Tories past, Keir’s today, Kemi’s tomorrow by Mary Long

There’s a peculiar kind of pain that comes not from defeat, but from being outmanoeuvred with your own forgotten weapons. For Kemi Badenoch and many Conservatives, the true sting of Keir Starmer’s recent political strategy isn’t simply that Labour is leading in the polls, it’s that Starmer seems to be raiding the Conservative playbook they themselves long abandoned. And he’s reading it better than they ever did.

Kemi Badenoch, often heralded as the intellectual torchbearer of modern Toryism, sharp-tongued, quick-witted, and unapologetically ideological, now finds herself watching, with no small amount of exasperation, as Labour rebrands itself with policies that could’ve been cut-and-pasted from early Cameronism. Fiscal prudence? Tick. National security front and centre? Tick. Tougher stance on immigration? Tick again. You’d be forgiven for mistaking Labour HQ for a conservative think tank circa 2010, albeit one with better coffee and less moral panic.

For Badenoch, who prides herself on ideological clarity and has long accused Labour of flip-flopping in a fog of progressive confusion, Starmer’s recent pivot must feel like watching a magician steal your act and get a standing ovation while you’re still backstage wondering where your wand went. It’s infuriating. Worse, it’s effective.

This isn’t just political theatre; it’s a slow, almost surgical dismantling of Conservative identity. Starmer has become the spectre haunting the Tories, not because he’s wildly charismatic or visionary, but because he’s occupying the very centre-ground they’ve slowly vacated in favour of increasingly erratic right-wing populism. In short, while Badenoch and her peers were busy yelling at clouds and culture wars, Starmer slipped into their suits, took a sensible haircut, and started making centrist noises in a lower, calmer register.

The irony is poetic. For years, the Conservatives accused Labour of being ideologically bankrupt, of being too soft, too chaotic, too bound by the Corbyn legacy. But Starmer’s Labour has undergone the kind of policy dry-cleaning operation that Tory strategists can only dream of. He’s laundered the red out of his tie just enough to make middle England nod approvingly. Meanwhile, the Conservatives, torn between Sunak’s technocratic drift and the Truss-Badenoch-style ideological purism, are left shouting over each other in an emptying room.

Badenoch’s frustration isn’t irrational. She’s watching the centre-right ground, long presumed safe territory for the Conservatives become contested again, and not by an insurgent right-wing party or a centrist Liberal revival, but by Labour of all people. Starmer’s genius, if we can call it that, lies in how thoroughly boring he’s made himself. Boring like a bank statement. Boring like a stable mortgage. Boring like the safe pair of hands voters start looking for after a decade of being taken on a rollercoaster blindfolded.

This isn’t to say that Badenoch’s ideological fervour doesn’t have an audience. It does. But it’s niche. It’s Twitter. It’s Conservative Home comment sections. The average voter, however, increasingly doesn’t want a warrior in government, they want a plumber. Someone who can fix the leaks without lecturing them about the Romans who invented aqueducts.

So when Starmer echoes Conservative positions on defence spending, public sector reform, or economic responsibility, Badenoch doesn’t just see political convergence. She sees ideological theft. She sees Labour doing what the Conservatives should’ve done if they hadn’t become addicted to performative chaos and purity tests. It's not just a betrayal of ideological lines, it’s a humiliation of the Tories' own neglect.

Of course, Badenoch will likely respond, as she often does, with fiery clarity. She might accuse Labour of opportunism, of lacking authenticity, of cynical political cosplay. And she wouldn’t be entirely wrong. But here’s the rub: voters don’t always care who thought of the idea first; they care who looks more likely to actually deliver it.

Starmer doesn’t need to be inspiring. He just needs to seem less risky than a party that tried to sell Trussonomics as genius before it imploded the markets. And that, ultimately, is the rub for Badenoch and her colleagues. They aren’t losing the argument. They’re losing the audience.

In the end, what hurts Kemi Badenoch most isn’t Keir Starmer stealing Tory policies. It’s the realisation that the Tories themselves stopped believing in those policies a long time ago. And now, the ghost of Tories past is wearing a red rosette.