The Conservative Party has ended its annual conference in Birmingham firmly united behind leader Kemi Badenoch, with no murmurings of dissent about her position — a sharp contrast to the mood a year ago, BBC political editor Chris Mason reported.
Mason wrote that the pivot point in Badenoch’s leadership so far came at the same gathering 12 months earlier, when, amid constant chatter that Robert Jenrick might seek to topple her, she won over the party faithful with an address that oozed confidence.
On that occasion reporters were given her speech script and could follow it line by line, but a page was missing towards the end. That page carried the Conservative crowd pleaser: a plan to scrap stamp duty in England and Northern Ireland.
This year a familiar drill played out. There was plenty of talk before and during the conference of a new policy on inheritance tax, and sure enough another page was missing near the end of her speech, containing her inheritance tax plan.
Inheritance tax is paid by fewer than one in 20 people but has been described as the country’s most unpopular tax. Advocates of cutting or scrapping it say that is because plenty aspire to one day being rich enough to have to pay it, and because it amounts to a second tax on already taxed income.
Opponents had prepared their case in advance. Reform UK claim the plan is a “tax cut for multi-millionaires”, and say their own proposal to cut income tax for millions by raising the threshold at which most people start paying it will benefit far more people.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies said the “biggest beneficiaries” would be “a very well off group, mainly living in London and the south east of England”. It added that the change would “encourage wealthy people to buy (or stay in) more expensive homes in their later years”, and said the proportion of estates subject to inheritance tax is rising rapidly, although forecasts are uncertain because they depend on factors including house prices.
The Conservatives estimate their inheritance policy change would cost around £6bn a year. They claim to have identified £71bn worth of cuts that can be made to government spending, including £36bn a year from benefits and welfare.
The largest savings are projected to come from reforming sickness and disability benefits, where the party believes it can save £13.7bn a year, with £9.5bn a year from ending access to benefits for non-EU nationals, £4.5bn from changes to housing benefit, and £3.1bn from reintroducing the two-child limit for Universal Credit.
Work and Pensions Minister Torsten Bell said “history is very clear that promising this scale of tax cuts ends one way: trashing your public finances”.
Beyond policy announcements, Mason said the speech stood out for a broader point. The veteran Conservative elections strategist Sir Lynton Crosby once suggested the party ought to “scrape the barnacles off the boat”, a reference to unpopular policies that could cause the Tories a headache during an election campaign.
This speech felt like Badenoch revelling in pointing at the clean hull of the Conservative ship, with what she sees as those barnacles removed — not least the high-profile defections of Jenrick and Suella Braverman, Mason wrote.
Her reflections on Reform UK carried striking glee and anger, he reported. She sought to portray the party as sleazy and pointedly leaned into an argument of recent months about Englishness.
Braverman wrote on social media last month that, given her Asian heritage, “I’m not English”, adding: “I’m proud to be British. My family and ancestors have a link to Britain which spans centuries. But in no way are we English”, and that “Englishness is an ethnicity”.
Badenoch expressed her personal fury at this, saying that as the mother of mixed-race children: “I don’t want to explain to my son, when we’re watching our brilliant England team play football, that some people don’t think our black players are English”.
The recurring message, on the day and over recent days, is that Badenoch cannot stand Reform and will not work with the party before or after the next general election. But Mason said what she said amounted to an attack on Reform’s character and the judgement of its prominent figures, rather than a significant focus on the policies most often talked about by Nigel Farage.
Badenoch did talk about immigration, but not at length. She largely left the issue — and the Conservative policy to withdraw from the European Convention on Human Rights, which Reform also advocates — to her shadow home secretary Chris Philp, who spoke before her.
Instead she grounded the speech in the big-picture tussle over trust between Labour and the Conservatives, and in particular over who is better placed to deliver a growing economy.
In tone, language and public enthusiasm, Mason noted, Badenoch and Andy Burnham are quite the contrast with their immediate predecessors Rishi Sunak and Sir Keir Starmer. Both appear to be enjoying themselves on stage and both are enthusiastic purveyors of the core of their very different worldviews. Badenoch acknowledged this with what she called the “battle for the soul of this nation” in the opening minute or so of her address.
The Conservatives feel chipper and are united. But Mason wrote that while both are better than the alternative for any party leader, they are not the same as being popular — and that Badenoch acknowledged the party is not there on that score yet by a long chalk, with opinion polls suggesting they are more unpopular than when they suffered a heavy defeat at the last general election.
The numbers for the party are dire, though relatively speaking not as bad as they were, he reported. Tories hope things are looking up: Reform has had a bruising few months, and the Conservatives believe Labour is leaning to the left as it tries to lure Green and Liberal Democrat supporters.
Can the Conservatives also lure recent Lib Dem supporters in the south of England with talk of help with childcare costs whatever your income, of not hiking council tax on very expensive homes, and of the inheritance tax plan? Tories hope there are now gaps in the political market they can exploit.
They crave catching and overtaking Reform in the polls, hoping that after that there is a tipping point allowing them to credibly claim they are the most viable alternative to a Labour or Labour-led future government.
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