Our Survey: Members rally behind Badenoch – but remain split on Reform pact

It is no secret that Kemi Badenoch didn’t have the easiest start to her time at the Tory helm. So much so that in our own ConHome survey, polling party members, the people who had elected her, she once ended up on a flat zero. The people were not satisfied.

But as Giles wrote in his piece yesterday, there has been quite the change. The Tory Leader, in our first poll with no Robert Jenrick, was far, far out in front.

And the good news doesn’t stop there for Badenoch as the majority (80.5 per cent) feel they have a more favourable view of the Tory Leader than they did a year ago. Only a slim portion (3.3 per cent) say their view of Badenoch has gone down in the past year. It shows throughout the recent build in her results amidst the rest of the shadow cabinet in our league tables.

As many people around her will tell you, from within LOTO or her MPs, there has been a weight lifted off the Tory Leader following Jenrick’s departure. “She no longer has to keep looking over her shoulder,” one member of LOTO tells me. A senior Tory adds: “There is no alternative now. We either all get behind her or we fail.”

It seems this opinion has also bled through to Tory Party members in our survey, with an increased number (83.85 per cent) believing that Badenoch should be the person to lead the Conservatives into the next general election. That is an uplift of 22.55 per cent from the last time our survey asked the question. It did lead to one Tory MP groaning: “Oh god, she really will be the one to see us into the election, won’t she.”

Despite all this, however, almost half of these very same members (48 per cent) believe a deal should be done between the Conservative Party and Reform UK in the run up to the next general election. They think that in seats either party has a better chance of winning, the other should stand aside.

It is something that would require a lot of thought and strategic planning. There are the practical issues (how would you divvy these seats up?) and the presentational issues (how do you sell this to both voter bases?). Henry wrote a piece worth reading on it here.

Badenoch has insisted a pact is something she will not do, telling The Telegraph: “How do you do a deal with liars?” Nigel Farage has said much the same, at least publicly saying a pact is “not happening at any level” – even if the Financial Times reported that the Reform UK leader told donors a Tory pact is “inevitable”.

At least Badenoch’s denials will be reassuring to the 44.2 per cent of our survey who don’t want to see a deal and would like to see the party contest every seat they can.

LOTO have chosen a specific attack line to keep hitting at Reform UK: that it is a Nigel Farage one man band. I’m told that part of the thinking behind Badenoch’s joint press conferences with her shadow cabinet ministers, like Laura Trott and Mel Stride, is to drive home that message. One shadow cabinet member tells me Badenoch is “very good” at “making it clear it is a team effort”.

If anything, during the early stages of her leadership, Badenoch relied on it too much. “It was a game changer,” one LOTO member tells me, “when the realisation hit that everything has to come from her to be heard”.

They suspect that Reform have caught onto what the polling says about the image of it just being Farage’s project, hence the new spokesperson roles for Jenrick, Suella Braverman, Zia Yusuf and Richard Tice. But as one Reform source admitted to me: “If his helicopter crashes again, it is over. This isn’t the Jenrick party, it’s not Zia’s party. It can only be Farage’s party. That is how it works.” If Badenoch can keep establishing herself, and ideally start taking the Conservative Party polling with her, then perhaps the attack lines will stick and translate to voters.