The Consistent Conservatism of Kemi Badenoch

Author
Affiliation

David Jeffery

University of Liverpool

Abstract

This study examines Kemi Badenoch’s conservatism through a mixed-methods analysis of her speeches, both within and outside of the Commons. It argues that Badenoch is best understood as a figure of the Conservative right who seeks to synthesise Thatcherite economic liberalism, post-Brexit sovereigntism, and a culturally assertive conservatism within a broader language of truth, responsibility, and national renewal. Drawing on Sentence-BERT analysis of Hansard and non-parliamentary speeches, the paper shows substantial continuity in Badenoch’s rhetoric across different phases of her career, while also identifying important shifts in tone and presentation as she moved from backbencher to minister, leadership contender, and party leader. In particular, it finds a transition from the more insurgent, moralised rhetoric of her 2022 leadership bid to a more programmatic and institutional language of competence, reform, and delivery by the time of her 2024 leadership bid, and her time as leader of the Conservative Party. Close reading of key speeches demonstrates that this shift is less a change in ideological substance than a reformulation of a relatively stable core. Badenoch’s conservatism is thus situated at the intersection of older and newer Conservative traditions: economically Thatcherite, politically shaped by Brexit-era sovereignty concerns, and culturally defined by opposition to identity politics and moral relativism. The study concludes that Badenoch represents an attempt to give the post-Brexit right a more coherent governing philosophy, one that seeks to turn grievance into programme and ideological combat into a politics of institutional renewal.

1 Introduction

Kemi Badenoch has emerged as one of the most significant figures on the contemporary Conservative right. Since entering Parliament in 2017, she has risen rapidly through ministerial office, two leadership bids, and ultimately to the leadership of the Conservative Party. Yet while Badenoch is widely identified as a politician of the right, there has been relatively little sustained analysis of what her conservatism consists of, how she frames it, and how consistent it has remained across different stages of her career.

This article examines Badenoch’s ideology through a mixed-methods analysis of her parliamentary and extra-parliamentary rhetoric. It first situates her comparatively within the Conservative Party in the House of Commons using existing measures of MPs’ ideological placement. It then uses Sentence-BERT analysis of Hansard speeches and curated leadership speeches to trace patterns of continuity and change in her language over time, before turning to close reading of those curated speeches to analyse the substantive content of her political project. In doing so, the article combines quantitative evidence of semantic consistency with qualitative analysis of ideological meaning.

The article argues that Badenoch’s conservatism is best understood as a synthesis of Thatcherite economic liberalism, post-Brexit sovereigntism, and a culturally assertive conservatism, held together by a recurring language of truth, responsibility, family, citizenship, and national renewal. While her rhetoric shifts as she moves from an outside leadership contender, to a viable leadership contender, to party leader, the underlying ideological core remains relatively stable. What changes most is not what Badenoch appears to believe, but how she presents those beliefs: moving from the sharper moral insurgency of 2022 to a more programmatic and institutional language of competence, reform, and delivery by 2024 and after. Thus Badenoch is not as a populist outsider or a simple Thatcherite revivalist, but instead seeks to give the post-Brexit Conservative right a more coherent governing philosophy.

2 Badenoch’s Backstory

Prior to entering Parliament, Badenoch had a notably varied professional background, having worked as a software engineer, systems analyst, associate director at Coutts, and later as digital director for The Spectator. This gave her a professional profile that differed from the more conventional routes into Westminster politics, which have often run more directly through working for an MP, political party, or charity/pressure group/trade union. She joined the Conservative Party at 25 and backed David Davis, later saying of David Cameron’s attempt to run for leader after 4 years as an MP “surely he can’t be ready” (Gimson 2017).

Badenoch first experience of elected office came at the London Assembly. Badenoch stood in the 2012 London Assembly election, where she finished fifth on the Conservative Party’s London-wide list and was therefore not initially elected. She subsequently entered the Assembly in 2015 after Victoria Borwick vacated her seat on being elected to the House of Commons. Badenoch was then re-elected to the Assembly in 2016. Badenoch herself left after winning the seat of Saffron Walden in the 2017 general election (she was replaced by Susan Hall). Badenoch won the Saffron Walden seat with a majority of 41 per cent, and was re-elected in 2019 with an increased majority of 44 per cent. Following the 2024 boundary changes, she was elected for the new seat of North West Essex, though with a much reduced majority of 5 per cent (against a notional 2019 majority of 42 per cent).

In the 2016 EU referendum, Badenoch supported Leave. She later voted in favour of Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement (Roe-Crines, Heppell, and Jeffery 2021). Her ministerial career advanced under Boris Johnson, where she held junior ministerial positions in the Department for Education and the Treasury. In February 2020 she was made a Minister of State for Equalities, and from September 2021 she combined this with a junior ministerial position for Local Government, Faith and Communities. She resigned from Johnson’s government in July 2022 during the wave of ministerial departures triggered by the Chris Pincher affair.

Alongside her ministerial rise, Badenoch also became increasingly visible in internal Conservative Party politics. She backed Michael Gove in the 2019 Conservative leadership election (Jeffery, Heppell, and Roe-Crines 2022), and Gove returned the favour when Badenoch emerged as a candidate in her own right in the first leadership contest of 2022. Although eliminated in the fourth round of MPs’ ballots, she attracted 59 supporters and established herself as a significant figure on the party’s right (Jeffery et al. 2023). Under Liz Truss, Badenoch was appointed Secretary of State for International Trade, a role she retained under Rishi Sunak. In the second leadership contest of 2022 she declined to run and endorsed Sunak, describing him as “the serious, honest leader we need”, and subsequently also served as Minister for Women and Equalities in his government.

Her progression culminated in the 2024 Conservative leadership election. Badenoch secured 42 nominations in the final round of the parliamentary stage, equivalent to 35 per cent, and went on to win 57 per cent of the membership vote (Jeffery, Roe-Crines, and Heppell 2026). With that, she became leader of the Conservative Party after just seven years in the House of Commons.

2.1 Contextualising Kemi Badenoch’s Ideology

One way of situating Badenoch within the parliamentary Conservative Party is to place her on existing estimates of MPs’ ideological positions. Two useful measures are available here. The first is the MP Left-Right study, which estimates MPs’ relative economic left-right positions from pairwise comparisons made by local councillors (Hanretty and Lazarov 2025). The second is Gaughan’s ideal-point dataset, which estimates MPs’ positions from patterns of social media followership among politically engaged users (Gaughan 2024).

