Tories’ last throw of the dice
Kemi Badenoch’s first conference speech as Conservative leader was delivered with poise, precision and an unmistakable sense of peril. Facing polls that place her party neck-and-neck with the Liberal Democrats at just 17%, she rolled the dice on a populist-tinged economic pivot: a £9 billion promise to abolish stamp duty on primary homes.
It was an audacious attempt to reclaim fiscal credibility and revive middle-class aspiration. “A bad tax, an un-Conservative tax,” she declared in Manchester, presenting the move as both moral and economic. But the pledge risks being seen as a desperate act of political brinkmanship rather than a coherent strategy for national renewal.
A tax worth tackling – but costly to kill
Few economists would mourn stamp duty’s demise. As the Institute for Fiscal Studies’ Paul Johnson has long argued, the levy “gums up” the housing market, trapping families in homes that no longer fit their needs and distorting labour mobility. Ruth Curtice of the Resolution Foundation calls property taxation “a mess”, and she’s right – Britain’s system rewards speculation and penalises movement.
Yet even Curtice cautions that abolition is not simple. It’s one thing to call stamp duty “bad”; it’s quite another to replace £9 billion in lost revenue without torching fiscal credibility. Badenoch’s promise that welfare and civil service cuts will somehow fund the shortfall sounds less like reform and more like arithmetic by wishful thinking.
Welfare cuts as political theatre
Her “golden rule” – that half of all spending cuts should go to deficit reduction and half to tax cuts – plays well to Tory activists nostalgic for George Osborne’s brand of austerity. But it risks alienating the voters Badenoch most needs to win back: younger professionals, renters, and those beyond the South-East property belt. A party can’t campaign on fairness while funnelling its biggest giveaways to homeowners in Surrey.
It also smacks of internal theatre. The shadow cabinet’s relief that the conference “didn’t fight like ferrets in a sack” tells its own story: unity, not policy, was the goal. Robert Jenrick’s decision to stay loyal – for now – may keep the party’s truce intact until the May local elections. But unless Badenoch’s numbers shift, the knives will soon come out.
The economic pivot that wasn’t
This was supposed to be Badenoch’s moment to reset her leadership, shifting the narrative from migration to money. Yet even her economic message carried a whiff of Faragism. Her repeated jabs at “fantasy economics” in Reform UK were more about differentiation than direction. Voters want competence, not culture-war contrasts.
The truth is, abolishing stamp duty won’t fix the structural rot in Britain’s housing market. It won’t build homes, boost supply or rebalance regional growth. Without reform of planning, infrastructure and skills, it’s a gesture – a costly one – towards a problem that needs deeper surgery.
A test of credibility and survival
For Badenoch, this was more than a speech; it was a test of leadership under siege. She invoked George Bernard Shaw – “Never wrestle with a pig” – to justify ignoring Nigel Farage. But if the latest polls are any guide, Reform UK doesn’t need her attention to hurt her. It just needs her to fail.
The coming months will decide whether this conference was a turning point or a last stand. Her allies say she’s bought time; her critics suspect she’s only borrowed it. By next spring’s elections, she must show results – or risk joining the long list of Tory leaders who mistook applause for revival.
In Manchester, Badenoch tried to sound like a Prime Minister in waiting. The danger is she may instead have sounded like the last leader of a party running out of both money and ideas.
