Theresa Villiers has written an article for today’s edition of the Daily Telegraph on Kemi Badenoch's success in changing the political weather and putting the Conservatives on the road to recovery:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/2025/12/15/whisper-it-but-badenoch-is-dragging-conservatives-back/
"Being leader of the opposition in the wake of a big election defeat is, to put it mildly, a difficult job – just ask William Hague.
The received wisdom is that whoever takes over in such circumstances can do little more than try to survive until the electorate has started to forget how unhappy they were when your party was last in charge.
Kemi Badenoch is re-writing that paradigm. With her impassioned party conference speech in October, she changed the political weather.
Her plan was simple. First: catch the nation’s attention. She did this by unveiling a coherent and attractive policy programme, headlined by a popular commitment to scrap stamp duty on the family home.
Second: reclaim the Conservatives’ mantle as the party of sound money and fiscal responsibility. This is a space left vacant by every other party in British politics. Labour’s decision to placate their backbenchers by hiking taxes to pay for increases in welfare spending marked a final break with the Blair-Brown era. Old-school Labour has returned: it is now a high-tax, high-spend, high-borrowing party.
Reform UK’s manifesto promised tax cuts costing £90bn. Yet they also support lifting the two-child benefit cap, nationalising utilities, and re-opening the South Wales coal mines, with no obvious way to fund any of it. When they do have power, we see the result: a number of councils they control are set to increase council tax. Reform is Left-wing on the economy and irresponsible with the public finances.
But Badenoch’s breakthrough hasn’t been confined to astute policy choices – her recent performances at the dispatch box have electrified Parliament.
There is no harder debating forum in the world than Prime Minister’s Questions. Those who have never experienced the House of Commons “wall of noise” cannot comprehend how difficult it is for a leader of the opposition to make a real impact.
Yet in the past three months, Badenoch first skewered Sir Keir Starmer over Peter Mandelson and Angela Rayner, playing a big part in the downfall of both. Then she had the PM on the ropes over the chaos besetting the grooming gangs inquiry and the failure of the Chinese espionage prosecution. But it is on the Budget that she has really started to own the dispatch box.
Starmer was unable to answer a straight question on whether he would stick to his manifesto commitment not to raise income tax. Badenoch highlighted the one-word answer – “yes” – he had given when she had asked that very same question in July. As one commentator put it “Starmer’s middle stump was doing cartwheels”.
But the best was yet to come. Responding to the Budget is the toughest task faced by the leader of the opposition. You have just minutes, sitting in the Chamber, to prepare a response to hundreds of pages of complex tax announcements, with a battery of government spads and spin doctors all lined up to say you are rubbish. Yet Badenoch forensically rebutted Labour’s tax onslaught, and she did so with a flair, vigour and conviction that wowed social media.
She has a strong team around her, both in her office and in her shadow cabinet. She is raising the money needed to sustain campaigning efforts. She has shown tremendous grit and resilience.
Too many people have tried to write off the Conservative Party and their leader. But there is a reason why we have survived longer than any other political party in the world: our values of fiscal responsibility, lower taxes and backing enterprise are in tune with the British people.
This is a party under new leadership, and that leadership is laying the groundwork for recovery. There is a long road ahead. It will take a huge effort to come back from a defeat as catastrophic as July 2024. But thanks to Kemi Badenoch, and her team, the recovery has now started."
