The 2024 Conservative Leadership Race: What does it tell us about the UK today?

By Mahnoor Mehr

On the 5th of July 2024, after a damning general election that reduced the Conservatives down to just 121 seats and a vote share of 23.7%, the lowest in their history, former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak resigned as party leader, triggering a leadership race within the party. At the Conservative party conference, the final four candidates, James Cleverly, Tom Tugendhat, Robert Jenrick, and to-be winner Kemi Badenoch made their pitches to Conservative members. Here and throughout their campaigns, we saw a strong indication of the consequences of the general election for the Conservatives and what this means for the UK as a whole. This article will focus mainly on the two finalists, Jenrick and Badenoch, their ideas and principles, and what the results of this race could mean for the future.

At the Conservative conference, Cleverly appeared to be the most moderate of the candidates, opening with an apology to the public for the fall in confidence in his party and emphasising the need to do better. An idea he continuously came back to was the importance of “[selling] the benefits of Conservatism with a smile.” Despite coming first in the third round of voting, he was unexpectedly eliminated. Meanwhile, the more right-leaning two final candidates Badenoch and Jenrick called for more extreme measures: Badenoch promoted her Renewal 2030 plan, which in essence is a defence of traditional Conservative values and a criticism of progressive, cultural and political shifts, whilst Jenrick referred to himself as the heir to highly controversial right-wing former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. 

Notably, both of their leadership campaigns focused on the highly topical areas of migration and identity politics. This is no doubt an attempt to regain the support they lost from their regular voters in the general election, a result of the last few years of scandals and failures that has caused a tank in confidence in the Conservatives - most painfully, the cost of living crisis. Disillusioned former Conservative voters found hope in Reform UK, a right-wing populist party (previously known as the Brexit Party). Reform UK campaigned as a saviour for working-class Britain, promising economic policies such as scrapping VAT on energy bills and environmental levies to lower household costs, but also tightening up on immigration and the promotion of “woke ideologies” which are supposedly leading to Britain’s downfall. This traditionalist and nationalist standpoint clearly resonated with a significant proportion of the electorate, because although they only won 5 parliamentary seats, Reform took the third largest vote share at 14.3%. In many constituencies, they won second place by thousands, clearing any other party. We also saw this radical lurch to the right play out in the race riots this summer, where online disinformation about the origins of the Southport tragedy’s perpetrator caused weeks of violent racist mob action across the UK, including the targeting of a hotel in Rotherham where asylum seekers were being housed. 

In terms of the so-called “woke agenda”, both were staunchly against the teaching of critical race theory, with Badenoch famously being a critic of the Black Lives Matter movement that reached its height in 2020. During her former role as Women and Equalities Minister, Badenoch made her anti-transgender position clear: her involvement with trans-exclusive charity LGB Alliance, her derogatory private remarks about trans women being “men using women’s bathrooms” being leaked, alongside more public criticism, testify to her stance on this matter. During her campaign, she made sure to stand out on this issue from her comparatively more moderate fellow candidates. Badenoch also attracted attention for her criticism of the minimum wage as harming UK businesses and maternity pay as “excessive” and “[having] gone too far”. Pro-tradition, pro-business, and committed to removing red tape, Badenoch placed herself as the right-wing darling of the Conservatives, and on 2nd November 2024, she was declared the winner of the leadership race. 

This begs the question - why was the most extreme of the candidates chosen as the Conservative leader after a thrashing of an election? Why not Cleverly, who campaigned on restoring unity and public trust, and encouraged his party to “be more normal”? Why instead Badenoch, who, by focusing on identity politics and the so-called ‘culture wars’ and pushing for significant deregulation, has polarised herself from the centre and left of the electorate? 

Because the Conservatives now know who they need to target in the next election. They need to campaign on the issues that lost them voters to Reform UK to ultimately return to power. With the Conservative Party now seeming to try to appease this section of the electorate, a group associated with events such as this summer’s riot actions of window smashing, fires, derogatory slogans and attacks on Muslims and ethnic minorities, a dangerous precedent has been set for Britain’s future. We will see how things play out in the coming years with Labour in government, and how they will handle these widening divides in contemporary British society. If mismanaged, we may see a continual shift towards right-wing populism as we are seeing across Europe and now in the recent US election. Radical right-wing political shifts like this are a cause for concern for the overwhelming majority, as history has proven time and time again - but without getting too ahead of myself, this leadership race has clearly communicated to the British public the course of politics for the next few years.