Has Kemi decided Reform are a bunch of racists?

Lewis Goodall (0:02)

This is a Global Production.

Kemi Badenoch (0:05)

In 2024, voters gave their verdict on the rouse, the plots and the infighting. Remember all that drama? That's gone. The Conservatives have had an export boom.

We have had an export boom of drama queens going to reform.

Jon Sopel (0:38)

If there's one image that was in Kemi Badenoch's head as she delivered that speech to conference, it was probably the face of Robert Jenrick, who dominated her conference this time last year, and then pretty much flounced off to join reform.

Lewis Goodall (0:54)

Some of her sharpest attacks were aimed at reform throughout this speech. It comes as reform has exonerated the two people filmed in that undercover report. Surprise, surprise. Is Kemi hitting the target? Welcome to The News Agents.

The News Agents It's Jon.

Jon Sopel (1:19)

It's Maitlis.

Lewis Goodall (1:20)

It's Lewis. And Kemi Badenoch has given her keynote speech to end the Tory Party Conference, and send everyone away with a slightly gladder heart and a quicker step than when they arrived. And it was a good speech in parts. I mean, some of it was pretty badly written. We are not a party of the past. And you know that the next line is, we are a party of the future. And there were clunky bits like that. But she took her argument to Labour. She set out some traditional Tory kind of battleground areas about on the economy, on defense, on welfare reform, and all those things, and said, look, we are very, very different from Andy Burnham. But I was really struck by those passages where she went after Farage and reform.

Jon Sopel (2:05)

I do think somebody has had a very firm word in her ear over the last 12 months. I mean, she sort of started to set the scene this time last year when she made the big announcement on ending stamp duty if they got into power.

And I think that firm word in her ear said this. You have to talk about the economy. You have to concentrate on the cost of living. You have to sound like a normal, moderate person, not somebody who is batshit crazy on culture wars because reform are doing all that. They can do all that. And it's not actually going very well for them right now.

And she gave this quite important, I think, interview a couple of days ago at the BBC, where she clarified that she would never, she says, go into power with reform if they were the two largest parties in any sort of hung parliament. And I think the reason she did that is because she has now worked out that, yes, she wants the voters back, but the leadership of reform is not where the bulk of the Conservative Party want to be. And somebody close to her said, cut them free, let them go, call them whatever you want, call them drama queens, call them racists, quite frankly, as she does pretty much. And I think that that is a really refreshing new place for the Conservatives to be, with clear blue water to both their left and now to their right.

Lewis Goodall (3:43)

I think this is, I think the significant thing about this speech, as you say, Emily, I think there is that Badenoch is clearly evolving her strategy with regards to reform. There have been lots of voices, not least some very senior ones in the Conservative press who have been talking about this Unite the Right idea. You know, the Conservative party is, and we didn't know this last year, in fairness, the Conservative party, despite reform's best efforts, doesn't appear to be going anywhere, but it is too weak to win, too strong to die, and the same thing goes on at the moment is true of reform. So there is obviously an electoral logic to the two at some point coming together. I think the significant thing about this speech is that this is basically the toughest we have seen her be on reform and on Farage so far. And indeed, it's not just being tough on them personally, taking the piss out of them, which is easy to do, albeit she did do a fair bit of that.

She was directly taking on some of their most eccentric and many people would say most extreme arguments, not just articulated by Farage in many cases here, because Farage, as we've discussed many times on the show before, kind of knows usually kind of where the line is, shuffles ever so gingerly up to it and stops there. But had did take on directly some of the, let's be frank, appalling, ethno-nationalist type of politics that we have seen from senior reform figures, especially on this question about what it means to be English and the idea that basically, unless for some reason you can trace your lineage all the way back to the bio-tapestry, that you can't possibly claim truly legitimately to be English. And she made that personal, not as personal as Burnham's speech was last week, but there was a flash of the personal here, because of course she was talking about her own children who are mixed race.