There’s a whiff of Truss about Badenoch

Party conferences generally look different in opposition than in government: they are smaller, they are quieter, and they are more subdued. Far fewer lobbyists bother splashing out the cash for major sponsorship deals (some don’t show up at all), and if the political mood is bad, half the MPs don’t even come along. They can be downbeat affairs.

That is not the case for the Conservative conference – not this year, at least. Thanks to the ongoing leadership contest, the rooms are still relatively full, there’s a decent buzz of conversation, and there’s a point to the whole affair. It’s not as packed as Labour’s conference was, but the mood is oddly upbeat.

Perhaps the new reality of the party hasn’t fully sunk in, or perhaps because a leadership contest means politicians say what members want to hear – rather than what they think the nation wants to hear – but all of it amounts to a largely unearned conference buzz for a party that now holds fewer than one in five seats in the House of Commons.

The four remaining leadership contestants are engaged in something of a bizarre dance. Because there are only four weeks or so for the members to vote – and this is the best chance they’ll have to get their attention – the candidates need to appeal to the party faithful as zealously as they can.

At the same time, they have a balancing act to uphold: MPs are very aware that Liz Truss was elected over Rishi Sunak by the members just two years ago. In her own address to the conference on Monday, Liz Truss made it clear that she thinks she did nothing wrong during her premiership, despite it crashing and failing within fewer than 50 days.

Through the connivance of MPs, the members were not given a chance to pick Truss’s successor, but the process this time is the same as the one that selected here: MPs pick a final two, and the members decide between them.

The task for the four candidates, then, is to appeal to members as hard as they can while not going so far that they alarm their fellow MPs enough to start a panicked movement against them. That is a fine line to tread, and it’s one with which Kemi Badenoch in particular is struggling.

Badenoch has an unfortunate habit of telling stupid truths in the moment, and then telling even stupider lies afterwards to cover them up. Historically, this got her into trouble when she admitted criminally hacking the website of a Labour MP, and has led to several less serious gaffes since.

The truth-telling side of it saw Badenoch spend the first day of her party’s conference pointlessly (and foolishly) floating a distant goal to one day end the NHS being free at the point of need. More consequentially, Badenoch said that while birth rates were too low, statutory maternity pay (which is capped at just over £700 a month) was too high. This obviously led the news through Sunday, and was condemned by all the other candidates.

Badenoch said this on a live recorded interview, and her words were not taken out of context. Nonetheless, she tried to claim exactly this – that she had been misrepresented, and it was the media’s fault.

This is a Trumpian tactic that works better for Donald Trump than it does for Badenoch: Britain is not America and Conservative members are not US Republicans. She has just made herself look doubly stupid – she could have argued that what she said wasn’t what she meant, but trying to engage in this kind of chicanery could blow up for her.

All the same, Badenoch is seen as a serious contender by the other candidates – if it comes down to a vote between the members, she and Robert Jenrick are seen as the two likeliest to win. That leaves MPs trying to decide whether or not they should ‘let’ her onto the ballot.

All of the Tory leadership candidates are saying things they know are unpopular with the country or which are diplomatically impossible, such as withdrawing from the European Convention on Human Rights, which is both. What they don’t want is a repeat of the Liz Truss incident.

Kemi Badenoch, on her current performance, might be starting to worry them just enough: the last thing they want is to look back on the Truss era as the good old days.