Ozempic Rob and the Iron Lady’s Successor: Tory Leadership Race Comes to a Head

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick // Photo Courtesy: Wikimedia Commons

The recent Tory leadership race is proof that, sometimes, it's best to just shut up. Unfortunately for us, neither candidate has heeded this advice, with both Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick expounding their contrasting leadership plans across all platforms. However, when it comes to articulating respective plans, Jenrick seems to struggle whilst Badenoch is on the up.

Jenrick has proven unpopular amongst Tory voters who have dismissively labelled him 'more of the same', with an approach that seems unobtrusive at best, and outright dull at worst. Confused and unconvincing, his policies appear to change at the beck and call of the Tory Membership, with his pledge to 'get immigration done' resoundingly familiar. Perplexingly, he doesn't appear to have a very well-founded stance on anything at all. Tory MP Holden offered Jenrick's biggest strength as his ‘slightly clearer vision of where he wants to take the country’ - an indictment from the people ostensibly supporting him. To add fuel to this, Jenrick has recently promoted a hard-right approach; his announcement of plans to leave the ECHR has lost him crucial support from many One Nation and more centrist Tories. 

Aside from the half-formed, ill-advised policies that Jenrick promotes, he is frankly straight up unlikeable. In fact, so uncompelling was Jenrick’s countenance that even Tory voters admitted they found it hard to listen to him. This seems to be a shared sentiment amongst Tories - he just does not do it for them. Despite saying the kind of far-right, mildly fascist things they know and love, he doesn’t seem to speak with the same conviction, or have the same story-telling ability, as Badenoch. Even on the subject of something as outlandish as Ozempic, Jenrick failed to prove interesting - after taking the drugs for weight loss earlier this year, all he flatly shared was that he ‘didn’t particularly enjoy it’. How disappointing. 

In spite of her hard-line policies, Badenoch, who has been unsympathetically dubbed 'KemiKaze', has received a much warmer appraisal from the Tory membership. The contentious policies she promotes, which border on downright vitriolic, have been labelled 'authentic' by the party’s right wing. Perhaps most strikingly, her infamous statement that 'not all cultures are equally valid', as well as her insistence that 'some civil servants need to be locked up', have provoked not anger but admiration. Caustic polemics on paid maternity leave have been met with praise whilst unfounded attacks on autistic individuals have been saluted. Nonetheless, despite Badenoch’s hardliner approach being so widely lauded, it seems Jenrick has proven capable of losing this race all on his own, as shown by his pitiful personality.

It remains to be seen whether Badenoch’s formidable personality will carry her to victory. For now, she seems to be saying all the right things (literally) - at least in the eyes of Tory voters. She went as far as to announce that she became more conservative in reaction to 'the very spoiled, entitled, privileged, metropolitan elite-in-training at university'- or in other words, your average future Tory MP. The irony of her statement was somewhat wasted on the Tory voter base, who apparently lack the introspection to realise that a lot of them fit that description themselves. 

So whilst the Tories have provided ample entertainment throughout this leadership race (like attributing Cleverly's loss to misguided tactical voting), it is intriguing to speculate whether the new Tory leadership will pose any genuine threat to the Labour government. With Badenoch holding the lowest ‘public suitability’ rating out of the original candidates, the likelihood of appealing to large swatches of the electorate seems slim. Notwithstanding this, the same was said about Margaret Thatcher, and she went on to win three consecutive terms. Badenoch's self-proclaimed similarity to the Iron Lady, then, may serve her well as she prepares to face Ozempic Robbie.