Tory leader’s first anniversary exposes a party adrift, not just a politician under pressure
By any political measure, Kemi Badenoch should have spent this weekend celebrating her first anniversary as Conservative leader with confidence. Instead, she faces a moment of quiet peril. Twelve months in, just 12% of Britons see her as a prime minister in waiting – a figure that would alarm any modern party strategist.
This is not merely a personal indictment. It’s a reflection of a political movement that has lost its centre of gravity. After five prime ministers in less than a decade, the Conservatives have exhausted the benefit of the doubt.
Badenoch inherited a party with deep structural rot – and while she has brought discipline, energy and ideological clarity, she has not yet persuaded the country that any of it amounts to renewal.
The numbers tell a story
Polling from YouGov makes for grim reading. Just 23% of Britons think Badenoch has done a good job as party leader so far, compared with 42% who think she has done badly. While that’s an improvement from May, when her numbers were even worse, it still signals a lack of traction beyond the Tory base.
Among Conservatives themselves, there’s cautious loyalty rather than enthusiasm. A narrow majority – 54% – say she’s done well, up twelve points since spring. Yet only a quarter of those same voters, 25%, see her as ready for Downing Street. Nearly a quarter think her first year has been unsuccessful. For someone touted as the intellectual heart of the post-Brexit right, these are not reassuring figures.
The message is clear: Badenoch may have stabilised the party after the chaotic fallout of Rishi Sunak’s premiership, but she hasn’t convinced voters she’s a national leader. That perception gap – between internal respect and public recognition – is deadly in modern politics.
The illusion of alternatives
What’s striking is that even within the party, few believe a change at the top would make much difference. Just 31% of Conservative voters say Badenoch should not lead the party into the next general election, but fewer than half – 41% – actively want her to stay. The rest are simply undecided, reflecting a party paralysed by fatigue rather than divided by ideology.
Among the broader electorate, the scepticism runs deeper. Around 77% of Britons believe the Conservatives are in a weak state, including 71% of Tory voters. Yet of those who think the party is weak, two-thirds believe it would be in the same position regardless of who leads it. The public no longer sees the problem as personality – they see it as systemic failure.
After nearly fifteen years in power, the Tories’ challenges are not cosmetic. Economic stagnation, public service decay and a widening generational divide have left the party with little to sell. Badenoch’s promise to restore “common-sense conservatism” may resonate in speeches and social media clips, but outside Westminster it sounds like a slogan from a government that long ago ran out of credit.
A leader caught between worlds
Badenoch’s problem is not that she lacks talent. Her blunt style and refusal to pander to fashionable orthodoxy have earned her a following both inside and outside Parliament. In an age of performative politics, she projects authenticity – something few Tory leaders since Thatcher have managed convincingly.
But Badenoch is trapped between two irreconcilable demands. The right of the party wants her to double down on culture-war issues and immigration; moderates want a credible governing agenda that might win back lost middle-class voters. Every policy choice she makes risks alienating one camp or the other.
Her approach so far – a mix of ideological firmness and technocratic caution – has left both sides unsatisfied. She’s too combative for the centrists and too managerial for the populists. The result is paralysis disguised as pragmatism.
Lessons from the past
For perspective, it’s worth recalling that Keir Starmer’s own numbers after his first year as Labour leader were hardly better. Only 22% of Britons then saw him as a prime minister in waiting – a figure that fell even further before eventually recovering. Political turnarounds are possible, but they depend on one thing: credibility.
Starmer built his by showing Labour could again look like a party of government. Badenoch’s equivalent task is harder. She must convince the electorate that a party in power for a decade and a half deserves another shot. To do that, she’ll need not just ideological clarity but a governing vision that matches the scale of Britain’s challenges – housing, growth, and the fraying social contract.
The year ahead
If Badenoch wants to prove she’s more than a caretaker of decline, she must spend her second year as leader reshaping the Tory story – not defending its legacy. That means talking less about Labour’s supposed dangers and more about what a Conservative Britain could still look like.
Her biggest obstacle isn’t the polls, nor the plotting in Westminster. It’s the creeping fatalism of a party that has stopped believing in its own renewal.
Twelve months on, Kemi Badenoch’s challenge is not just to convince the country she could be prime minister – it’s to remind her own party why it ever wanted to govern in the first place.