The MP Left-Right covers estimates place Badenoch firmly on the right of the parliamentary Conservative Party in both the 2019–2024 and 2024–2029 parliaments (Hanretty and Lazarov 2025). Badenoch is given a score of 75.4, which is to the right of the Conservative Party mean in each period: 68.03 in the 2019 parliament and 67.28 in the 2024 parliament. In the 2019 parliament estimations, Badenoch is the 10th most right-wing MP out of the 609 MPs included in the dataset and also the 10th most right-wing Conservative out of 356 MPs. In the 2024 parliament, she is estimated to be the 9th most right-wing MP out of 614, and the 7th most right-wing Conservative out of 121. In the 2024 parliament, Badenoch’s placement puts her to the right of both the average Conservative MP and the average Reform MP. Yet she remains within the observed Conservative range rather than outside it. Her location is therefore best described as distinctly right-wing within the Conservative parliamentary party, rather than as an outlier detached from it (Hanretty and Lazarov 2025).

A second measure produces a somewhat more moderate, but still clearly right-leaning, placement. Gaughan’s ideal-point estimates use social media followership networks to infer MPs’ positions on a latent left-right dimension in the 2019-2024 parliament (Gaughan 2024). On this measure, Badenoch records a score of 1.42. This is again to the right of the Conservative mean of 1.26 and median of 1.29, confirming that she sits on the right of her party in comparative terms. However, her ranking in this dataset is less extreme than in the councillor-based measure. She is placed 98th most right-wing out of 591 MPs in the full House, and 98th most right-wing out of 312 Conservatives.

Taken together, these measures provide a useful descriptive benchmark for the analysis that follows, namely that it indicates Badenoch’s rhetoric and ideological framing emerge from a recognisable location within intra-party space: not of centrism nor outside Conservative politics, but from one of its more rightward parliamentary tendencies. However these accounts do not by themselves provide a full account of her conservatism. Left-right scores capture relative placement rather than the substantive content of a political worldview and they cannot show how she justifies her position, which themes she prioritises, or how consistently she articulates them across different contexts. For that, it is necessary to move beyond comparative ideological location and examine Badenoch’s own language. The next section therefore turns to her speeches and other leadership texts, using a mixed-methods approach to explore not simply where Badenoch sits within the party, but what her conservatism consists of, how she frames it, and how stable that framing has remained over time.

3 Methodology and Data

This article adopts a mixed-methods design. The quantitative component uses sentence embeddings to map the semantic relationship between Badenoch’s speeches over time and to compare them with wider parliamentary speech corpora. The qualitative component then uses close reading of key leadership texts to interpret the substantive political meaning of those patterns. This combination is important for the purposes of the paper. The embedding analysis is useful for identifying broad continuities, shifts, and relative distances in Badenoch’s language across different periods of her career, whilst close reading are used to understand what Badenoch is actually arguing and how she frames those arguments. Or put simply, the quantitative analysis explores consistency and the qualitative analysis explores content.

The speech corpus for the first part of the analysis consists of twelve non-Hansard texts authored by Kemi Badenoch between July 2022 and March 2026. These texts, listed in the appendix, include leadership launch speeches, campaign speeches, victory speeches, newspaper editorials, and speeches delivered while party leader. The corpus is therefore designed to capture high-salience ideological and agenda-setting interventions, rather than routine parliamentary contributions. These speeches were ordered chronologically and grouped into three broad phases: Badenoch’s first leadership bid in 2022, her second leadership bid in 2024, and her time as party leader. This structure allows the analysis to examine both short-term continuity across leadership contests and longer-term consistency once Badenoch had assumed the party leadership.

The second part of the analysis concerns Hansard speech data for Badenoch, Conservative MPs as a whole, and the House of Commons as a whole, from the period when Badenoch entered the Commons to 25th March 2026 (the time of writing). Speeches were first cleaned to remove bracketed procedural material and repeated whitespace. For Badenoch’s own parliamentary speeches, each chunk was also assigned to a broad career stage using her ministerial and parliamentary roles. These stages run from backbencher through junior and middle-ranking ministerial roles to Secretary of State, Shadow Secretary of State, and Leader of the Opposition, allowing us to track change associated with holding certain political offices.

In both cases, speeches were split into chunks. For the non-Hansard corpus, the unit of analysis is the paragraph-level text chunk. Each document was split into paragraphs using blank-line breaks, and very short paragraphs were excluded. Chunks with fewer than 120 characters or fewer than 20 words were dropped before embedding. For the Hansard data, which was more voluminous and messy, text was split into chunks of roughly 200 words, with chunks shorter than 80 words excluded. This produces units that are long enough to contain substantive semantic information, but short enough to avoid combining too many separate ideas into a single observation. The method of chunking text, rather than providing whole speeches as the unit of analysis has two advantages. First, it increases the number of observations available for comparison. Second, it allows the model to capture internal variation within speeches, rather than forcing an entire document into a single representation.

The core quantitative method is Sentence-BERT, implemented through the sentence-transformers framework using R and Python (Reimers and Gurevych 2019; Reimers 2024). Sentence-BERT is well suited to this project because it represents each text chunk as a dense numerical vector that captures semantic similarity rather than simple word overlap. This is particularly useful when studying ideology in political speech, as politicians often restate similar positions using different phrasing or contexts. Whereas dictionary methods or keyword counts may fail to detect this nuance, since they rely on repeated lexical items, sentence embeddings are designed to place texts with similar meanings close together in vector space even when they do not share identical vocabulary. For a study of ideological consistency, that is a substantial advantage: the question is not just whether Badenoch repeats the same words, but whether she returns to similar clusters of arguments, themes, and conceptual associations over time.

Sentence embeddings were generated using the all-mpnet-base-v2 model, which serves as the main model for the analysis. A lighter SBERT model (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), not presented here, was also used in exploratory robustness checks and produced similar results, increasing confidence that the main findings are not an artefact of a single model specification.

In each case, text chunks are encoded in batches and normalised so that cosine similarity can be used as a measure of semantic proximity. Cosine similarity is appropriate here because it captures the angle between vectors rather than raw magnitude, making it a standard way of assessing how close two embedded texts are in meaning space. A value closer to 1 indicates greater similarity in semantic content, while lower values indicate greater distance.

For the Hansard component, chunk-level embeddings are aggregated into centroids by taking the mean vector for a given group of speeches. Centroids are created for Badenoch by career stage, and separately for comparator corpora consisting of Conservative MPs and the broader parliamentary sample. Each Badenoch chunk is then scored against three reference points: an anchor centroid based on her backbench speeches, the centroid for Conservative MPs within that period, and the centroid for the full parliamentary corpus in that period. These comparisons serve different purposes. Similarity to the backbench anchor provides a measure of continuity with Badenoch’s earlier parliamentary rhetoric. Similarity to the Conservative centroid captures how close she is to the semantic centre of parliamentary Conservative Party, and the similarity to the full parliamentary centroid provides a broader benchmark against the language of the House as a whole.

