When I first met Kemi in October 2024, I was decidedly unimpressed; I thought that under her leadership, the Conservative Party would morph into an exaggerated caricature of itself, wielding contradictions and vacuous rhetoric as though they might disguise its fundamental lack of purpose. I was not mistaken. One can latch onto any one of Badenoch’s theatrics and discern the absence of genuine policy or argument she creates; a certain nihilistic flamboyance seems to define her.

Take, for instance, her engagement with the issue of grooming gangs. There was no substantial attempt to address the matter. Her unwillingness to defend Jess Phillips from alt-right attacks, coupled with her dismissive stance on legitimate efforts to enhance safeguarding powers for councils, highlights a recurring pattern: superficial rhetoric over meaningful action, all while ignoring the glaring failures of her own party following the Jay inquiry.

Or consider her ostentatious posturing with Reform UK. Publicly disavowing any formal alliance, she nonetheless echoes their language, mirroring their tone and priorities. This alignment, where loyalty to ideology trumps reasoned discussion, is deeply concerning.

It’s not just her policies that exasperate, it’s the party’s broader intellectual stagnation. The Conservatives under Badenoch appear almost hostile to fresh ideas. Her slogan, ‘Renewal 2030,’ promised a visionary agenda, yet her leadership delivers little beyond the stale dogmas of the past. An empty promise that feels more like a cruel mockery than a serious framework for change.

Her preoccupation with dismantling protections such as the Equality Act or the ECHR, alongside her resistance to maternity leave, portrays a leader fundamentally at odds with societal progress. Her remark that Labour’s Rachel Reeves is “a woman problem” exemplifies this myopic perspective. The party’s fixation on free speech increasingly feels hollow when its policies seem designed to suppress minority voices, whether by gender, race, or class.

While her discussions of the triple lock pension gesture towards reform, they are overshadowed by her abject neglect of universal credit failure and her inability to address post-Brexit stagnation. Badenoch’s focus simply never wanes from the populist and, frankly, at times inconsequential policies. More so, even if her clock occasionally hits the correct time (a feat I wish I could claim happened twice a day) it remains set on the wrong path. Case in point, it’s not necessarily farmers for whom inheritance taxation poses a problem, but rather the precedent it sets for taxing illiquid assets. Any opposition would be gleeful with this bountiful budget of slop, but it feels at times Badenoch is paralysed by her lack of imagination.

The absurdity of Badenoch’s leadership lies in her apparent blindness to all of this. Her performances at PMQs are uninspired, her speeches lack substance, and her policy ideas are as incoherent as they are inconsistent. After 14 years in government, her party remains unwilling to engage in genuine self-reflection, and her leadership offers little more than a veneer of renewal.

Badenoch’s insistence the Tories must entrench themselves sounds as hollow as her claim that her family “can’t afford a holiday” on a ministerial salary and a Deutsche Bank income. Her leadership is a disjointed exercise in deflection, her promises dissipating into irrelevance. And if this is her vision for 2030, the electorate will likely leave her behind long before then, and in all honesty, so should the party.