Kemi Badenoch’s honesty problem

Let’s start with the positive, since it won’t take all that long: Kemi Badenoch has at least one trait that is genuinely refreshing in modern politics, and which if used in the right way could be a real asset to her.

When the leader of the opposition is asked a question, especially if it’s not one she’s expecting, she has a habit of answering it honestly. Instead of stopping to think what the right answer should be – as most politicians do – or recollecting a party line, or checking it for traps, she will often instead say what she thinks.

The latest instance of that happened on LBC on Thursday, during which Badenoch was asked whether or not she was considering restricting the triple lock on pensions, which guarantees pensions will rise by whichever is highest of wage growth, inflation, or 2.5%, to those who most needed it.

Badenoch, no doubt surprising several of her shadow cabinet and her own staffers, replied that she was. She said: “That’s exactly the sort of thing that the policy work we are going to do will look at… We’re going to look at means-testing. Means-testing is something which we don’t do properly here.”

She continued by saying that while she opposed the way Labour had introduced means testing for the Winter Fuel Allowance – the first major policy to blow up in the new government’s face – she didn’t oppose it in principle.

Daring to say something out of the ordinary on these policies is a brave move for the Tory leader, whose base is made up of pensioner voters, for whose continued support she is engaged in a bitter battle of survival with Nigel Farage’s Reform Party.

But it is also clear that it is true to her political instincts, which lean her towards a smaller state with lower taxes. While she did go on to suggest the triple lock probably wouldn’t be the first thing her team looked at, her answer very specifically left it on the table for her policy review. It couldn’t have been clearer on that front.

Inevitably, once the comments started generating headlines – and opportunistic attacks from Labour, suggesting pensioners now couldn’t feel safe to vote Conservatives – her team did what they always do when Badenoch says something in public they don’t want to defend. They said she hadn’t said it.

This is both her own default move and that of her team. Badenoch made the bizarre claim after the Budget that it had made no mention of defence spending – which was entirely untrue. When later confronted by it, her team insisted she’d said it didn’t lay out a detailed pathway to increasing defence spending to 2.5%, which might be the case, but absolutely wasn’t what she’d actually claimed.

Similarly, the Conservatives are now claiming Badenoch never suggested the triple lock was on the table. This is saving up endless problems for them in the coming years.

Badenoch is trying to start from zero, refusing to own the record of the last government and trying to spend at least the next 2-3 years without any firm policies of her own. But by not ruling anything in, she is not ruling anything out. Trying to balance that is politically much more difficult than it sounds.

Opposition for smaller parties is easy, because they don’t have much chance of being in government: you simply oppose anything unpopular and offer qualified support to anything that sounds like the public will like it. Ideally, you then try to claim the government’s only doing it because of pressure from you.

Badenoch is not used to opposition, and it shows. She has now made her disagreement with Labour over means-testing Winter Fuel Allowance a matter of where they set the line (instead of the principle of the thing), and also put ending the triple-lock for all pensioners on the table. Her political goals and instincts are out of line with what her team thinks her voters want, and that will only get more difficult.

But the bigger problem is more profound: each time the Conservatives try opposition-by-gaslight, insisting Badenoch either didn’t say something she said, or didn’t mean something she meant, they undermine her best political quality – as someone who sounds honest, or at least plain-speaking.

Badenoch’s team are constantly having to deal with the most dangerous of political gaffes – someone speaking an uncomfortable truth they’d have preferred didn’t get said. In their scramble to manage the unmanageable, they are likely to undercut Badenoch’s most likeable trait. Opposition isn’t easy, but so far no-one has made it look21 Ball quite as difficult as this lot.