This design makes Sentence-BERT particularly suitable for tracking Badenoch’s ideology over time and expands our understanding and measurement of ideology from beyond simple counts or roll-call voting patters - heavily structured by the party whip - alone. Instead it treats ideology as something expressed through recurring semantic patterns in language: the kinds of problems a politician foregrounds, the way she names adversaries and allies, the concepts she links together, and the general argumentative structure of her interventions. Because Badenoch’s career spans backbench, ministerial, shadow cabinet, and leadership roles, some rhetorical adaptation is to be expected. The advantage of the embedding approach is that it allows us to ask whether those changes in office and context are accompanied by substantial semantic movement, or whether a recognisable ideological core remains visible beneath them.

This is necessarily prior to the close reading of speeches. The embedding analysis establishes the broader pattern first. It shows whether the leadership speeches appear semantically continuous with Badenoch’s earlier parliamentary language, or whether they mark a clear departure. That, in turn, sharpens the subsequent qualitative analysis. Rather than approaching the leadership speeches in isolation, the paper reads them against a quantified record of continuity and change. The close readings can then ask what remains stable or what changes, and how Badenoch articulates those beliefs in more explicit ideological terms.

At the same time, SBERT has limits, which help explain the need for the qualitative stage. Semantic similarity is not identical to ideological identity. Two speeches may be close in vector space because they share topics, framing devices, or rhetorical style, even if their normative commitments differ in important respects. Conversely, a politician may express a stable ideological belief in substantially different language as the political context changes. The embedding analysis should therefore be understood as a tool for identifying patterns of proximity and movement, not as a self-sufficient measure of ideology. That is precisely why this article combines it with close textual interpretation. The quantitative analysis identifies where to look and what kind of continuity or discontinuity might be present; the qualitative analysis determines what those patterns mean in substantive ideological terms.

A final advantage of the design is that it allows Badenoch to be situated comparatively rather than examined only in isolation. By comparing her speech embeddings with Conservative and wider parliamentary centroids, the analysis can distinguish between language that is distinctive to Badenoch and language that simply reflects broader party or parliamentary trends. This matters because ideological consistency is not only a question of whether a politician remains similar to her earlier self, but also whether she remains comparatively distinct from her surrounding political environment. In combination, then, the speech corpus, the Hansard comparator data, and the embedding-based similarity measures provide a robust framework for examining what Badenoch appears to believe, how she articulates those beliefs, and how consistently she has expressed them over time.

3.1 Analysis

3.1.1 Parliamentary Speeches

The Hansard analysis suggests a substantial degree of continuity in Badenoch’s parliamentary rhetoric over time, but not complete stasis. The cosine similarities are shown in Table 1. For interpretation, values closer to 1 indicate greater semantic similarity. In this case, the observed scores mostly fall within a moderate-similarity range, indicating that Badenoch’s language remains recognisably related across career stages even as her own position changes.

Table 1: Pairwise Speech Similarities
Career Stage Kemi vs backbench Kemi Kemi vs Conservatives Kemi vs Parliament Number of Chunks
Backbencher 0.633 0.595 0.596 53
Exchequer Secretary 0.560 0.600 0.602 214
Minister of State 0.583 0.607 0.607 150
Secretary of State 0.544 0.570 0.568 177
Shadow Secretary of State 0.662 0.713 0.697 28
Leader of the Opposition 0.567 0.617 0.603 245

We use Badenoch’s backbench speeches as the anchor corpus, because this is temporally the earliest period, and also the period when her speech was least restrained by the demands of office. This establishes the basis for comparison. Her backbench speech chunks have an average cosine similarity of 0.633 to the backbench centroid - this shows that while her backbench speeches were recognisably clustered around a common semantic centre (hence the relatively high cosine similarity), they do contain substantial internal variation. To put this into context, a cosine similarity of 1 would suggest an essentially identical or very formulaic speech pattern (such as ‘my father was a toolmaker’).

Later career stages can then be assessed according to how closely they resemble this earlier rhetorical profile. Similarity to the backbench anchor falls to 0.560 as Exchequer Secretary, rises slightly to 0.583 as Minister of State, drops to 0.544 as Secretary of State for Business and Trade, rises to 0.662 as Shadow Secretary of State, and then settles at 0.567 as Leader of the Opposition.

These numbers suggest a high level of continuity regardless of Badenoch’s changing parliamentary roles. Badenoch’s language shifts as her role changes, but not to the point that her parliamentary rhetoric becomes unrecognisable in relation to her earlier self. It is notable, but perhaps unsurprising, that she is closest to her backbench profile once the Conservatives leave office and the constraints of collective responsibility, defending the government’s line, and sticking to a departmental brief weaken. Similarity then falls again as Leader of the Opposition, when her rhetoric becomes more shaped by weekly confrontation with the prime minister in Prime Minister’s Questions and the demands of opposition leadership.

The comparison with Conservative and full-parliamentary centroids adds an important layer to this picture. In most career stages, Badenoch is slightly more similar to the contemporary Conservative and parliamentary centroids for the same career-stage time window than she is to her own backbench anchor. As Exchequer Secretary, for example, she scores 0.600 against Conservatives and 0.602 against Parliament, compared with 0.560 against backbench Badenoch. As Minister of State, the figures are 0.607 and 0.607, compared with 0.583. As Leader of the Opposition, they are 0.617 and 0.603, compared with 0.567. This suggests that role and context matter. As Badenoch moves into government and later into opposition leadership, her rhetoric becomes somewhat more aligned with the language of her surrounding parliamentary environment than with the specific semantic profile of her earlier backbench speeches which is perhaps to be expected: Badenoch moved from a relatively unconstrained backbench role into positions requiring ministerial responsibility, party management, and broader representational claims.

At the same time, the extent of this movement should not be overstated. The similarity scores remain relatively high throughout, especially given the changes in office, subject matter, and political context involved. Furthermore, the Shadow Secretary of State periods shows a return to earlier language: similarity to backbench Badenoch rises to 0.662, while similarity to the Conservative and parliamentary centroids reaches 0.713 and 0.697 respectively. This is the highest similarity to the backbench anchor apart from the backbench period itself, although it should be interpreted somewhat cautiously because this stage contains fewer chunks than the others. As noted above, however, the pattern makes sense: opposition often gives politicians greater scope to restate ideological commitments more explicitly than government office, where administrative and collective responsibilities impose greater constraints on rhetoric.

