Badenoch has the strength to fight both Labour and Reform

New Tory leader has the charisma to take on Nigel Farage – and the ability to savage Sir Keir Starmer at the despatch box

Being leader of the opposition is known as the worst job in politics, and Kemi Badenoch might find that is putting it mildly as she contemplates the scale of the task she now faces.
After emerging bloodied but victorious from a gruelling slugfest with Robert Jenrick, the hard work really begins for Mrs Badenoch. She has seven months to reinvigorate her demoralised party before it faces its next big moment of peril in May’s local elections.
The Tories should rightly use this moment to celebrate the fact that they have elected the first black leader of a major political party – not to mention their fourth female leader – in a week when Labour has laughably claimed that Rachel Reeves is the person who has broken the glass ceiling in politics. 
Once again, the Conservatives have made history as the true party of diversity and equality. But once the applause has died down, Mrs Badenoch must turn her attention to how she can stop the Tory rot before her first big test in May. 
She has claimed that the six leadership candidates “came through this campaign more united” and, if she can truly unite the party behind her, she stands a chance of making the sort of gains in the local elections that will prompt soothing talk of green shoots of recovery.
If the party remains divided, though, there is the very real possibility that the Tories could carry on leeching support from both wings, with disaffected centrists – denied the chance to vote for a leader from the One Nation faction – tempted by the Lib Dems, and panicky Right-wingers being lured by Nigel Farage’s siren call to join Reform UK.
Conservative Party members have chosen Mrs Badenoch because they believe she has the charisma and force of character to take on Mr Farage, not to mention the likelihood that she will savage Sir Keir Starmer at the despatch box.
At a time when the Tory Party needs to show the wider electorate that it has changed, its choice of a woman born in London but raised in Nigeria immediately reboots the party’s image. 
Her task now is to define what the present day Conservative Party is for. In her own words, it is time “to reset our politics and our thinking”.
She was accused by supporters of Mr Jenrick of offering little more than “vibes” during the leadership contest, but party members were clearly attracted by a leader who is in listening mode, willing to use the next five years to form policies that are what the party wants rather than just what she wants.
This was the closest result in the era of members choosing their leader – around 56 per cent to 44 per cent – but the higher-than-expected turnout of nearly 73 per cent in the membership ballot means she has a decent mandate from the grassroots, a fact she can use to whip her critics into line in the days and months ahead.
Only a third of Tory MPs voted for her, and that comparative divide between MPs and members makes it all the more important that Mrs Badenoch makes good on her promises to give members a greater say in party policy and in choosing parliamentary candidates. 
Many of the Tory members who voted for her are also the volunteers who carry out the thankless task of door-to-door campaigning in local elections. If they feel ignored, they will go elsewhere.
There are very real fears that the Conservatives could be overtaken in membership numbers by Reform, which is already well on its way to the 100,000 mark, while the Tories are down to a little over 131,000 members.
Mrs Badenoch is not without her flaws – not least her well-documented ability to fall out with some of her colleagues – but members see in her a woman whose feistiness is a strength: they believe she will fight for them, and they also believe she is genuine when she says what she stands for, something they perhaps doubted in Mr Jenrick’s case.
Mr Jenrick arguably had the more attractive policies (and certainly the more fully-formed) but Michael Gove’s unkind description of him as another “Tory boy” clearly chimed with many party members who feared he would be blown away by gale force Farage.
Mrs Badenoch has already described herself as “Labour’s worst nightmare”, a woman whose background and ethnicity will blunt any accusations that Tories are prejudiced or racist.
And, despite his dismissive comments about Mrs Badenoch, Mr Farage will surely recognise that, of the two contenders for the Tory crown, she is the one who will cause him the most problems.
If Mrs Badenoch can lead the party to gains in the local elections, members will start to believe that she can be the closest they have had to an heir to Margaret Thatcher. If she fails, they will surely give her time to prove herself at the 2026 local elections but, if there is no progress by then, she may not be given the chance to fight a general election.
Both Mrs Badenoch and Mr Jenrick have described this as an existential moment for the Conservative Party. The stakes for the country’s most successful political party have perhaps never been higher.