Kemi Badenoch: 'I'm a classic old school Conservative'

Kemi Badenoch has declared herself a "classic old school Conservative" as her party's annual conference gets under way in Birmingham, launching a 100-page statement of principles she says will return the Tories to their core beliefs.

In a BBC interview with Laura Kuenssberg, conducted in a children's day-care centre in the conference city, the Conservative leader set out pledges to end the £100,000 childcare "cliff edge" and to fund 50,000 new prison places by cutting overseas aid to £1 billion a year. "I believe in common sense, people working hard and being rewarded for that effort," she said.

A conference with everything to prove

!Kemi Badenoch delivering her speech at the Conservative Party Conference 2023 in Manchester Credit: The Conservative Party, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The Conservatives arrive in Birmingham with a great deal to prove. They trail Labour and Reform UK in the opinion polls and have yet to recover from their historic defeat at the 2024 general election, though Badenoch's personal ratings are stronger than her party's — a gap her allies hope she can close this week. As VERITY has reported, Reform UK's leader is facing his own scrutiny as the right-of-centre vote fragments.

Asked whether her plans for benefit cuts and a big prison-building programme marked a return to the "nasty party" of the past, Badenoch was unrepentant. "It's the common sense party," she said. "And, quite frankly, if we were doing so well the old way, then why did we have such a terrible issue in 2024?" She said welfare should be a "safety net, not a lifestyle". The pressures on the public finances facing the government are the subject of VERITY's analysis of the government's budget choices.

Childcare: ending the cliff edge

The headline domestic pledge is the abolition of the childcare "cliff edge", under which parents earning more than £100,000 lose their free childcare entitlement entirely. "What we want to see is that people who work harder don't get punished for doing so," Badenoch said. "If you earn £1 over £100,000 you could lose £20,000. That's absurd."

Under the Tory proposal, all parents working 16 or more hours a week would be eligible for 30 hours of free care a week, at an estimated cost of £700 million a year — which party officials say could be funded by cutting staff at arms-length public bodies. Badenoch conceded that even parents earning £1 million a year would qualify, but insisted the number of such cases was "negligible" and that the policy was aimed at families around the £100,000 threshold. "It is often women who end up carrying more of the childcare responsibility, so a system that makes it harder for them to progress in their careers is not helping families, it is not helping women and it is definitely not helping the economy," she said. Details of the current entitlement system are published on gov.uk.

Labour was unimpressed. A party spokesperson said: "It tells you everything you need to know about the Tories that the first of their own tax policies they want to unpick is one helping higher earners. They clearly don't want to admit that they set the thresholds in the first place."

Prisons paid for with an aid bonfire

The conference also heard a pledge to build 50,000 new prison places in England and Wales — a 50 per cent expansion of capacity — aimed at ending the early release of offenders. It would be paid for in part by slashing the overseas aid budget to £1 billion a year, a 90 per cent cut on current plans. Even under Labour's plan to reduce aid from 0.5 to 0.3 per cent of GDP by 2027, spending would still amount to around £9 billion a year. Aid groups have warned that a £1 billion budget would not even cover existing commitments to the UN and World Bank.

The Tories are acutely aware of their own record: over their 14 years in power, just 500 net prison places were created — 14,142 added in existing and new jails, set against 13,660 lost mainly to dilapidation and closures. The party's full platform is published on the Conservative Party website. A separate conference announcement would tighten access to student loans for non-UK nationals, saving a claimed £900 million a year, and block EU settled-status claims the party says are being "abused" — a policy area where ministers have already been accused of mis-selling.

The Right Way: a Thatcherite credo

The intellectual centrepiece is a 100-page essay, The Right Way — a deliberate echo of The Right Approach, the essay Margaret Thatcher wrote in 1976. In it, Badenoch argues that the last Conservative government failed because it did not know what it stood for. "We did little to reverse the structural changes Labour had made which took the country in the wrong direction," she writes. "The result was that the state grew by stealth."

The essay's central claim is that "the next Conservative government will have one central principle: business, not government, creates growth". Growth, it says, would come through tax cuts, cutting red tape and shrinking the civil service back to pre-pandemic levels. "What is really missing from politics and government today is people prepared to say no," the essay adds. "Political parties now need to recruit those who have the stomach to say no to good causes when the resources simply are not there to do everything." Thatcher's own writings are archived by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation.

Badenoch also waded into the integration debate, telling Kuenssberg: "I don't want lots of little ghettos of separatist communities where they are recreating the place they come from — that will ruin the United Kingdom."

'Grumpy grandpa' and 'cheesy uncle'

!Changing skyline of Birmingham city centre, host of the 2026 Conservative Party Conference Credit: Michael Westley / Geograph Britain and Ireland, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The interview had its lighter moments. Badenoch described Reform UK leader Nigel Farage as a "grumpy grandpa" and Labour leader Andy Burnham as "the cheesy uncle who does all the dad jokes". Asked how voters see her, she smiled: "They probably see me, you know, as the no-nonsense mum. No nonsense, [that's] probably me."

The jibes mask a serious calculation. With the right-of-centre vote split, Badenoch needs to win back voters who have drifted to Reform while holding the party's traditional base — and to convince a sceptical public that the Tories have genuinely changed. Her personal poll lead over her party suggests voters are listening to her, even if they have not yet forgiven the institution she leads.

What to watch next

Badenoch will use her conference speech to hammer home a message of unity, after years in which Tory infighting defined the party's image. Labour will not give her a free run: party chair Bridget Phillipson said the Tories "are stuck in the past and remain completely out of touch with what people across Britain want to see". "Last week Andy Burnham set out a plan to bring back hope to Britain," she added. "Kemi Badenoch wants to drag our country back to a politics that let so many people down over the past 40 years."

With the next general election approaching, the question is whether a conference of Thatcherite principles, childcare pledges and tough talk on crime can rebuild a winning coalition. For now, the Tories have a plan, a slogan and a leader who believes in them. Whether the country does is another matter — one Parliament will be watching closely.

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