In the wake of last month’s Conservative Party Conference, our survey found that party members were for the first time in a long while satisfied with Kemi Badenoch’s media profile. The big question was: could she maintain it?
A glance across this morning’s papers highlights the problem: in what ought to be a rich news environment, the Tories are clearly struggling to elbow their way into the conversation.
This report from the Daily Telegraph about reports that Rachel Reeves is considering breaking her manifesto promises on income tax does feature both Badenoch and Mel Stride, but the reader needs to plough on down to paragraph 32 if they want to find out what the Tories have to say about anything; the Times report on Bridget Phillip scrapping the English Baccalaureate has a couple of pars from Nick Gibb some three quarters of the way down (the current Shadow Education team are nowhere in evidence); the same paper has an extended interview with Claire Coutinho focussed on her challenging pregnancy.
But on other stories, which ought to be rich pickings, the Conservatives get no mention at all. Not in this piece from the FT about young people swinging hard to the right on welfare and crime, where the only two parties discussed are Reform UK and the Greens, nor in this report from the Telegraph about Nigel Farage abandoning his plans for tax cuts. Even this Times article about Reform councils u-turning on tax rises only mentions the Tories – in the very last paragraph – because Reform sources mentioned them.
Doubtless CCHQ would grumble about this. But a politician complaining about the media is, as Enoch Powell once put it, like a sailor complaining about the sea. This is simply the news environment which the Conservative Party has now to navigate: one with far more players than is historically normal, and where a piece doesn’t feel incomplete if it hasn’t checked in with the Tories.
This is perhaps the most important difference between the challenge facing Badenoch and that which faced William Hague when he took the helm after the party’s last shattering rout in 1997. Then, the Conservatives not only had more MPs but were still very obviously the country’s opposition party; untouchable as New Labour often appeared, at least if you wanted to cover the other parties the Tories were at the top of the list.
Unfortunately, Badenoch’s initial strategy for opposition seems to have been calibrated for that vanished age. As I noted last Thursday, the trajectory of the party’s polling since the election has several distinct phases: gaining on Labour up until the end of the leadership contest, decline immediately afterwards, and a sharper decline ahead of the local elections after Reform overtook it.
Some of this might reflect voters who simply don’t like the new leader. But I suspect more of it represents the brutal reality of the attention economy. The leadership contest kept the Conservatives in the spotlight, as they were used to from government; they then more or less voluntarily ceded it to Reform, and then suffered again once the latter overtook them in the polls and crossed an important credibility threshold.
As I’ve said several times, one of the big question marks over Badenoch’s leadership bid was always her distaste for the media. Her profile in government was built skillfully on a small number of interventions, a tactic which works only when the media comes to you. Being leader of the opposition is a very different beast.
It isn’t necessarily good for either the party or the country that the nation now runs on this attention-deficit news cycle, but it does. The aftermath of the leadership contest should have been a period of frenzied activity as the party fought, at all costs, to win airtime and remain in the public consciousness (and ahead of Reform UK in the polls). Robert Jenrick’s endless videos might sometimes make seasoned hacks roll their eyes, but at least they get attention.
The test that Badenoch had to pass at conference was simple: can she use the spotlight when she has it? She passed that test; the media would have loved to leave Manchester writing about splits and drama, but it ended up writing mostly about her pledge to abolish Stamp Duty.
But the essential test of her broader leadership is whether she is able, and indeed willing, to do what it takes to win the spotlight when events don’t point it at her by default. On the latest evidence, that one she has yet to pass.