Taken together, the Hansard data point to a pattern of constrained consistency. Badenoch’s parliamentary rhetoric changes in predictable ways as she moves between backbench, ministerial, shadow, and leadership roles, but the evidence does not suggest wholesale ideological reinvention. Instead, what appears is a politician whose rhetorical presentation adapts to institutional role while retaining substantial semantic continuity and without obviously abandoning an underlying core.

This also helps explain why it is necessary to look beyond Hansard. Parliamentary speeches are highly structured and often reactive. There is often limited time to develop ideas in detail. Ministers answer questions, respond to legislation, and operate under collective responsibility. Even opposition speeches in the Commons are shaped by parliamentary procedure, immediate party strategy, and the demands of adversarial debate. Hansard is therefore highly valuable for tracing continuity over time, but it is less well suited to capturing a politician’s fullest self-presentation. To understand Badenoch’s ideology more directly, it is useful to turn to speeches and texts produced outside Parliament, especially those linked to leadership contests and agenda-setting moments, where the aim is not merely to intervene in a parliamentary exchange but to define a political project in more explicit terms. ### Extra-parliamentary Speeches The non-Hansard speech data suggest both continuity and development across Badenoch’s public ideological positioning. As a reminder, these speeches are split into three periods: her first leadership bid in 2022, her second leadership bid in 2024, and her time as leader (see Table 3 in the appendix). The pairwise similarity for each period is shown in Table 2.

Table 2: Pairwise cosine similarity between Badenoch’s non-Hansard speeches, by career periods.
Period 2022 Leadership Bid 2024 Leadership Bid Time as Leader
2022 Leadership Bid 1.000 0.791 0.837
2024 Leadership Bid 0.791 1.000 0.864
Time as Leader 0.837 0.864 1.000

The strongest evidence comes from the period-by-period comparisons. The similarity between the first and second leadership bids is 0.791, between the first leadership bid and her time as leader is 0.837, and between the second leadership bid and her time as leader is 0.864. These are all high scores, indicating that the three phases occupy a closely related semantic space. Put differently, Badenoch’s rhetoric changes less across these moments than might be expected given the shifting political contexts in which they were delivered: an initial leadership campaign, a second bid two years later, and then the responsibilities of party leadership itself.

There is still some development within this overall continuity. Of the three pairwise comparisons, the lowest similarity is between the two leadership bids, at 0.791, suggesting that the 2024 campaign was not simply a repetition of the 2022 one. At the same time, the later periods are particularly close to one another: the similarity between the second leadership bid and her time as leader rises to 0.864, while the first leadership bid and her time as leader also remain highly similar at 0.837. This suggests that Badenoch’s rhetoric did evolve, but that it did so within a relatively stable semantic universe rather than through any marked rupture or wholesale repositioning.

The speech-by-speech results sharpen that picture. These are presented in Table 4. The figures show that there is a high level of consistency within her speeches - compared to her first leadership launch speech (Lee Harris News 2022), cosine similarity for all other speeches ranges from 0.355 at the lowest to 0.739. The launch of her 2024 campaign (Badenoch 2024b) again shows a similar range of cosine similarity scores against her other speeches, from 0.456 to 0.807. Interestingly, both speeches come from her time as leader at the 2025 Conservative Party Conference, suggesting the different contexts - speaking at conference on day one in the aftermath of the Heaton Park Synagogue attack a few days prior, and her keynote speech at the end of conference, respectively - are the important drivers of difference, rather than her ideology.

The time-as-leader speeches show a similar pattern of partial continuity. The clearest continuity comes not from the conference speeches but from the earlier leader-period interventions. Badenoch’s speech launching the policy renewal programme scores 0.689 against the 2022 editorial and 0.607 against the 2022 launch speech, whilst her keynote speech at the 2025 party conference scores 0.736 and 0.706 respectively, and the January 2026 “Future of Conservatism” speech 0.760 and 0.706. The March 2026 local elections launch is also moderately connected to the earlier corpus, at 0.683 against the 2022 editorial and 0.592 against the 2022 launch speech. These are lower than the strongest cross-period links, but still well within the range one would associate with a recognisable rhetorical lineage - especially when the focus of this speech is on local government rather than national issues.

There are, however, two notable outliers, but which have clear explanations. The November 2024 victory speech is strikingly weakly related to much of the wider corpus, but this is a more personal speech, thanking those who voted for her in the contest, than a campaigning speech. The October 2025 conference day one speech is an even clearer outlier, but as noted above this took place shortly after the Heaton Park Synagogue attack and thus drew on themes which were otherwise not politically salient.

Even allowing for those caveats, the overall pattern is fairly clear. The two leadership bids are consistent with one another at a broad level, but not identical. The 2024 campaign does not look like a break from 2022 but rather a reformulation of Badenoch’s earlier ideological project. An evolution of ideas rather than a revolution. This broadly reflects what we would expect to see. Leadership bids are moments of ideological self-definition, so a substantial degree of continuity across them would be unsurprising if Badenoch is a relatively coherent ideological actor. Equally, we would expect some movement once she becomes leader, because the rhetorical task changes from campaigning to unity and from promises to action. The speech data fit this trajectory well. They do not show Badenoch abandoning her earlier framework, but they do suggest that it is repackaged as her own context changes.

What these results cannot tell us on their own, however, is exactly what remains stable and what changes in substantive ideological terms. High semantic similarity shows that texts are related in language and framing, but it does not by itself reveal whether the continuity lies in economic liberalism, cultural conservatism, anti-bureaucratic rhetoric, nationalism, populism, or some other combination. Nor can it show whether a lower-similarity text represents genuine ideological change, a shift in genre, a new audience, or simply a different immediate political purpose.

That is why the next section turns to close reading. The quantitative analysis establishes that Badenoch’s rhetoric is neither wholly static nor radically discontinuous. Across both Hansard and non-Hansard material, there is considerable evidence of continuity, but also some patterned movement associated with office, audience, and broader political context. To understand the content of her ideologyof, and how Badenoch articulates and justifies it, a more qualitative reading is needed. Only by examining the content of the speeches themselves can we identify the key themes in Badenoch’s conservatism and assess how far semantic consistency corresponds to ideological consistency.

4 Key themes in Badenoch’s conservatism

Badenoch’s conservatism is best understood as an attempt to fuse three recognisable strands of post-war Conservative thought: Thatcherite economic liberalism, post-Brexit sovereigntism, and a politics of cultural contestation, or what is often pejoratively termed the ‘culture war’. What gives her rhetoric its distinctive shape is that she presents these not as separate commitments, but rather as parts of a single moral and governing project with its own internal consistency. Across the speeches examined, economic discipline, national sovereignty, social order, and truth-telling are repeatedly treated as mutually reinforcing rather than competing goods. In that sense, Badenoch is not simply reviving one older Conservative tradition. She is trying to synthesise several of them into a language of renewal, seriousness, and competence, which will lead to electability.

