Here’s a fun quiz question for your Wednesday morning: what do Kemi Badenoch and the Princess of Wales have in common?
Answer: they are both Capricorns. Both hard grafters, highly ambitious, dedicated, disciplined, extremely practical – and loyal, almost to a fault.
At their best they exude confidence and ability; sometimes they can come across as a little self-satisfied, a bit too head-girly and often quite judgmental.
One has single-handedly revived the fortunes of the Royal Family at a time of great turmoil and trouble; the other, if yesterday’s speech was anything to go by, may yet do the same for the Conservative Party.
By all means scoff. I know my colleague and fellow podcaster Peter Hitchens will. (But then, what do you expect? He’s a classic Scorpio.) Badenoch herself certainly scoffed the other day when I bumped into her at an event and joked that I thought her strong, steady Capricorn energy was exactly what the Conservative Party needed right now.
She laughed, rolled her eyes and said she didn’t believe in all that woo-woo (again, a very Capricorn trait, not believing in woo-woo), but in my experience there’s some truth in this stuff.
My mother is a Capricorn, one of my best friends is a Capricorn, so I know the type well. If you’ve got a problem, call a Capricorn. They have an irritating habit of almost always being right about everything.
But if I’m honest, it’s not really Capricorn energy (much as I enjoy teasing Peter), it’s feminine energy. And that’s what we women do, isn’t it, when a bunch of blokes have made a gigantic mess of things? We clear up. We pick up the rubbish, load the dishwasher, fold the clothes, put away the empties.
Conservative Party leader Kemi Badenoch (centre), in the crowd at the launch of a ‘policy renewal process’, led by shadow cabinet members. The Tory leader exudes feminine energy, writes Sarah Vine
As Thatcher once said, paraphrasing St Francis, where there is discord, may we bring harmony. That’s what Badenoch is trying to do: sort out the Tories’ metaphorical sock drawer.
Badenoch realises that the party needs a complete reset: to stop, slow down and take stock, work out why and how it went wrong, re-centre itself and rediscover its core values.
It needs to plot a steady course and follow it, ignore the endless distractions of petty Westminster politics and the toxic whisperings of bad actors like Dominic Cummings, whose only interest these days seems to be power for the sake of power.
For their part, MPs in the parliamentary party need to lash themselves to the mast, block their ears to the siren call of endless leadership change, stop chasing that short-term dopamine hit and learn to play the long game.
Above all, the Tories need to recognise that they messed up, big time, and that if they ever want to be seen as a viable party again, they need to show they understand this and are prepared to put in the work needed to fix it.
Badenoch is by no means perfect. It’s no secret that a lot of people find her hard to deal with (personally, that’s not been my experience, but then I don’t work for her, and I’m not easily intimidated). She is not a Robert Jenrick or a Nigel Farage: she doesn’t exude that clubbable self-confidence. And, as a black woman, she will always have to work harder than many of her colleagues to win over certain voters.
But what she lacks in those departments she makes up for in others, not least a thorough understanding of the scale of the problem – and a pretty fearless plan of action to go about fixing it.
Yesterday’s announcement about net zero – and the admission that the current target is unrealistic, impractical and frankly too financially ruinous to contemplate – was only just the start of a forensic and unflinching programme.
Under her leadership, the party will re-examine its approach to every aspect of government, from prisons to education, transport to healthcare. It will engage with experts but also, as she said yesterday, involve notable antagonists, so that all ideas can be properly stress-tested. As she said herself: ‘Shutting out sceptics means your plans will never be robust.’
In an age of fast-food politics and narcissistic man-babies such as US President Trump and Russia’s Putin, Badenoch is swimming against the tide
This is an important point, because it not only shows an open mind, it’s also a recognition of one of the (many) things that went wrong for the last Conservative government, not just in terms of its own internal power struggles, where constructive debate was obscured by ego and jealously, but also when it came to Covid, the disastrous legacy of lockdown and the failure to stand up to vested interests such as the trans lobby, environmental pressure groups or the dreaded European Convention on Human Rights.
Listening to those who tell you what you don’t want to hear is the mark of a good leader. And yet it’s vanishingly rare in an age of narcissistic man-babies such as Trump and Putin.
Authority is one thing, and it’s important to command it; but politicians (or anyone in a position of power) who become trapped in their own echo chambers rarely achieve anything worthwhile or lasting. It’s vital to be on receive as well as transmit.
That concept runs counter to the prevailing cultural and political mood, where everyone seems to be broadcasting their own utterly non-negotiable opinion. The incessant need to fill the void, to feed the social media monster, produces endless pronouncements that grab attention but ultimately lack substance. Politics becomes like fast food: ultimately very bad for everyone’s health.
Badenoch is swimming against this tide, and for that I admire her.
While the likes of Farage prance around on TikTok, jumping on every hashtag, her focus is elsewhere – on the stuff that really matters.
Her critics decry her for this. She is always being urged to be more ‘proactive’, to get herself ‘out there’ more, to be more responsive to the political news cycle. After all, they argue somewhat unsubtly, it’s done wonders for her shadow justice secretary and runner-up in the leadership contest Robert Jenrick.
And it’s true, Jenrick is brilliant at framing important issues for an online audience. But beneath all that, there is hard work to be done, and that is Badenoch’s priority. Because however plausible a plan may sound, if it’s not underpinned by proper policy, it soon unravels, as we’ve seen time and again, and especially with this current Labour lot.
Put simply, in a world of ADHD politics, Badenoch is political Adderall, the calm, considered antidote to the utter chaos of the past few years. Can the Conservative Party be persuaded to take the medicine? Impossible, yet, to tell.
She has some very powerful enemies, people who think they are entitled to run the party and don’t like the fact that she doesn’t play their game.
Chief among these is, of course, the aforementioned Cummings, whose attacks on her have been both ungallant and rather cowardly. Calling her ‘lazy, brittle and delusional’, he recently defected to Reform, which, shortly afterwards, began to implode.
Whether the two events were in any way related I cannot possibly say, but given that this is the man who managed to bring down the Conservative Prime Minister with the largest majority since Margaret Thatcher (one Boris Johnson), it’s not beyond the realms of possibility. Cummings and men like him (there are others, too, less visible but no less toxic) are the problem, not the solution. Reform is welcome to him.
I suppose at the end of the day it depends what kind of party you want: a collection of disparate egos squabbling for control of a pile of steaming ruins; or someone who might actually have the self-knowledge and determination to start again at ground level.
It’s a good four years until the next election, an eternity in politics. If the Conservatives use that time wisely, who knows? They might even achieve the impossible and rise from the ashes of their own self-destruction.
Search for Alas Vine & Hitchens on Apple, Spotify and wherever you get your podcasts now. New episode released every Wednesday.
