Badenoch Says UK Needs an Engineer as She Pledges Tory Renewal

Alex Morales and Ailbhe Rea

2 September 2024 at 9:27 am·4-min read

(Bloomberg) -- Conservative leadership frontrunner Kemi Badenoch vowed to renew her party, saying it needs to use its time in opposition “wisely” by returning to its principles and developing an offer for young Britons after losing the trust of the UK electorate.

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Launching her campaign to take over from former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, she criticized her party for becoming “mired in scandal,” saying Keir Starmer’s Labour Party — which won a landslide election victory on July 4 — is only in power now because of mistakes made by the Tories. She said it was to time to “talk about our future” and that “right now, this country desperately needs an engineer.”

“I want to help us rebuild the party, rewire the state, reboot the economy, revive our country and make it go places,” Badenoch, the former business secretary, said Monday in a speech at the Institute of Engineering and Technology. “Engineers are realist; we see the world as it truly is, but we can also dream and we can plot a path from idea to reality.”

The shadow communities secretary is vying with five other former ministers to replace Sunak, who will remain acting Tory leader until a successor is announced on Nov. 2.

Her rivals in the race are former Foreign Secretary James Cleverly; ex Home Office Minister Robert Jenrick; Priti Patel, a former home secretary; Mel Stride, who held the work and pensions brief under Sunak; and former Security Minister Tom Tugendhat. The task for the winner will be to rebuild Britain’s self-styled natural party of government into an election-winning machine again after collapsing to its worst ever electoral defeat.

Badenoch criticized her party for “talking right and governing left” — a diagnosis shared by Cleverly, who made his own launch speech just an hour later, saying the Tories need to be “honest and realistic about the role of the state.”

“The state should focus on doing fewer things very well, not everything badly,” Cleverly said. “We accept that the state has a primary duty to protect its people and its borders. But Conservatives must be honest about the trade-offs in doing these things properly.”

While Badenoch’s launch was low on policy, Cleverly vowed to increase defense spending to 3% of gross domestic product, resurrect a plan to deport to Rwanda asylum seekers who arrive in the UK in small boats from France, and get the country’s welfare bill down.

With YouGov data showing that all age groups under 65 were more likely to vote Labour than Conservative, both politicians identified the need for the Tories to win over younger voters.

Cleverly said “we need to give young people a stake in our society.” With younger workers increasingly struggling to get on the housing ladder, he vowed to abolish stamp duty tax on home purchases altogether, encourage new builds and ease restrictions on building upwards on existing residential properties.

Badenoch, for her part, said that the Tories “used to have a vision and an offer for the young.”

“When I was young, the future was exciting: I hate the fact that young people no longer find it so,” she said. “For the future to mean anything, it must means something for the young. It’s the chance to build something — a career, a business, a family, to acquire capital and through it security, savings, a house, pensions and investments, so that even if today is tough, tomorrow is bright.”

Tugendhat — a moderate Tory who appeals to the party’s center — is due to make his launch speech on Tuesday, while Patel did so on Friday, vowing to make the Tories an election-winning “machine” again. Tory MPs are due to whittle the candidates down to four in time for the party’s annual conference later this month, before reducing them to two who will go to a final runoff vote among the wider grassroots party membership.

While Badenoch is the bookmakers’ favorite, Jenrick has the most backers among Tory MPs for now, according to a tally by the Spectator. Formerly seen as a politician from the so-called One Nation tradition of Tory centrists, he has in recent years pivoted to the right, having reinvented himself as a hard-liner on immigration when he resigned from his role as immigration minister in December 2023.

Jenrick has focused his campaign on that topic, with a headline promise to leave the European Convention on Human Rights, which he blames for interfering in UK immigration policy. That’s a controversial proposition within the Tories, and has implications for the peace agreement in Northern Ireland and for the trade deal the UK signed with the European Union after Brexit.

The Jenrick campaign argues he is best placed to dispel the threat of Nigel Farage’s far-right Reform UK party, with Ipsos polling suggesting he is the candidate most likely to win back Reform voters. A senior member of the Jenrick campaign said that they were confident he could reach enough nominations to qualify for the two-candidate run-off vote.