No amount of sliding in the polls can shake Kemi Badenoch’s self-belief – or alter her party’s direction

Two years in to her leadership, Badenoch continues to take the Tories ever-rightwards, into comfort-zone Conservatism

What happens to a political leader who is too sure of themself? Sometimes, huge confidence is a very useful, self-fulfilling quality: persuading party colleagues, activists, donors and voters that more can be achieved than is usually thought possible. Such utter conviction can keep everyone believing while the actual practicalities of a political project are worked out.

Yet when an air of absolute certainty turns out to be overconfidence, the bubble bursts. The politician may be revealed as disastrously complacent and lacking in judgment, having delusions of grandeur, or being fundamentally in denial. Especially in our era of online mockery and instinctive contempt for politicians, an overconfident leader can end up as a laughing stock.

This week is the second anniversary of the start of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative leadership. So far, self-assuredness has been her tenure’s central feature, the one aspect that many voters and journalists have noticed. “There’s a new captain, there’s a new coach, there’s a new owner … which is all me,” she told GB News last month, after a party conference where activists chanted “Kemi” and her assertive persona pervaded everything, as if the party had found another Margaret Thatcher.

Badenoch’s speeches, interviews and Commons interventions come riskily spiced with contempt, self-congratulation and advice to supposedly lesser political mortals: “I was right”, “let me explain”, “let me tell them [the government] some home truths”. She and her party now present themselves in a similarly self-aggrandising way. Unlike Labour and the other parties, she says: “We live in the real world.” The Conservatives are the party of “common sense”, “the no-nonsense party” that “get stuff done”. A long pamphlet the party recently published, with Badenoch’s name on the cover, about how it would approach governing is a little smugly titled: “The Right Way”.

When she became leader, the Tories were at 26% in Politico’s rolling average of polls: barely above their 24% vote share in the 2024 general election, the worst in their history. After two years of Badenoch’s aggressive leadership, covered ever more approvingly by the rightwing media, accompanied by regular crises inside Labour and Reform UK, the Conservatives have fallen to 21%. The forecaster Electoral Calculus currently predicts they will win 128 seats at the next election, almost three times fewer than Labour – and even this paltry tally depends on the electoral system hugely favouring the Tories over the similarly disliked Reform UK.

During previous periods of defeat and great unpopularity, the Conservatives pored over their mistakes in government, reconsidered policies, reassessed how their party related to society, and changed direction fundamentally. After losing power in 1945 – after 14 years, as in 2024 – they accepted that in office they had not done enough to reduce unemployment, stimulate the economy, or develop the welfare state. After losing power in 1974, they ditched their kinder Conservatism for the ambitious counter-revolution of Thatcherism.

Despite their electoral position now being far worse than in either 1945 or 1974, no such reinventions have taken place under Badenoch. Instead, the Tories have continued to travel rightwards, not in new directions as under Thatcher, but deeper and deeper into a Conservative comfort zone, where they have been loitering most of the time since David Cameron abandoned his government’s brief experiments with liberal Toryism in the early 2010s.

In this comfort zone, traditional Conservative remedies such as deregulating business, building more prisons, cutting taxes for the prosperous and reducing the poor’s welfare benefits are always right – regardless of how society is changing, or whether recent Tory governments have actually applied them, or done so successfully. Brexit’s failure is not to be acknowledged. Net zero’s necessity is to be avoided. Yet according to the Tories, it is Labour, the Greens and Liberal Democrats – who are all trying to develop fresh approaches to the climate crisis, and the outflanking of Brexit by shifts in geopolitics – who are “not serious”, as Badenoch patronisingly puts it.

It’s tempting to ascribe this narrow-mindedness to her character, which seems to lack much capacity for self-criticism. But parts of her life story may also have helped create and maintain her predictable rightwing perspectives. “I was born into a relatively wealthy family,” she told the Nigerian newspaper Peoples Gazette in 2024. Her father “was a doctor who had lots of oil company patients … and got paid very well”. She was educated privately in Nigeria, later worked in London as a director of the elite bank Coutts, and married a Tory activist who was also privately educated and worked in the upper echelons of finance. She represents an affluent rural constituency, North West Essex, with an above-average proportion of wealthy homeowners and retirees, groups that dominate her party’s remaining national support. With the huge exception of racism, it’s not clear she has encountered many social forces during her life which might have made her rethink her outlook.

But the Tories’ complacency extends far beyond Badenoch. Conservatism can be a comfort zone ideology: wanting to conserve the status quo implies that you think things are essentially fine as they are. Only when that status quo, and specifically Tory-aligned interests within it, are seriously threatened does the party switch to its less common iconoclastic mode, as it did under Thatcher in the turbulent, increasingly egalitarian 1970s. One reason the Tories aren’t doing that now is that, for all the rightwing talk about millionaires fleeing the country, the rich, big business and the City of London are still doing well here.

For non-Tories, the party’s long, ongoing holiday from reality may seem something to relish. The Conservatives’ stark decline since the late 1980s – with only one big general election win since, in 2019 – is certainly a great change after centuries of Tory hegemony, and still insufficiently noticed or discussed.

But their stubborn attachment to the same old assumptions also helps keep British politics, and how much of the media cover it, and many voters think about it, skewed to the right, by making traditional Conservative ideas about the economy and society still seem fairly respectable, and therefore realistic. Badenoch’s cocky leadership may be abruptly terminated after the next election. But unless a more open-minded Tory replaces her – which is currently hard to imagine – the “common sense” politics she says she stands for will destructively linger on.