4.1 Economy and the role of government

The most consistently Thatcherite element in Badenoch’s rhetoric is her insistence on trade-offs, restraint, and the limits of the state. Her 2022 leadership launch speech begins with the line that becomes one of her core motifs: “It’s time to tell the truth” (Badenoch 2022). What follows is an argument against what she describes as “cakeism”: “no tax cuts without limits on government spending, and no stronger defence without a slimmer state” (Badenoch 2022). This is recognisably within the tradition of Thatcherite fiscal realism, not simply in its preference for low taxes, but in its moralisation of economic discipline. Badenoch does not frame hard choices as regrettable necessities alone but rather as evidence of political honesty, arguing there are “no free lunches” and promises of tax cuts must be met with reductions in spending (Zeffman 2022) - even then, the Conservative promise should be one of effecient management and running of public services, rather than a singular focus on cutting the public sector (Yorke 2022).

That theme persists well beyond the first leadership bid. In the 2025 “Rebuilding Trust” speech, she again argues that “politicians across all parties have not told the truth” and links national decline to long-term evasion about Britain’s economic weaknesses (Badenoch 2025a). Likewise, in the 2024 launch speech she says that “we have lost control” and presents this not just as a crisis of policy, but as a crisis of seriousness and administrative grip (Badenoch 2024b). The underlying economics remain close to the Conservative free-market mainstream, but they are increasingly embedded in a critique of state inefficiency rather than in a simple rhetoric of tax-cutting.

That shift matters. In 2022 Badenoch sounds like an insurgent critic of over-promising politicians - “We can only deliver lower taxes if we stop pretending the state can continue to do everything” (Lee Harris News 2022) - which is understandable in the context of the Conservative Party’s largely-undelivered promises to ‘level up’ the country and to ‘build back better’ from Covid 19. By 2024 and 2025, she sounds more like a state reformer. The key move is the shift in focus from “limited government” to “government that does fewer things but does them well” (Badenoch 2024b). This places her slightly differently from orthodox Thatcherism. Thatcher was, of course, concerned with the state’s scale and cost - although the size of the state did grow on her watch - but Badenoch’s emphasis is often as much on redesign, competence, and systems failure as on size alone. Her self-description as an “engineer” rather than an “arsonist” makes this especially clear: “We are Conservatives, not anarchists. I am an engineer, not an arsonist” (Badenoch 2025d). The target is not just big government, but broken government.

That is why Badenoch is best read here not simply as a neoliberal revivalist. She remains committed to a recognisably Thatcherite economic ethic of sound money, work, and anti-statism, but she reframes it through a more contemporary language of state capacity, which has been repeatedly called into question especially in some elements of the Covid response. This is not one-nation paternalism in the Macmillan sense, nor Cameronite modernisation. It is harder-edged, more suspicious of dependency, and more preoccupied with whether the state is crowding out work, family, and responsibility. In 2022, Badenoch argued that “there are always tough choices in life and in politics: no free lunches, no tax cuts without limits on government spending, and no stronger defence without a slimmer state” (Lee Harris News 2022). In the same speech, she insisted that “limited government - doing less but better - is the best way to restore faith in government” and warned that governments had become trapped in a “shopping list of disconnected, unworkable, and unsustainable policies” (Lee Harris News 2022). The same instinct is present in her 2024 leadership bid, reformulated in a more programmatic register: “Government should do fewer things but better. And what it does, it should do with brilliance” (Badenoch 2024b).

By the time of her speeches as leader, this becomes tied explicitly to work, aspiration, and skills. In October 2025, for example, Badenoch argued that “work is a good in itself” and that “a job is the best route out of poverty” (Badenoch 2025d), while coupling her critique of “rip-off courses” with a promise to “double the apprenticeship budget” so as to give “thousands more young people the chance of a proper start in life” (Badenoch 2025d). In this respect, her political economy is not simply about shrinking the state, but about reordering it around productivity, contribution, and intergenerational responsibility, linked to a repeated insistence that work is socially and morally valuable (Badenoch 2025d). This palces her within a long Conservative tradition that links economic order to character, morality, and citizenship.

4.2 Borders, sovereignty, and citizenship

If the economic dimension of Badenoch’s politics draws most clearly on Thatcherite and New Right traditions, her rhetoric on borders and sovereignty is much more obviously a product of post-Brexit Conservatism. Her speeches repeatedly pair “stronger economy” with “stronger borders,” most explicitly in the 2025 conference leader’s speech, where she argues that “only the Conservative party can deliver the stronger economy and stronger borders that will give people a more prosperous future” (Badenoch 2025d). The pairing is important: borders are not presented as a discrete policy area but rather one half of a broader moral and national settlement.

This is also where Badenoch’s language of citizenship becomes more distinctive. In the 2024 launch speech, she argues that citizenship must be understood as reciprocal obligation rather than simply residence, and she later sharpens this into the line that Britain is “our home, not a dormitory or hotel” (Badenoch 2024b). That moves her beyond the market liberalism often associated with the Cameroons - those MPs who argue that a strong economy requires free movement of people or a reliance on migrant workers - and closer to the communitarian-national language that became more prominent on the Conservative right after Brexit. In this respect, she shares ground with national-conservative figures who see sovereignty as inseparable from social trust and civic cohesion.

Yet Badenoch is also careful to present sovereigntism as considered rather than merely performative. In the later speeches, especially around the ECHR and the Human Rights Act, she frames legal rupture as the outcome of sober reflection rather than ideological impulse. Indeed, Badenoch’s pledge to leave the ECHR came after a review led by Shadow Attorney General Lord Wolfson QC (Conservative Party 2025) and the considered nature and seriousness of this approach was contrasted with Reform UK’s similar pledge. This is part of a broader strategy of Badenoch moving the Conservatives into similar policy areas as Reform UK - e.g. to end Britain’s net zero carbon emissions by 2050 policy (Badenoch 2025b) - and this forms part of how Badenoch positions herself against Reform UK. Her rhetoric suggests that sovereignty must be restored, and there is overlap between many of her policy solutions and those of Farage, but under Badenoch seeks to present the Conservatives as the only serious governing party option on the right, in contrast to Reform UK’s purported gesture politics. Again she draws on the engineer metaphor: sovereignty is not just a feeling to be asserted, but a system of control to be rebuilt (Badenoch 2025e).

