Kemi Badenoch, the Tories’ new leader, plans war on the “blob”

The signNGOMPGDPEDIUK MP that Kemi Badenoch, who on November 2nd was elected leader of , was operating on a different plane from her rivals came at the party’s conference in October. While they busied themselves with cheesy selfies and cheesier merchandise, her team released a 22,000-word pamphlet, entitled “Conservatism in Crisis: Rise of the Bureaucratic Class”. It contained a sprawling theory, which combined Ms Badenoch’s pet issue of combating progressive identity politics with an idea circulating on the Tory right: that the “blob”, a sticky nexus of liberal interest groups, works to thwart the policy of Conservative governments. This “new bureaucratic class”, as Ms Badenoch terms it, comprises private-sector compliance lawyers, human-resources staff, university administrators, workers and green lobbyists. They owe their comfortable middle-class livelihoods to demanding ever more government regulation to enforce, at the expense of the “old middle class” of entrepreneurs. And that regulation is to blame for an astonishing range of Britain’s ailments: , high taxation, high immigration, social polarisation, low-value degrees, a creaking health service and the weakening of the nation-state itself. The new bureaucratic class is, the authors wrote, a “new left, not based primarily on nationalisation and private sector trade unions, but ever increasing social and economic control”. It fell to the Tories to confront them.Such thinking was a hit with Tory members. Having won the support of a narrow plurality of s, Ms Badenoch then defeated her rival, Robert Jenrick, in a ballot of the party’s 131,680 members. She faces a daunting task: at the general election in July, the Tories were reduced to their since at least 1832 in both seats (121) and vote share (24%). The Labour government has a large parliamentary majority, and an appetite to stay in power.The ideas in that pamphlet will serve as a fault line over the coming years. It is not only that Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister and former chief public prosecutor, believes in a larger and more activist state (the budget of October 30th will push tax as a share of up to 38.2% by the end of the decade, the highest since the second world war). More to the point, he subscribes to the idea that most of Britain’s problems can be fixed if Whitehall, quangos, businesses and charities work more closely together; his plans teem with “trailblazers”, “hubs”, “mission delivery boards”; he touts something called the “civil society covenant framework”. The blob is, for Starmerites, the solution not the problem.Ms Badenoch’s triumph is evidence of how ideas about cultural power have displaced economics as her party’s animating matter. Her supporters compare her non-nonsense tone and outsider credentials to Margaret Thatcher’s (Ms Badenoch grew up in Nigeria and is the first black woman to lead a major British political party). She courts the comparison, likening her “comprehensive plan to reprogramme the British state” to the thinking of Keith Joseph, an architect of Thatcherism. Yet beyond some lip-service about lower taxes and deregulation, her lack of interest in economics is distinctly un-Thatcher-like. Read her policy-light speeches alongside, say, “Monetarism is Not Enough”, Joseph’s lecture of 1976 that was a set-text of the supply-side revolution, and the comparison seems absurd.Those priorities were evident in government, when she combined the post of business and trade secretary with that of equalities minister; the latter took up “a disproportionate amount of time”, according to Michael Ashcroft, her biographer. “She has to fight the machinery of government, the activists, the broadcast media and others pretty much all the time,” one source tells him. She made little mark on the industrial-policy powers at the disposal of the business secretary: competition enforcement, trade defences, subsidies and so on. But she did issue guidance on ending the proliferation of equality, diversity and inclusion () schemes in the private sector, and on single-sex toilets in commercial premises. A speech to the TheCity, a financial-services lobby group, was used to denounce those who think Britain’s wealth is “down to colonialism or white imperialism or privilege or whatever.”Such thinking may electrify prime minister’s questions: Sir Keir seems averse to confrontation and squirms over cultural questions. Whether it will help put the Tories back into office seems less certain, for three reasons. The first is that her story—of how an elected government was thwarted by the new bureaucratic class—may appear a displacement exercise. An honest account of how Britain’s infrastructure-planning laws became so sclerotic would begin not with the new bureaucrats but with Conservatives who repeatedly blocked reform. The same might be said of the environmental and public-health laws which Ms Badenoch laments and for which her colleagues legislated.The second is that her war on this bureaucratic class seems odd, set against her task of rebuilding the fragmented Conservative coalition. A large chunk of Tory voters defected to the Liberal Democrats, who now hold 72 seats, many in prosperous southern commuter towns, formerly the Tories’ heartlands. Yet although the middle-class lawyers and administrators of the new bureaucratic class may appear to be prime Tory targets, this is “deeply mistaken”, according to Ms Badenoch’s paper, as it “would be extremely detrimental to their interests”. This is logic more familiar to the election-losing hard Left than the old Conservative Party. It helps for aspirant prime ministers to sound as if they like the people they hope to govern.The third is that the lot of a leader of the opposition is a gruelling one: a slog of visits to supermarkets in marginal seats, while attempting to raise funds, reform a creaking party machine and keep fractious colleagues together. Yet Ms Badenoch, says Lord Ashcroft, is “not a morning person”. She is late to campaign stops and dinner parties—and was even late to her first cabinet meeting. She is said to dislike political journalists, and particularly broadcast interviews. She can sound disdainful of wonks who want to discuss policy. Rebuilding a shattered Conservative Party will take strong organisational leadership. Before she can take on the new bureaucratic class, Ms Badenoch will first need to demonstrate that she is a bureaucrat herself.