Badenoch’s Risky Gamble Is Leaving Centrist Tories Fearing Defeat

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch’s decision to allow a former (albeit reformed) neo-Nazi to stand as a Conservative councillor hasn’t just raised questions about her judgement; it’s prompted wider concerns about her political strategy.

After a day of outrage, Joshua Bonehill-Paine saw the writing on the wall and stepped back. He’s the creator of the Crewkerne Gazette, a satirical online AI video account with a cult following.

Bonehill-Paine was convicted of racially harassing Jewish former Labour MP Luciana Berger in 2016, while already serving a separate jail sentence of more than three years for sharing antisemitic posts. He has since described his past views as “indefensible” and says he has spent years opposing antisemitism since leaving prison in 2018.

Leaving aside Badenoch’s verbal gymnastics – she managed to offend leaflet-delivering Tories by saying that, unlike MPs, councillors only deal with bins and parking – the row reignited concerns from the last remaining centrists in her party that Badenoch is wooing too narrow a tranche of voters.

The Crewkerne row comes shortly after she rejected centrist former Tory MPs as candidates for the next election. Centre-left Tories, who loosely group under the One Nation banner, worry she is sidelining both them and politically homeless voters who could be persuaded to vote Tory.

The electoral logic for Badenoch’s current strategy rests on the assumption most switchers to Reform UK since 2024 are on the right. The theory is that the Tories’ existential threat isn’t the Liberal Democrats eating into moderate territory in the South West, it’s Nigel Farage eating into their base.

Is this correct? Labour is now losing fewer of its 2024 voters to Reform. But the same is true of the Tories.

For Robert Ford, professor of political science at Manchester University, the current strategy makes it likely Badenoch would at best – and if a fair wind delivers a Labour decline – limit herself to a post-election coalition with Reform or forming a minority government.

Ford argues she can’t win an outright majority on her current path and instead needs to make inroads into yellow-branded Liberal Democrat-held areas.

“That great big yellow blotch on the map is a big problem. It’s all former Tory seats. It’s really hard to win a lot of those without winning at least some One Nation Tory-type voters back, and if you don’t win at least some of that big yellow blotch back, where are your 325 seats coming from exactly?” he said.

Centrist Tories are worried. “My conversations with those who are close to the inner circle means they genuinely don’t think the Lib Dems are a threat and they are wrong about that,” one Tory complained.

“You can win an election without the Red Wall because we didn’t win any of them in 2017 and still had a sort of majority. Whereas, if you’re not winning half of Kent, half of Surrey, Hertfordshire and Oxfordshire, then it’s hard to see where you construct a Tory majority from,” the Tory added.

Allies of Badenoch argue it’s relatively early days in re-establishing the Tory brand: “Only time will allow voters to forgive us,” as one shadow cabinet minister puts it. Party sources point to new policies on scrapping business rates for shops and pubs, abolishing stamp duty and leaving the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). All those policies are aimed at reassuring right-leaning voters that the Tories, not Reform, are the competent vehicle for their instincts.

They also say the divisions of left and right are an outdated framing, that voters are now so sick of small boats that leaving the ECHR, shocking even a few years ago, is now mainstream. The Government’s pursuit of net zero targets delivered the party the Aberdeen South by-election, they say.

Nonetheless, the right of British politics is overcrowded, with the Tories, Reform and Restore Britain all jostling for votes and dogged by questions about deals. Badenoch has rejected all ideas of pre or post-elections pacts.

But this week, Restore Britain’s leader Rupert Lowe, a former Reform MP who spectacularly fell out with Farage, offered his former colleague an olive branch. That’s worried some Tories who think Badenoch was playing with fire by allocating Lowe a party seat on the House of Commons Public Accounts Select Committee. At the time, the Tories defended it as a cross-party effort to reduce waste in public spending. Farage claims there is some sort of “deal” between them.

“The thing that worries me about her playing nice with Lowe is I tell myself that Kemi had bought into the idea he wants to destroy Farage and now he doesn’t. Where does that leave us?” a Tory MP questioned.

Badenoch is at an inflexion point. Her personal ratings have improved; she polls around 33 per cent favourability among all voters, up from 19 per cent a year ago, but her party still lags her by ten-plus points. According to pollster Peter Kellner, Badenoch needs to “shake off the Tories’ brand weakness.”

“Tony Blair did this with ‘New Labour’ and Badenoch needs to sell ‘New Conservatives’,” he advised. “One option is to promote a new definition of One Nation Conservatism. It can be inclusive but addressing the concerns that Farage has exploited. Perhaps along the lines of ‘Tough on small boats, tough on the causes of small boats’.”

Currently the left is better at tactically voting and co-ordinating their support to stop the right winning. Progressives showed this in by-elections in Caerphilly, Gorton and Denton and Makerfield. Unless the Burnham bounce lasts – and an autumn of tax rises may stop it in its tracks – the right might get its act together to prevent another Labour government. Then, even if aggregate vote shares don’t change very much, the numbers of seats affected could change a great deal.

Meanwhile, don’t expect Badenoch to switch strategy. Times have moved on since David Cameron showed his green credentials by taking a husky ride.

She also may not be hugging a hoodie, as Cameron recommended, but says she believes in rehabilitation. That’s why she offered Bonehill-Paine a role of adviser to the party’s culture and integration commission, where he will specifically focus on how young men become radicalised.

Her critics say it’s a fundamental lack of strategy and judgment. Her allies hope the politically homeless will recognise she’s right on this and take another look.