There is also a deeper Conservative lineage here. Badenoch’s language of home, belonging, duty, and citizens over abstract rights echoes themes that have recurred in Conservative thought from Burkean attachment to place through to more recent blue-collar and post-liberal currents, for example of the type espoused by Philip Blond in Red Tory (2010). But she articulates them in a distinctly post-2016 context, where national sovereignty, immigration control, and constitutional autonomy are treated as preconditions for democratic legitimacy. In that respect she is very much a post-Brexit Conservative, though not a libertarian one.

4.3 Culture wars, wokeism, and identity politics

The area in which Badenoch became nationally distinctive, and in which she most clearly departs from older Conservative idioms, is culture and identity. Her speeches repeatedly define the political field as one in which truth is under threat from ideological fashion. In 2022, she warns that if free speech, due process, and equal treatment are abandoned, politics becomes “a zero-sum game of identity politics” (Badenoch 2022). In the same campaign she presents herself as willing to “set us free by telling people the truth” (Badenoch 2022). By 2024, “truth” is elevated into one of her explicit principles alongside responsibility, citizenship, family, and equality under the law (Badenoch 2024b).

This is where Badenoch draws most clearly on the “anti-woke” politics that emerged on the Conservative right in the late 2010s and early 2020s. Her rhetoric rejects structural and group-based understandings of injustice in favour of a moral language of individual responsibility, legal equality, and universal civic standards. This is a liberal, individualist response to wokism, which sits uncomfortably with her views more communitarian views on citizenship, rights and the national community. But she is at pains to frame this not as reflexive provocation. Rather, she presents herself as the politician prepared to state empirically uncomfortable facts and resist moral intimidation - Badenoch reportedly despises the label ‘culture warrior’ and instead sees her conclusions as the consequence of carefully weighing up the evidence (Yorke 2022). The effect is to combine culture-war signalling with a self-image of rationalism and seriousness.

That matters for how she fits within recent Conservative ideological history. Badenoch is not a Cameronite liberal-conservative moderniser, for whom openness, diversity, and social liberalism could be incorporated into a broad centre-right coalition. Nor is she simply a traditional moral conservative in the older Major back-to-basics sense. In 2024, she sharpened this further by arguing that “identity politics” had become “malign and destructive,” with laws “used by left-wingers to protect certain groups above others” (Badenoch 2024b). By 2025, this had become part of a wider critique of cultural fragmentation and institutional drift: Britain, she argued, “must never become a multicultural country where shared values dissolve, loyalty fragments,” while both Labour and Reform “practice identity politics which will destroy our country” (Badenoch 2025e) Thus, her politics of culture is more combative and more directly shaped by contemporary disputes about race, sex, identity, and institutional capture. In that respect, she belongs to a newer right-wing formation. Yet even here she tempers that style over time. The 2022 material is more insurgent and oppositional; the 2024 and 2025 speeches increasingly fold these arguments into a broader framework of values and governance.

Family is central to that reframing. In the later speeches, family is not presented only as a moral good in itself but as the social institution on which citizenship, economic resilience, and public order depend (Badenoch 2024b, 2025e). This is one of the clearest Burkean notes in her politics. The family appears as a kind of “little platoon”: the first site in which responsibility and belonging are learned. That gives Badenoch’s rhetoric an important conservative depth. Her critique of identity politics is not just negative but is paired with a positive account of how social life should be organised.

4.4 Law and order

Badenoch also places considerable emphasis on law and order and the restoration of institutional authority. In the conference speeches this takes the form of promises to free the police from “chasing tweets instead of thieves,” to curb “lawfare,” and to prioritise victims, veterans, and public safety (Badenoch 2025d, 2025e). This draws on a long Conservative tradition of law-and-order politics, but with a contemporary twist. The enemy is not only crime in the conventional sense, but also elite and institutional drift: activist lawyers, bureaucratic distortion, and public bodies that have lost sight of their core purpose: Badenoch attacks the “drift of our institutions away from truth, honesty and decency” (Badenoch 2025e).

This theme helps explain why Badenoch should not be reduced to a knee-jerk culture warrior. Her rhetoric is not simply symbolic but is tied to a wider argument that institutions have been repurposed away from their proper functions. Police should police, schools should educate, borders should control entry, and government should govern. This is not only a deeply conservative way of thinking about ordered society - not least because it treats institutional role confusion as itself a source of decline. This is also a critique of 14 years of Conservative government - whereby the party, following focus groups, “talked right but governed left” (Badenoch 2024a, 2024b) and thought it could “leave quangos and bureaucrats to their own devices and then wonder why we don’t see results” (Badenoch 2025e).

In Badenoch’s diagnosis, the Conservative Party as best failed to stop this institutional drift and at worst caused it. But Badenoch does not simply propose easy solutions. She insists on institutional repair, legal coherence, and governing authority. Her diagnosis is moralised, but her preferred remedy is often administrative. “We need to reboot, reset and rewire the way that government works so that it can serve the public” (Badenoch 2024b): fix the structure, and the content will follow.

4.5 National renewal and anti-declinism

The broadest organising theme in Badenoch’s speeches is decline and renewal. The state repeatedly described as having “lost control” (Badenoch 2024b), as “failing to compete in a world that is changing” (Badenoch 2025a), or as needing to “rebuild Britain’s strength” (Badenoch 2025d). This anti-declinist narrative is the frame into which all the other themes are placed. Economic weakness, porous borders, cultural relativism, institutional overreach, and political dishonesty are all symptoms of the same national malaise.

This is one of the clearest points of continuity with Thatcherism. Badenoch frequently invokes moments of national testing and recovery, and in the 2025 leader’s speech explicitly places the 2020s alongside the 1940s and 1980s as periods demanding national renewal (Badenoch 2025d). The implication is that her project is not a departure from Conservative history, but a new chapter in a familiar revivalist story. Yet there is also something more contemporary in her presentation. Whilst Thatcher’s renewal narrative was overwhelmingly economic and anti-socialist and anti-statist, Badenoch’s is cultural, institutional, and, perhaps, civilisational.

That is why “Renewal 2030” and then the “Blueprint for Britain” matter in the trajectory of Badenoch’s conservatism. These are not just slogans. Rhetorically rooted in her background as an engineer, and they mark the transition from diagnosis to architecture. In 2022 she mainly presents herself as the truth-teller willing to expose illusions - fitting, perhaps, given her candidature was to place rather than to win. By 2024 she is talking about principles and rewiring, on the assumption that she could actually be leader of the Conservative Party. Her wish fulfilled, by 2025 she is offering what she explicitly calls “a Blueprint for Britain - a new settlement - based on Conservative values” (Badenoch 2025d). The evolution is therefore not from one ideology to another, but from ideological declaration to governing programme.

