeking to build an election-winning coalition, this should be an invitation to try to shape opinion. If she were serious about trying to win, she should be sounding positive and optimistic; instead, she sounds as if she is saying “No, we can’t” – and that climate change cannot be stopped.

Pragmatism is all very well, and there are serious questions to be asked – particularly about the early targets of 2030, as well as the more distant 2050. But it is not always good politics. Rishi Sunak started the recalibration of Theresa May’s policy but it did him no good with the voters. Equally, his cancellation of the next stage of HS2 was the right thing to do – its costs were unjustifiable – but it was negative and seemed to be giving up on levelling up the North.

There is something admirable about politicians who are prepared to denounce fine-sounding plans for being unrealistic – especially if they are right – precisely because the media-political complex has such a bias in favour of announcing things and unveiling grand projects.

There were a lot of good lines in Badenoch’s speech about the unseriousness of policy-making – much of it aimed at recent Conservative governments. She is right that Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Act 2008, which set emissions targets in law, was passed with inadequate debate and hardly any idea of how the targets might be met. When Theresa May hugely increased the ambition of these targets, the “net zero by 2050” target was waved through parliament with 17 minutes of debate, as Rishi Sunak complained recently.

But there are a lot of good lines in many of Keir Starmer’s speeches about the end of “policies by press release”, the lack of attention to detail leaving the mess with which he is having to deal. He has promised to face all sorts of problems head on and fix them by adopting a new, serious approach. Let us see how that works out.

Meanwhile, Badenoch’s message might be summarised as: the last Tory government was a joke, Labour are going to make all the same mistakes… but don’t vote for Reform because I shall offer a more respectable version of the same thing. Let us also see how that works out.