Antony Davies: Badenoch is finding her stride, and Reform’s theatre is a gift to the Conservatives

Antony David Davies FRSA is a historian and commentator whose work explores identity, governance, and the politics of trust.

I have been openly critical of Kemi Badenoch, not in the casual, factional way that passes for comment in Westminster, but on the only question that matters, whether she could project the discipline and seriousness required of a Prime Minister in waiting.

In recent weeks, I have found myself revising that judgement. Not because she has performed a sudden ideological pirouette, but because her tone is tightening into something rarer than it should be in British politics, a preference for grown-up argument over viral commotion. That matters, because the country is exhausted, and the centre right cannot rebuild itself on theatrics. It must rebuild on credibility.

I wrote last year that Reform UK’s rise was driven less by a coherent programme than by voter despair, by the sense that everyday Britain is being managed badly and spoken to worse. That diagnosis still holds. But I am increasingly hearing something else too, voters who flirted with Reform are becoming more open-eyed about what it actually is, a shallow razzmatazz show, satisfying as protest, thin as a proposition for government.

The most revealing political conversations rarely happen at conferences. They happen in ordinary places where people speak without trying to win points, in queue-side grumbles, in family group chats, in that resigned national tone of “What’s the point?” Reform is still invoked, but increasingly as a mood rather than a plan. People mention it as a warning shot, a way of saying, “Do not take me for granted.” But the moment you ask the follow-up question, the one adults ask, the conversation changes.

“Alright then, what would they actually do?” Who runs departments, who negotiates budgets, who carries policy through the civil service machine, who stands at the Despatch Box when slogans collide with arithmetic? When voters start asking those questions, protest politics begins to lose its magic. That is what I am hearing more often now, not admiration, but doubt, not worship, but impatience with a politics that performs anger rather than resolves it. If Badenoch is finding her stride, Conservatives should not chase Reform. They should outgrow it.

Reform benefits from a structural fact.

Voters will tolerate almost anything from a party that does not have to govern. It can promise without pricing, provoke without repairing, posture without consequence. That is not a moral condemnation. It is the advantage of permanent opposition. It is why Reform can run on vibes and indignation while never having to convert slogans into systems. This is also where Conservatives lost their footing.

Too often they behaved as if they could borrow insurgent language and still retain governing authority. They cannot. The centre right does not recover by becoming angrier. It recovers by becoming more credible, and that is why the Conservative defections to Reform, painful as they were in the short term, may yet prove a blessing in disguise.

Recent months have seen a steady trickle of high-profile Conservative figures moving to Reform, underlining that a portion of the right is choosing insurgency over the burdens of office. In that sense, the defections are not merely a threat. They are a clarifying force.

Politics occasionally requires sorting. A party cannot be both a governing force and an outlet for permanent grievance. That arrangement produces incoherence, because every difficult decision becomes a betrayal and every compromise becomes corruption. Defections have helped draw a clearer boundary between two political cultures, one that accepts the burden of government, and one that thrives on the thrill of opposition. Badenoch does not need to chase every defector. She needs to define the party that remains, as the party that intends to govern again, seriously.

My scepticism about Badenoch has not been about ideology. Conservatives are a broad church. My concern has been whether she would be tempted into the easy rhythms of modern politics, permanent confrontation, permanent provocation, applause as a substitute for persuasion. What has impressed me recently is not gaffe-free performance, which is a low bar, but a tightening in her message and a seriousness that does not feel performative. She sounds more like someone preparing to carry responsibility, not simply land blows.

If the Conservative Party is to recover, it will not do so through endless micro-arguments about who said what on which channel. It will do so by offering something Reform cannot offer, a plausible route from frustration to a functioning state.

If Badenoch wants to convert momentum into trust, she should make competence the organising principle. Competence is what respect looks like in practice. That means choosing a small number of priorities and pursuing them with clarity. Public service delivery, spend honestly, fix procurement, stabilise workforces, and be accountable for outcomes. Law and order, visible policing and swifter justice are not nostalgia, they are the foundations of social confidence. Borders and migration, competence not theatre, control, lawfulness, speed, and enforcement that actually happens. If Conservatives focus on these, they do not merely argue with Reform. They make Reform look unserious, because they remind voters that anger is not an administrative plan.

There is also a constitutional seriousness the party must recover, and it begins with the Union. A Conservative Party that wishes to govern the United Kingdom cannot speak as though the UK is simply England with administrative add-ons. In Wales and Scotland in particular, unionism has too often been reduced to a badge rather than a programme. A serious centre right must speak to devolved realities with respect. It must show that the Union is about shared standards and shared institutional strength, not occasional visits and predictable slogans.

Reform will remain a pressure valve for public anger as long as the established parties look incapable of competence. But the public is not permanently captive to razzmatazz. When the costs of dysfunction bite, voters return to first principles. Can you run the country? I am increasingly hearing voters move from permission, “I might vote Reform to send a message”, to doubt, “But what would they actually do?” That is the moment when protest politics shrinks back towards its natural size.

Badenoch’s task is not to compete with Reform’s theatre. It is to make the Conservative Party the obvious home for those who want change without chaos, discipline without dullness, and a state that works again. If she continues to find her stride, and if the party around her matches that seriousness, then the defections to Reform will look, in hindsight, like a necessary clearing of the fog, not a defeat, but a sharpening, and in politics, sharpening is the beginning of recovery.