5 Conclusion: Situating Badenoch within Conservative ideological history

Badenoch therefore sits at an interesting intersection within Conservative ideological development. Economically, she belongs firmly to the Thatcherite family: sceptical of state expansion, hostile to fiscal illusion, and committed to work, enterprise, and discipline. On sovereignty, she is unmistakably a post-Brexit Conservative, treating borders, constitutional autonomy, and national control as central rather than peripheral. There is no talk of closer ties to the European Union. On culture, she is a creature of the newer anti-woke right, but one who increasingly embeds that politics in a broader moral and institutional framework.

That combination makes her neither a straightforward Thatcherite, nor a Cameronite, nor a populist. She differs from Cameron-era modernisers in her hostility to liberal cultural settlement and in her insistence that truth, family, and citizenship have been eroded by elite consensus. But she also differs from Farage-style populist nationalism in her stress on institutions, capacity, and governability: seriousness not soundbites. Her repeated insistence that Conservatives must build, repair, and govern places her closer to what might be called a state-capacity conservatism: sceptical of big government, but convinced that strong, morally focused, and properly directed institutions are indispensable to national renewal.

A careful formulation, then, is that Kemi Badenoch’s ideology is best understood as a synthesis of Thatcherite economics, post-Brexit sovereigntism, and culturally assertive conservatism, articulated through a rhetoric of truth, responsibility, and competence. She is not merely reviving an older Conservative settlement, nor wholly inventing a new one. Rather, she is trying to stabilise the post-Brexit right by giving it a more coherent governing language and addressing the failures of the Conservative Party’s time in office.

6 Bibligraphy

Badenoch, Kemi. 2022. “Kemi Badenoch: I Want to Set Us Free by Telling People the Truth.” https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-i-want-to-set-us-free-by-telling-people-the-truth-85sk8prm9.
———. 2024a. “Kemi Badenoch: People Won’t Vote for Us If We Don’t Know What We Want to Be.” https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-people-wont-vote-for-us-if-we-dont-know-what-we-want-to-be-btfpbf95m.
———. 2024b. “Kemi Badenoch’s Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech.” Kemi Badenoch. https://www.kemibadenoch.org.uk/news/kemi-badenochs-renewal2030-leadership-launch-speech.
———. 2024c. “Kemi: I’m Labour’s Worst Nightmare – They Can’t Paint Me as Prejudiced.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/i-am-labours-worst-nightmare.
———. 2024d. “Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech.” Alex Burghart MP. https://www.alexburghart.org.uk/news/kemi-badenoch-leadership-victory-speech.
———. 2025a. “Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/kemi-rebuilding-trust-speech.
———. 2025b. “KEMI BADENOCH Net Zero by 2050 Is Impossible – the Cost to British Families Will Be Catastrophic & It’s Time to Get Real.” Kemi Badenoch. https://www.kemibadenoch.org.uk/news/kemi-badenoch-net-zero-2050-impossible-cost-british-families-will-be-catastrophic-its-time-get.
———. 2025c. “Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/watch-live-kemi-launches-the-policy-renewal-programme.
———. 2025d. “Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/kemi-badenoch-closes-conference.
———. 2025e. “Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/kemi-speaks-at-conference-day-1.
———. 2026a. “Kemi Makes Important Speech.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/kemi-makes-important-speech.
———. 2026b. “Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/kemi-gives-keynote-speech-at-spring-conference.
———. 2026c. “Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/local-elections-2026-campaign-launch.
Blond, Phillip. 2010. Red Tory: How the Left and Right Have Broken Britain and How We Can Fix It. London: Faber and Faber.
Conservative Party. 2025. “Conservatives Announce ECHR Exit Policy.” https://www.conservatives.com/news/conservatives-announce-echr-exit-policy.
Gaughan, Conor. 2024. “Estimating Ideal Points of British MPs Through Their Social Media Followership.” British Journal of Political Science 54 (4): 1506–18. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007123424000450.
Gimson, Andrew. 2017. “Interview: Kemi Badenoch - "I’m Not Really Left-Leaning on Anything...I Always Lean Right Instinctively".” Conservative Home.
Hanretty, Chris, and Vasil Lazarov. 2025. “Estimates of MP Positions.”
Jeffery, David, Timothy Heppell, and Andrew Roe-Crines. 2022. “The Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2019: An Analysis of the Voting Motivations of Conservative Parliamentarians.” Parliamentary Affairs 75 (1): 113–34. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsaa046.
Jeffery, David, Timothy Heppell, Andrew Roe-Crines, and Chris Butler. 2023. “Trusting Truss: Conservative MPs’ Voting Preferences in the (First) British Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2022.” Representation 59 (4): 555–72. https://doi.org/10.1080/00344893.2023.2231469.
Jeffery, David, Andrew S Roe-Crines, and Timothy Heppell. 2026. “Backing Badenoch: The Conservative Party Leadership Election of 2024.” Parliamentary Affairs 79 (1): 113–53. https://doi.org/10.1093/pa/gsaf010.
Lee Harris News. 2022. “Kemi Badenoch’s Leadership Launch Event Speech. (Monday 12th July 2022).”
Reimers, Nils. 2024. “Sentence-Transformers: Embeddings, Retrieval, and Reranking.”
Reimers, Nils, and Iryna Gurevych. 2019. “Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings Using Siamese BERT-Networks.” arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1908.10084.
Roe-Crines, Andrew, Tim Heppell, and David Jeffery. 2021. “Theresa May and the Conservative Party Leadership Confidence Motion of 2018: Analysing the Voting Behaviour of Conservative Parliamentarians.” British Politics 16 (3): 317–35. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41293-020-00138-4.
Yorke, Harry. 2022. “Kemi Badenoch: Labour’s Still Living in the Past on Race.” https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-labours-still-living-in-the-past-on-race-wpzkfgt6t.
Zeffman, Henry. 2022. “Kemi Badenoch Rejects Tax Cut Bidding War, Saying ‘Cakeism’ Must End.” https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/kemi-badenoch-rejects-tax-cuts-saying-cakeism-must-end-j290dqg6w.

Software Used

R. Bååth. beepr: Easily Play Notification Sounds on any Platform. R package version 2.0. 2024. https://github.com/rasmusab/beepr.

E. Clarke, S. Sherrill-Mix, and C. Dawson. ggbeeswarm: Categorical Scatter (Violin Point) Plots. R package version 0.7.3. 2025. https://github.com/eclarke/ggbeeswarm.

G. Grolemund and H. Wickham. “Dates and Times Made Easy with lubridate”. In: Journal of Statistical Software 40.3 (2011), pp. 1-25. https://www.jstatsoft.org/v40/i03/.

