Coffee House Shots: is 2026 Kemi's year?
Best of the Spectator
The Spectator
4.4 • 785 Ratings
🗓️ 6 January 2026
⏱️ 17 minutes
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Summary
Regular listeners will remember back in May we recorded a podcast debating whether Kemi Badenoch was the right fit for Tory leader. At that point in time the Conservatives were falling in the polls and she was facing allegations of laziness and a lack of a political vision. Spool forward to the end of the year and she is in her strongest position ever. She looks more assured in PMQs, her conference speech was a hit and her media game is much improved. But is she actually getting better, or is Starmer getting worse? And will this modest bump in fortunes translate to success at the local elections?
James Heale speaks to Paul Goodman, Lara Brown and William Atkinson.
Produced by Oscar Edmondson and Patrick Gibbons.
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Transcript
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| 0:35.3 | Hello and welcome to the special edition of Coffee House Shots. I'm James Hill and I'm joined today by Paul Goodman, Conservatives Peer and former editor of Conservative Home, and two of my colleagues, William Mackinson and Lara Brown. Now, for long-term listeners, you might recall back in May, we had a bit of a debate between Michael Gove, William Mackinson and Lara Brown about the future of the Conservative Party and particularly KemiNox leadership. So we just thought we would have a podcast reflecting on the first 14 months |
| 0:58.0 | of Komenbead-Nox leadership. Paul, how do you think she's done so far? |
| 1:01.3 | So the good news is that her position has improved since May. There was a big internal |
| 1:06.4 | shuffle. In came Mark McGuinness and Stephen Gilbert and Francis Maude on the side. There's a very |
| 1:14.1 | experienced held hands. She had a good conference and you can see from her doing PMQs that she's now |
| 1:20.9 | beginning to enjoy it. And the first rule of a political leader is you must enjoy it. Her personal |
| 1:26.4 | ratings are now at their highest ever. That's the good news. |
| 1:30.9 | And she has stopped the slide. The triumphalist emails I was getting, even three months ago, |
| 1:37.0 | from very senior members of reform, who I'm just about too tactful to name, claiming that the |
| 1:40.9 | Tories are about to be extinguished, they have stopped. But the bad news is they're stuck. |
| 1:47.4 | They can't really seem to push up much above 17%. |
| 1:51.7 | And reform, for all the fact they've had a bit of a knock, are still, you know, what, about 10 points ahead. |
| 1:57.9 | What you could reasonably expect is this. |
| 2:00.7 | Kemi's main problem is actually just getting |
| 2:02.4 | heard. It's people noticing she's there. So if she can find a way of carrying on getting noticed, |
| 2:09.6 | I would expect reasonably the Tory rating to start creeping up. But then you hit May. And the big |
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