What happens to a political leader who is too sure of themself? Sometimes, huge confidence is a very useful, self-fulfilling quality: persuading party colleagues, activists, donors and voters that more can be achieved than is usually thought possible. Such utter conviction can keep everyone believing while the actual practicalities of a political project are worked out.
Yet when an air of absolute certainty turns out to be overconfidence, the bubble bursts. The politician may be revealed as disastrously complacent and lacking in judgment, having delusions of grandeur, or being fundamentally in denial. Especially in our era of online mockery and instinctive contempt for politicians, an overconfident leader can end up as a laughing stock.
This week is the second anniversary of the start of Kemi Badenoch’s Conservative leadership. So far, self-assuredness has been her tenure’s central feature, the one aspect that many voters and journalists have noticed. Badenoch’s speeches, interviews and Commons interventions come riskily spiced with contempt, self-congratulation and advice to supposedly lesser political mortals: “I was right”, “let me explain”, “let me tell them [the government] some home truths”.
She and her party now present themselves in a similarly self-aggrandising way. Unlike Labour and the other parties, she says: “We live in the real world.” The Conservatives are the party of “common sense”, “the no-nonsense party” that “get stuff done”. A long pamphlet the party recently published, with Badenoch’s name on the cover, about how it would approach governing is a little smugly titled: “The Right Way”.
When she became leader, the Tories were at 26% in Politico’s rolling average of polls: barely above their 24% vote share in the 2024 general election, the worst in their history. After two years of Badenoch’s aggressive leadership, covered ever more approvingly by the rightwing media, accompanied by regular crises inside Labour and Reform UK, the Conservatives have fallen to 21%. The forecaster Electoral Calculus currently predicts they will win 128 seats at the next election, almost three times fewer than Labour – and even this paltry tally depends on the electoral system hugely favouring the Tories over the similarly disliked Reform UK.
During previous periods of defeat and great unpopularity, the Conservatives pored over their mistakes in government, reconsidered policies, reassessed how their party related to society, and changed direction fundamentally. After losing power in 1945 – after 14 years, as in 2024 – they accepted that in office they had not done enough to reduce unemployment, stimulate the economy, or develop the welfare state. After losing power in 1974, they ditched their kinder Conservatism for the ambitious counter-revolution of Thatcherism.
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