Tory patience wears thin as Badenoch’s critics count down to May elections

1 day ago7 min read

The champagne flowed freely at the Spectator's parliamentarian of the year awards, held in the opulent, speakeasy-style confines of the Raffles hotel on Whitehall, but the buzz among the great and the good of the Conservative party was anything but celebratory. With the party adrift in the polls and Nigel Farage's Reform UK surging, the gossip swirling through the room had a sharp, political edge, zeroing in on one pressing question: is Kemi Badenoch's job at risk? This isn't just idle Westminster chatter; it's the sound of a party conducting a brutal, real-time assessment of its future, and the patience for the current leadership is wearing dangerously thin.Allies of Robert Jenrick, watching from the wings, are already sharpening their pitch for a post-election reset, a leadership contest that feels less like a future event and more like an imminent inevitability. The countdown to the May elections is ticking like a time bomb, and every local council result, every by-election swing towards Reform, is another digit falling away, bringing the internal explosion closer.The strategic calculus is being run in plain sight; the backbenches are restless, the membership is fractious, and the cabinet is beginning to look like a collection of rival camps preparing for the coming civil war. This is the classic pre-defeat playbook, where the narrative shifts from winning the next election to surviving the aftermath and controlling the party's soul.The battle lines are being drawn not over policy minutiae, but over the fundamental direction of Conservatism—should it pivot to reclaim voters lost to Reform with a harder line on issues like immigration and culture, or attempt a centrist consolidation? Badenoch, once the darling of the party's right, now finds herself in the crosshairs, her every statement parsed for weakness, her every media performance graded on a curve of diminishing returns. Jenrick's operatives, meanwhile, are meticulously building their case, framing him as the clean break, the candidate who can articulate a coherent vision that both unites the warring tribes and presents a credible challenge to a likely Labour government.They are studying the playbooks of past leadership contests, from Thatcher's downfall to Cameron's ascent, understanding that in politics, the narrative that wins is often the one prepared longest in advance. The May elections are no longer just a set of local contests; they have been transformed into a national referendum on Badenoch's leadership within her own party.A poor showing will be the signal, the green light for a challenge that is already fully formed in the minds of her critics. The event at the Raffles was merely the public dressing for a much more brutal, private war being waged in WhatsApp groups, late-night dinners, and carefully placed briefings to political journalists. The party is in a state of suspended animation, waiting for the electoral verdict that will either grant Badenoch a temporary reprieve or trigger a fight for its very identity.

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#UK politics

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