Badenoch needs to stop running the Tory Party like a family firm

Loyalty can be an admirable quality. It is one that Kemi Badenoch values in spades – and something she requires from her closest allies. “It was part of what originally won me over,” one shadow cabinet minister tells me.

That one quality goes a way to explaining why many of her top backers, friends from her intake of 2017 MPs, are now those in top jobs: take Shadow Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster Alex Burghart MP, her PPS Julia Lopez MP, chief of staff Lee Rowley and even Rachel Maclean as CCHQ’s director of strategy. Former Department of Business and Trade ministers from her time as secretary of state supported her in the leadership contest and they too now have jobs like the party co-chairmen Nigel Huddleston and Lord Dominic Johnson. Old government spads of hers have similarly been rewarded with roles in her Leader of the Opposition Office (LOTO).

But that same shadow cabinet minister, who first saw Badenoch’s value of loyalty as a positive, now says: “It is not really working in anyone’s favour”.

The hangovers of people from government, another shadow cabinet minister adds: “Has led to a real case of governmentitis. LOTO is operating in its own silo as if it is a department. There isn’t that political opposition sense there.”

One Tory source puts the issue succinctly: “Badenoch prioritises loyalty to her over putting the best people in the job.”

It is a characterisation one Tory source hits back as “absurd”, claiming there is “a broad team across the party” in which Badenoch has brought people up who were not associated with her leadership campaign. But one of the new MPs disagrees and describes their experience of LOTO as a “closed book, stuck in a closed-loop”.

There are complaints from some within the shadow cabinet that Badenoch – trusting only those closest to her – is getting her inner-circle to effectively mark and cross-check all of their work, leading to mass build-up and a clogging of the system.

A shadow cabinet minister might send something to LOTO for approval, they say, and a week later they could still have not heard anything back: “Everything is running through Lee Rowley, but one person can’t be across everything and it is slowing things down.” Although one Tory source insists that, while Rowley is involved in decision making, things do get delegated.

Rowley, and the rest of Badenoch’s core group, another Tory source says, are serving as her “security blanket”, protecting from criticism Badenoch might face if she were to ever widen her feedback loop – and it is a comfort she seems “unable to overcome”.

“This bunker mentality – which hides a real insecurity – has come really early on,” they add, “it has developed in what should still, in theory, be something of a honeymoon period”.

I even felt the bunker mentality recently following my latest piece about internal party politics and the unhappiness of the new 2024 intake of Tory MPs, after which a senior whip sent a WhatsApp message to their fellow Tories branding me a “hostile journalist”.

To that MP, I’d politely point out the slight tautology in being a journalist and being hostile, but also say that – as one of those who informed me about your words suggested – if there is that much concern about ConHome reflecting what your own MPs are saying; the picture may not be so rosy and you might want to emerge from the bunker to address it properly with your colleagues.

But considering how highly Badenoch appears to value loyalty, it is not something she, nor her wider team, seem keen on fostering any wider than the group they already have; an interesting move when party leader, with a fifth of your party being new intake.

Even without this, MPs that I speak to recognise that her success is their success so they are actually, despite what some may think, keen for her leadership to succeed. The problem is that while the party doesn’t just plateau, but actually retreats in the polls – hitting 15 pts and a predicted 46 seats at the next election – Tory MPs feel they lack a plan of attack.

Badenoch allies insist it exists, but if that is the case, there is a problem communicating or translating said plan any wider than the core group. I asked one Badenoch ally: “Have you been getting involved in engagement with MPs and trying to get the message across?” They told me: “Party engagement is what the whips are for.” Any other MP I have since shared this message with is left similarly astonished by the nonchalant, flippant attitude of the response.

There have been signs of Badenoch herself starting to put some effort into at least the MP engagement side of this. After PMQs – where colleagues comment that she has made improvements – she has started hosting a pizza lunch of groups of different MPs, and recently she held another LOTO drinks for her colleagues. But it doesn’t entirely serve its purpose if, as one Tory source tells me, “she is stood in the corner speaking to Julia Lopez most of the time”.

They add: “If you can’t connect to your parliamentary colleagues, why are we putting you in a position to connect with the public?”

Lopez is spoken of with a certain warmth but a recognition that LOTO PPS, which theoretically involves much engagement and socialising between the backbenches and Badenoch, may not be the best fit for her – and perhaps a shadow job relating to DSIT, the department she enjoyed working in during government, may prove much more suitable.

There is a general fondness for Burghart too, who is running the policy process, but some in shadow cabinet have begun to get frustrated at the insistence of constant consultations for almost every policy proposal. “There are certain things I think we can say with confidence that we should be doing,” one shadow cabinet minister tells me, “without having to turn to a thinktank or a policy board to tell us”.

“We are meant to be politicians after all. We should be able to make some of our own decisions.”

LOTO meanwhile has requested that each month shadow cabinet ministers submit multiple separate reports on their progress in the brief to the political secretary and the policy programme. 