S. Izrailev. tictoc: Functions for Timing R Scripts, as Well as Implementations of “Stack” and “StackList” Structures. R package version 1.2.1. 2024. https://github.com/jabiru/tictoc.

D. Meyer and C. Buchta. proxy: Distance and Similarity Measures. R package version 0.4-29. 2025. DOI: 10.32614/CRAN.package.proxy. https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=proxy.

L. Mullen. tokenizers: Fast, Consistent Tokenization of Natural Language Text. R package version 0.3.0. 2022. https://docs.ropensci.org/tokenizers/.

L. A. Mullen, K. Benoit, O. Keyes, et al. “Fast, Consistent Tokenization of Natural Language Text”. In: Journal of Open Source Software 3 (23 2018), p. 655. DOI: 10.21105/joss.00655. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.00655.

E. Odell. mnis: Easy Downloading Capabilities for the Members’ Name Information Service. R package version 0.3.1. 2021. https://docs.evanodell.com/mnis.

T. W. Rinker and D. Kurkiewicz. pacman: Package Management for R. version 0.5.0. Buffalo, New York, 2018. http://github.com/trinker/pacman.

T. Rinker and D. Kurkiewicz. pacman: Package Management Tool. R package version 0.5.1. 2019. https://github.com/trinker/pacman.

K. Slowikowski. ggrepel: Automatically Position Non-Overlapping Text Labels with ggplot2. R package version 0.9.6. 2024. https://ggrepel.slowkow.com/.

V. Spinu, G. Grolemund, and H. Wickham. lubridate: Make Dealing with Dates a Little Easier. R package version 1.9.5. 2026. https://lubridate.tidyverse.org.

J. Stephens and K. Simonov. yaml: Methods to Convert R Data to YAML and Back. R package version 2.3.12. 2025. https://yaml.r-lib.org.

K. Ushey, J. Allaire, and Y. Tang. reticulate: Interface to Python. R package version 1.45.0. 2026. https://rstudio.github.io/reticulate/.

H. Wickham. tidyverse: Easily Install and Load the Tidyverse. R package version 2.0.0. 2023. https://tidyverse.tidyverse.org.

H. Wickham, M. Averick, J. Bryan, et al. “Welcome to the tidyverse”. In: Journal of Open Source Software 4.43 (2019), p. 1686. DOI: 10.21105/joss.01686.

H. Wickham, T. L. Pedersen, and D. Seidel. scales: Scale Functions for Visualization. R package version 1.4.0. 2025. https://scales.r-lib.org.

Appendix

Table 3: List of Non-Parliamentary Speeches Used
Leadership Period Date Full Title Short Title Citation
2022 Leadership Bid 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) LE2022 Launch Editorial Badenoch (2022)
2022 Leadership Bid 2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch’s Leadership Launch Speech LE2022 Launch Speech Lee Harris News (2022)
2024 Leadership Bid 2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) LE2024 Editorial Badenoch (2024a)
2024 Leadership Bid 2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch’s Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech LE2024 Launch Speech Badenoch (2024b)
2024 Leadership Bid 2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced LE2024 Campaign Speech Badenoch (2024c)
2024 Leadership Bid 2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech LE2024 Victory Speech Badenoch (2024d)
Time as Leader 2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust Rebuilding Trust Badenoch (2025a)
Time as Leader 2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme Policy Renewal Programme Badenoch (2025c)
Time as Leader 2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 CPC25 Day 1 Speech Badenoch (2025e)
Time as Leader 2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty CPC25 Leaders Speech Badenoch (2025d)
Time as Leader 2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech Future of the Conservative Party Badenoch (2026a)
Time as Leader 2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 2026 Spring Conference Speech Badenoch (2026b)
Time as Leader 2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 2026 Local Election Launch Badenoch (2026c)
Table 4: Pairwise Speech Similarities
Date Speech 1 Date Speech 2 Similarity
2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 1.000
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.720
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.774
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.788
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.655
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.432
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.670
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.689
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.435
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.736
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.760
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.686
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.683
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.720
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 1.000
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.636
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.739
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.576
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.455
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.696
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.607
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.335
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.706
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.706
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.539
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.592
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.774
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.636
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 1.000
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.772
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.724
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.615
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.634
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.696
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.474
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.747
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.745
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.615
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.683
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.788
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.739
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.772
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 1.000
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.732
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.544
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.783
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.739
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.456
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.806
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.807
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.654
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.768
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.655
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.576
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.724
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.732
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 1.000
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.547
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.562
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.558
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.421
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.717
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.702
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.558
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.617
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.432
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.455
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.615
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.544
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.547
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 1.000
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.406
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.397
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.368
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.607
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.618
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.325
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.481
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.670
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.696
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.634
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.783
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.562
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.406
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 1.000
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.766
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.397
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.683
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.664
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.534
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.702
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.689
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.607
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.696
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.739
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.558
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.397
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.766
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 1.000
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.476
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.682
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.661
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.539
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.676
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.435
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.335
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.474
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.456
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.421
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.368
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.397
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.476
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 1.000
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.483
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.486
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.463
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.469
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.736
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.706
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.747
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.806
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.717
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.607
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.683
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.682
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.483
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 1.000
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.797
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.572
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.715
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.760
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.706
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.745
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.807
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.702
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.618
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.664
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.661
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.486
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.797
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 1.000
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.641
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.780
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.686
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.539
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.615
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.654
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.558
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.325
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.534
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.539
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.463
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.572
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.641
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 1.000
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 0.527
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 2022-07-09 Kemi Badenoch: I want to set us free by telling people the truth (editorial) 0.683
2022-07-12 Kemi Badenoch's Leadership Launch Speech 0.592
2024-07-28 Kemi Badenoch: People won’t vote for us if we don’t know what we want to be (editorial) 0.683
2024-09-02 Kemi Badenoch's Renewal2030 Leadership Launch Speech 0.768
2024-10-15 Kemi: I’m Labour’s worst nightmare – they can’t paint me as prejudiced 0.617
2024-11-02 Kemi Badenoch: Leadership Victory Speech 0.481
2025-01-16 Kemi’s First Speech of 2025: Rebuilding Trust 0.702
2025-03-18 Kemi Launches the Policy Renewal Programme 0.676
2025-10-05 Kemi Speaks at Conference Day 1 0.469
2025-10-08 Kemi Badenoch Announces Our Plan to Abolish Stamp Duty 0.715
2026-01-28 Kemi Makes Important Speech 0.780
2026-03-07 Kemi Gives Keynote Speech at Spring Conference 0.527
2026-03-19 Local Elections 2026 Campaign Launch 1.000