Opinion
As the Coalition continues to argue with itself about how to deal with One Nation, Angus Taylor and his colleagues would do well to watch an electrifying speech by Britain’s Conservative Party leader, Kemi Badenoch, at her party’s conference in Birmingham last week. With the Conservatives ever so slowly inching up in opinion polls (from a very low base), and the insurgent populist party Reform UK beginning to slide as its leader Nigel Farage is almost daily tainted by new embarrassments and scandals, Badenoch left nobody wondering about how she plans to take the fight to Britain’s equivalent of Pauline Hanson.
Like Labour’s Prime Minister Andy Burnham, Badenoch has emerged as a galvanising new leader. Just as Burnham has given Labour new hope, Badenoch has re-energised the Tories. Both of the traditional parties of government are in a stronger position than they have been anytime in the past year.
Badenoch is a remarkable figure – charismatic, articulate and fearless. She was born in London in 1980 to Nigerian parents. (“Kemi” is a diminutive: she was christened Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke.) An engineer by training, she became an MP in 2017 and was soon promoted to cabinet. Emerging as the unexpected choice for leader after the Tory trainwreck at the 2024 election, she has already claimed the biggest political scalp any opposition leader can boast, having demolished the prime minister – Labour’s election-winning but hopeless leader Keir Starmer – in a series of nimble and ruthless question time performances.
Nobody should be surprised that the Conservatives are now led by a black woman. She is the Tories’ fourth female leader, and its second consecutive leader of Asian or African heritage. Labour, by contrast, is only ever led by white men. The only thing about Burnham that is “diverse” is that he is a Catholic who went to Cambridge. (British Labour leaders are usually Oxford-educated Anglicans.)
The tweed-coated gentlemen, blue-haired old ladies and earnest whey-faced Young Conservatives who make up the Tory rank and file have fallen in love with Badenoch. They can tell a winner when they see one. Like their all-time hero Margaret Thatcher, she comes from the party’s right wing. At the Tory conference, I even heard some activists refer to her as “the black Margaret”. She loves it. She uses her African heritage as a platform to skewer identity politics and denounce the postmodern Left’s campaign to make Britons feel ashamed of their country’s past. Her conference speech was steeped in old-fashioned patriotism. “I don’t know whether you’ve noticed,” she said teasingly, “but I am black. I am British. I’m proud of my country. I’m proud of our history.”
Apart from the reference to skin colour, Nigel Farage could have delivered the same lines. But Badenoch has made a very deliberate decision that the way for the Tories to deal with Farage’s party is to hit it hard; to expose it, relentlessly and mercilessly, for what it is. Initially, her tactics caused misgivings among some Conservatives, who felt uncomfortable attacking their rival on the right. But Badenoch – as a true legatee of Thatcher – is no appeaser. A friend of mine who is intimately involved with her political tactics told me last week, invoking a Thatcherite trope: “She’s adamant. The lady’s not for turning.”
She understands that nothing will impress straying Tory voters more than a strong leader. Nothing will lose them faster than a pale imitator.
The fact that she comes from the Tory right – on a whole range of issues, she is as hard line as it gets – both inoculates her from being written off as an equivocating centrist and gives her critique of Farage greater force.
In her conference speech, she made it clear that her criticism was not of people who are tempted to vote for Reform. “These,” she said, “are our people … we let them down and we want them to come back home. They deserve better than Reform politicians.”
After a devastating demolition of the litany of Reform candidates who have been exposed as crooks, shonks, weirdos, perverts and, in one case, a Russian agent of influence, there came the line that brought the party faithful roaring, unitedly, to their feet:
“To those who say ‘unite the right’, we are not uniting with that!”
She went on to say: “People deserve better than that. And we are going to give them better than that. Character, conduct and standards matter.
“I don’t want to live in a country run by people who threaten journalists, call veterans traitors, and debate whether my mixed-race children are English. Reform MPs are openly questioning people’s identity. I don’t want to explain to my son when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football that some people don’t think our black players are English … We must not let these people take us backwards. This is not the country we are. … They [Reform] are not like us. We are not like them. We are different. We are the Conservative Party!”
Like Reform in the UK, One Nation too has given its endorsement to some of the very worst people who have ever been parliamentary candidates – a gruesome cavalcade of misfits, oddballs, conspiracy theorists, racists, ex-crims, wife-beaters and perverts (although, so far as I’m aware, none has – yet – been exposed as a Russian spy).
Swap “Conservative” for “Liberal”, “Reform” for “One Nation” and “Australian” for “English”, and virtually the same speech Badenoch made could have been given by any leader of the Liberal Party.
But it hasn’t been. It’s high time that it was.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
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George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.From our partners
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