Badenoch Keeps Her Options Open in Tory Reshuffle

Kemi Badenoch’s first genuinely consequential reshuffle as Conservative leader, completed today, can easily be described as a move to the right. Andrew Griffith has replaced Mel Stride as shadow chancellor; Claire Coutinho has been elevated to an unusually powerful position as shadow business secretary and Griffith’s deputy across economic policy; Katie Lam, among the most uncompromising Conservative voices on immigration, has taken James Cleverly’s old housing and communities brief; Andrew Bowie moves to energy; and two members of the 2024 intake enter the shadow cabinet. By replacing Stride with Griffith, Badenoch has cut loose a conspicuously cautious economic spokesman and prominent critic of Liz Truss’s minibudget in favor of a man who supported Truss, served in her Treasury, and on receiving his new job immediately promised lower taxes, deregulation, more oil and gas production, and an “economic revolution.”

But a reshuffle that also brings Tom Tugendhat back from the wilderness to replace Priti Patel at the Foreign Office and installs Damian Hinds at health hardly amounts to a purge of Conservative moderates. Tugendhat opposed Badenoch in the leadership election, belongs temperamentally and historically to a different part of the party, supported Remain, and had previously declined to serve in her shadow cabinet. Hinds, a former education secretary, supplies experience rather than ideological excitement. Even Patel has been given a consolation prize in “international engagement” (whatever that may be), rather than being unceremoniously dispatched. 

The upshot is that Badenoch is moving the party rightward on the questions over which the Conservative–Reform struggle is actually being fought, without making ideological conformity the organizing principle of her leadership. Every move toward Reform’s positions, however, becomes both an asset and a liability: When Badenoch adopts a harder position, she can say that the Conservatives have changed, and Farage can say that Reform forced them to change; when she hews to the center, her hard-right rival can say the Tories have not changed enough. Reform can therefore claim some share of the proceeds whichever choice she makes.

Margaret Thatcher’s first years as Tory leader reveal a precedent that was considerably less tidy in practice than it became in retrospect. After 1975, Thatcher presided over an unmistakable movement away from the assumptions that had governed Conservative economic policy under Ted Heath, without immediately constructing an ideologically homogeneous front bench. Her opposition remained divided among converts, skeptics, and figures whose political usefulness outweighed their doctrinal reliability. Keith Joseph supplied much of the intellectual insurgency, but Geoffrey Howe rather than Joseph took control of economic policy, while figures belonging to the older Conservative establishment remained indispensable. Even the Centre for Policy Studies sometimes complained that Thatcher was proceeding too cautiously. The ideological revolution subsequently imposed upon the period can obscure how provisional, improvised, and politically managed it looked while it was happening.