Badenoch blows her chance to say something interesting about Brexit

The former McDonald’s employee Kemi Badenoch has served up another nothingburger.

On Thursday afternoon, in what was billed as a keynote speech that would start the process of rebuilding trust with the British public, the leader of the opposition was trailed to be making a significant admission about the Conservatives and Brexit. What turned out to be on the menu was a meatless aside which will once again raise questions about her own competence.

At the start of her remarks, Badenoch offered a statement of the bleeding obvious. She said “we made mistakes” while in government, and mentioned first that the Tories “announced that we would leave the European Union before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”.

After slating net zero and immigration – the new big bads of modern Toryism – she added: “These mistakes were made because we told people what they wanted to hear first and then tried to work it out later. That is going to stop under my leadership. If we are going to turn our country around, we’re going to have to say some things that aren’t easy to hear.”

Was Badenoch about to admit that she had been wrong in January to write that Brexit had created “a global Britain which is thriving in the world… delivering for British business and the British people at home… delivering for them abroad, too”? Was she about to say that, in fact, it had all been a bit of a costly shambles? That would have been a case of saying things that weren’t easy to hear, and it would also have had the added bonus of being true.

Badenoch dared not go there. Apart from a waffly Q&A answer about “looking at where we have competitive advantage with countries around the world, and using our regulatory system to exploit that competitive advantage” – exactly what the Tories have tried and failed to leverage since 2016 – she offered nothing more on Brexit than her initial statement.

Having castigated her then-Cabinet colleague David Cameron in April 2024 for saying that his government had run a referendum without making proper preparations for implementing a decision to Leave, Badenoch now appeared to be throwing Theresa May and Boris Johnson under the bus too.

But if Brexit has been the success she claims, what damage are all three previous leaders supposed to have done? How does any of this persuade ordinary voters – who see that Brexit has failed and consistently say so in polls – that she is really facing up to Tory mistakes and the wreckage that has resulted from them?

Badenoch could not offer them any serious thoughts on how she would improve the handling of Brexit in the future, first because she has told shadow cabinet colleagues not to expect any major policy announcements until 2027 at the earliest and second because she evidently thinks that despite the best efforts of her predecessors, it is mostly going just fine.

There was nothing from the leader of the party of small business about the devastating effect red tape and extra costs have had on small and medium-sized enterprises trading with the EU. Nothing for subsidy-starved farmers from the leader of the party of agriculture. This is not the way to rebuild trust in the Conservative Party.

Only two sets of people will have been impressed with the limited amount that Badenoch had to say about Brexit on Thursday. The first is that group of politicians and activists – some still Tories, some now Reform – who want Badenoch to fail quickly so they can install Robert Jenrick as Conservative leader and get on with the business of merging the parties into a far right fighting force.

Tories still loyal to Johnson will profess themselves outraged at Badenoch’s betrayal; Nigel Farage and co will say she has offered nothing new on the question of Europe, on which their policy is to leave the European Convention of Human Rights, sink the Johnson/Frost trade deal and wait for the rest of the world to reward us for our brilliance.

The second group who will be pleased by Badenoch’s performance consists of Keir Starmer and his close allies. By saying next to nothing on Britain and Europe – apart from making it clear that she will continue to say next to nothing on it for the next two years at least – she is giving Labour a clear run on trying to alleviate some Brexit damage by pushing the UK closer to the EU’s orbit. If Starmer dares, he can pick up some significant trade wins while the Tories dither.

Kemi Badenoch has made the Conservatives even easier to ignore on the matter of Britain’s relationship with Europe. Meanwhile, a recent poll shows 60% of Britons want Starmer to negotiate a new trade deal with the EU, with only 20% opposed. So keep on ignoring the Tories, and get on with it.