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Kemi Badenoch has said the local elections next week will be “very, very difficult” for the Conservatives, as she insisted that criticism of her leadership of the party echoes disapproval of her predecessors.
Polls are taking place for more than 1,600 council seats in almost 25 local authorities in England on May 1. A handful of mayors are set to be elected, and a Westminster by-election for the Cheshire seat of Runcorn and Helsby is also scheduled that will pit Nigel Farage’s Reform UK against Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour party.
The vote comes just six months after Badenoch was elected party leader last November and “it’s going to be very, very difficult for us to make inroads in such a short period of time”, she told BBC Radio 4 on Tuesday.
Badenoch’s attempt to manage expectations comes as the Conservatives average 21 per cent in the polls, trailing in third place behind both Labour, which is averaging 24 per cent, and Reform UK, on an average of 25 per cent.
When local elections were last held in these councils in 2021, the Conservatives were enjoying a bounce in the polls from the Covid vaccine rollout and then-prime minister Boris Johnson was still largely popular with the public.
In the intervening four years the party suffered its worst-ever rout at a general election last July, plunging from 365 to 121 MPs.
Badenoch did not dispute that her leadership has come in for heavy criticism from quarters of her own party, but argued: “It happens to every single leader of every single party, even when they are successful. It happened to David Cameron, Theresa May, Boris Johnson — that is politics . . . Being in politics is to be criticised every single day.”
She added: “The job of a politician is to make difficult decisions and some people will be upset about that. That is not the measure of whether we are doing a good job.”
In recent months Badenoch has faced accusations over her work ethic, which some party officials have compared unfavourably with the energy of Robert Jenrick, who was her final rival for the party crown and is now shadow justice secretary.
While Jenrick has regularly posted videos online covering a range of issues, critics have complained about Badenoch’s low visibility in the media and failure to set the agenda of public debate.
Some of the interviews she has given have failed to land messages on key topics, with one remark that “lunch is for wimps” dominating coverage, to the irritation of some of her MPs who wanted her to focus on areas where the government is weak, such as the economy.
However, she has insisted she wants to take time to overhaul the party’s policy prospectus in opposition, rather than issuing fresh announcements in the press week by week.
“Protest parties are doing well at the moment, and it’s really important that we take time to get things right, rebuild trust with the public and have a credible offer, not just things that we’ve written on the back of an envelope for a newspaper or a radio interview,” she said on Tuesday.
Challenged to list her achievements as leader now she is half a year into the role, she said: “The biggest thing that people will notice is that if you picked up papers this time last year, you would have been reading about Tory rows and Tory infighting. All of that’s gone.”