That means LOTO would be receiving more than 30 reports per month. Except, apparently, they’re not. There are shadow cabinet teams who claim to have simply stopped filing them because they take up so much time – and, guess what? Nobody appears to have noticed, or at least if they have, they don’t care as nobody has bothered to get in touch to ask for them either. 

There are policy renewal catchups in person, but these too have left some people feeling lacklustre. After one of the latest meetings, one shadow cabinet minister turned to another and asked: “Really, what are we doing with this?” It is a view shared by backbenchers who can’t quite understand what is happening at a distance from them. “Do they really exist?” one asks.

For more of the short-term policy announcements, which came about after Badenoch and co realised waiting two years was unsustainable, there is yet another grouping with a policy oversight committee – made up of Badenoch, Burghart, Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride and Shadow Leader of the House of Commons Jesse Norman – that meets weekly and asks shadow cabinet ministers to talk them through any urgent ideas. (Thankfully, positions on winter-fuel and a grooming gangs inquiry have led to some wins.)

The Shadow Chancellor being involved, most people I have spoken to understand, given various policy costing, but nobody has quite understood Norman’s involvement. Despite being recognised as an political thinker – having written books both on Edmund Burke and Adam Smith – there has been an underwhelming reception to his appearances in his Commons role (which in opposition should be a fantastically political job, with plenty of free hits), and few realised he was getting stuck in on the policy side. “Great, this now means if they’re secretly close, he’s just another one that won’t get reshuffled when he needs to,” one MP tells me. People assume if there is a personal connection between a member of the party or shadow cabinet and Badenoch, like Shadow Transport Secretary Gareth Bacon who is married to Badenoch’s long-time parliamentary office manager, then you’ll be safe in any future changes.

A close ally of Badenoch admits that internal processes haven’t quite been working or presenting the desired image: “We do need to trim the fat, slim things down and get a better flow.”

One way of trimming the fat that a number of fellow MPs, but also those working in CCHQ and the wider party suggest is letting go of some of these friends.

“You cannot run the party via family firm with appointments of people to jobs they are totally unsuited for just because you are close. It does not, nor should it, work like that if we want to be a serious political force,” one MP tells me.

A lot of ire is directed towards Rachel Maclean at CCHQ who one MP says was “made to feel special during the leadership campaign and has carried over in her appointment now as director of strategy”. A role that she is doing unpaid, which some say absolves her of certain critiques, but for others sparks anger that such an important role is going unsalaried.

“She is a duff appointment who is kicking around CCHQ, although she’s actually rarely there,” one Tory source says. 

But another Tory source rejects critiques of Maclean’s appointment as “nonsense”, pointing to her experience as a former MP, business owner and role on the Renewal2030 campaign.

Back in Government when Rishi Sunak sacked Maclean as housing minister, “Badenoch was apopletic at No.10 because even though she wasn’t in her department, it was her friend,” a minister at the time tells me. In many ways the defence of a friend is commendable, but does it actually mean Maclean was deserving of that role then or this role now?

There is a comparison to be found between Badenoch and Sunak in this regard, although it is not one she’d necessarily appreciate. In the first shadow cabinet after the election, Badenoch actually made a point of attacking Sunak’s decisions during the election, including, for example, telling his inner circle of the snap election before his cabinet. But as a number of Tory figures pointed out to me, look at her behaviour now and it is unlikely many MPs would be surprised if she did the same.

Like Sunak, one Tory source says, “she has a team that worships, but doesn’t challenge her”. Like Sunak, “she has a similar view of her own certainty and if you disagree you must be wrong”, they add: “Sunak’s was intellectual and Badenoch’s ideological.”

An MP adds: “Rishi had two years and people were tearing their hair out waiting for something bold and for him to show what he wanted the job for, but instead he was cautious. It is the same with Kemi where you question what she is waiting for? Because if next May is bad, she is going to get the chop. It seems she is afraid of her own shadow when the one thing we thought we’d get for sure is definition.”

“She is missing that killer instinct,” the Tory source suggests: “There are changes available to her, but if it involves sidelining, or worse, sacking some of her friends, then it appears unlikely to happen.”

But another Tory source tells me:  “Kemi Badenoch has a mandate to renew the Conservative Party, from top to bottom, and that is exactly what she is doing. 

“She has always been clear that this would not be easy, and nor would it happen overnight, but she is doing the hard yards necessary to rebuild the Party’s machinery, win back the trust of the country, and set out a serious policy platform to deliver in government – not just a series of announcements without any plans behind them like others are offering.”

One shadow cabinet minister encourages that Badenoch does some sort of end of term rally the troops address, perhaps to the 1922 committee, in order to reset her vision and her plans to wavering MPs, but it still seems unlikely as it means accepting that there is some sort of problem – and that is one thing Badenoch doesn’t enjoy doing.

Instead, it appears she will continue using the safety blanket, and deflecting. As one member of LOTO put it so succinctly: “These MPs need to stop moaning and get over themselves.”