Kemi Badenoch faced a fork in the road. She needed to embrace one of her previous rivals and use either James Cleverly or Robert Jenrick to prop up her leadership of the Conservative Party. Luckily, she chose correctly, welcoming back Cleverly, the sensible centrist, while keeping Jenrick, the Reform-lite offering, at arm’s length.
This decision makes use of the authentic person-of-the-people communication skills of Cleverly, pitching them against the authentic p-of-the-c ditto of Angela Rayner. By installing Cleverly as the deputy prime minister’s shadow, Badenoch hints that he is her deputy without actually giving him that title.
We are told that she will continue to rotate shadow cabinet ministers to stand in for her against Rayner at Prime Minister’s Questions when Keir Starmer is away, but Cleverly is clearly “second among equals”.
Badenoch needs a big hitter to help keep the Tory party anchored to the centre ground. By keeping Mel Stride as shadow chancellor – the post that Jenrick wants – and recruiting Cleverly to the top team, she keeps the party on the path of fiscal responsibility and compassionate realism.
The road not chosen was the one that zigzags off the beaten track towards the mirage of imitating Nigel Farage. She could have thrown her lot in with Jenrick and gone all-out to try to out-Reform Reform. That would have failed to convince those former Tory voters who have defected to Reform, and it would have sounded shrill to loyal Tory voters – some of whom are in danger of defecting to the Liberal Democrats.
Jenrick has shown himself to be a good communicator, too, of course, with his brilliant videos explaining the Chagos deal and intercepting fare dodgers. But he lacks Cleverly’s authenticity: Jenrick was an ambitious junior minister who paved the way for Boris Johnson’s premiership, and who reinvented himself (too late!) under his former ally Rishi Sunak as a tough-on-immigration dissident within government.
If Badenoch had tried to hug him close, politically, it would have done her no good. Reform voters would not have been impressed, and one-nation Tories would have been put off. Much better, from her point of view, to keep her options open on the European Convention on Human Rights and to draft in reinforcements to take on Labour on policies such as housing.
She should leave Suella Braverman, the former home secretary whose stock in the party is low, to publish her pamphlets about leaving the Convention. Badenoch’s position, of “moving towards” leaving the Convention, is one that can hold the party together for a long time: she can be moving towards leaving without ever actually getting there. Jenrick, who also wants to leave it, remains a semi-detached licensed rebel on the subject.
Is Jenrick more likely to launch a challenge to Badenoch’s leadership from this semi-detached position after her immunity expires at the end of her first year in November? I doubt it. Giving him a higher-status job would only give him a better platform from which to launch his bid; this way, she locks Cleverly into her defence.
So Badenoch has strengthened her position – slightly. But Mark Garnier, a shadow Treasury minister, said on Times Radio at the weekend that he didn’t think there was much point in a reshuffle of the Tory deckchairs until Starmer had reshuffled the government team.
Oops. “Deckchairs” was not the best choice of words, given its association with a common saying about the Titanic. But maybe he was reflecting a deeper truth, which is that there is very little that Badenoch can do, having taken over at a time when the Tory party is doomed.
I don’t think that a different leader would have made much difference. And I don’t think a different shadow cabinet lineup is going to be decisive. The Tories’ problem is fundamental: they lost control of immigration when they were in government, which means they are now vulnerable to an anti-immigration party to their right.
But if the Tory party is going down, as the Liberal Party did in the 1920s, it might as well go down fighting – and that means trying to cling to the centre ground. Cleverly is the right choice.
