Kemi Badenoch has a problem. The Conservative Party she now leads is in the electoral wilderness after a catastrophic end to its 14-year rule — bookended by the chaos of Boris Johnson and the fantasy economics of Liz Truss. Badenoch is trying to forge a path forward, but so far, it looks less like a reinvention and more like a doubling down.
Positioned on the hard right of her party — and apparently comfortable there — Badenoch has embraced a familiar toolkit: anti-immigration posturing, opposition to “diversity,” and loud disdain for international norms. Her strategy is clear. She wants to consolidate the Tory base and ward off the rising challenge from Reform UK by offering voters a slightly more polished version of Nigel Farage’s grievance politics.
But Badenoch should stop looking over her right shoulder and start looking west — specifically, to Canada.
Across the Atlantic, Conservative leader Pierre Poilievre deployed a nearly identical playbook. He railed against elites, refused mainstream media interviews, and governed his image through slick YouTube clips and made-for-Twitter soundbites. Like Badenoch, he banked on the idea that cultural grievance, right-wing style, and anti-establishment swagger would be enough to win.
For a while, it looked like he was right. By late 2024, Poilievre’s party held a commanding 20-point lead over Justin Trudeau’s Liberals. Then everything fell apart.
The Liberals, long thought to be toast, suddenly swapped out Trudeau for Mark Carney — former central banker, global financial heavyweight, and the political equivalent of a cold compress after a migraine. At nearly the same moment, Donald Trump ramped up economic threats against Canada, giving Carney — the technocrat’s technocrat — the perfect crisis to walk into.
Poilievre’s support began to bleed. Fast.
His mistake wasn’t just tone — though his abrasive, dismissive style didn’t help. It was strategic. He assumed protest votes were permanent ones, that a furious electorate would stick around for the revolution. But as Carney surged, it became clear that many Canadians weren’t voting for Poilievre — they were voting against Trudeau. And once that bogeyman vanished, so did Poilievre’s lead.
This is Badenoch’s warning.
Right now, she seems to believe that the Tory path back to power runs exclusively through the Reform UK base. But like Poilievre, she’s misreading the moment. Many of Reform’s voters aren’t hard-right radicals; they’re disillusioned Conservatives — frustrated, embarrassed, and, above all, looking for competence. They don’t need their anger mirrored back at them by someone shouting about cancel culture and wokeness. They need a party that looks like it could run a country.
If Badenoch wants to rebuild the Tory brand — and avoid presiding over its dissolution — she needs to pivot. Now.
That means articulating a policy space between Farage-style reaction and Starmer’s technocratic centrism: one focused on workers, economic growth, and the actual mechanics of governance. It means dialing down the culture war stuff, not because it won’t play with the base (it does), but because it alienates the moderates she needs to win back. Canada’s experience shows that performative politics may energize the loudest parts of the electorate — but they repel everyone else.
Most importantly, it means acting like a grown-up on the world stage. Trump is coming, and like it or not, the next British Prime Minister will need a strategy to deal with him. That strategy cannot be posturing. It needs to be credible.
British democracy is stronger when both Labour and the Tories are serious parties with serious ideas. Right now, the Tories aren’t. If Badenoch wants to change that, she could do worse than learning from Poilievre’s crash course in overpromising to the angry and underestimating the rest.
The Reform UK threat is real. But it isn’t destiny. Badenoch still has time to prove that competence, not just confrontation, is the path forward. Whether she will is another matter entirely.
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