DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Only Kemi has the resolve to confront Britain's problems

Published: 00:01 BST, 17 October 2026 | Updated: 00:04 BST, 17 October 2026

Slowly but steadily the green shoots of Tory recovery are beginning to emerge from the icy wasteland left by the 2024 election humiliation.

With the image of other party leaders rapidly palling, Kemi Badenoch is suddenly the name on many lips as a serious contender to be the next prime minister.

There’s no room for complacency. The Tories’ betrayal of their 2019 mandate is still fresh in the public mind. But most of those responsible have either lost their seats or been purged and a new generation of Conservatives are making their presence felt.

Mrs Badenoch’s stature as a leader grows by the day. Her bravura performance at the Tory conference breathed fresh life into her faltering party and greatly improved her standing on the wider political stage.

For the first time since just after the general election, opinion polls placed the Conservatives ahead of Reform UK and neck-and-neck with Labour.

Adding to the sense of momentum, a survey today showed the Tories are seen as the main opposition to the Government – having trailed Reform by 28 points in May.

Reform has largely been the architect of its own decline, with Nigel Farage mired in controversy over questionable donations and allegations of racism in his party. Meanwhile Andy Burnham, with his Brexit delusions and cloying parochiality, is already being exposed as an empty vessel.

Kemi Badenoch in Edinbutgh this week... her stature as a leader grows by the day. For the first time since just after the election, opinion polls placed the Conservatives ahead of Reform UK

Their manifest failings are Mrs Badenoch’s opportunity, and she is clearly determined to grab it with both hands.

A set of serious and eye-catching policies are marking her out as the only leader with both the will and wit to confront this country’s chronic problems.

They include slashing welfare spending, slimming down the civil service to pre-Covid levels, reducing national debt, controlling migration by quitting the European Court of Human Rights and reviving third-country assessment for asylum seekers.

There is a coherent growth strategy which involves cutting taxes and red tape, pushing back Net Zero, boosting nuclear and North Sea production and, of course, properly funding our armed services.

And if there was a defining moment in her conference speech, it was her repudiation of the toxic politics of race and highly personal rebuke to those who equate Britishness exclusively with whiteness. ‘I am black, I am British. I am proud of my country… I am proud of our history,’ she said.

There is also much to admire in the team she is building. Laura Trott, whose put-down of Education Secretary Lucy Powell’s ‘Orwellian’ scheme to create a ‘Department of Hope’ was swift and withering.

Shadow Chancellor Andrew Griffith speaks with the authority of one who’s worked for a major investment bank, a global accountancy firm and a multinational media corporation.

Deputy leader Alex Burghart is holding Labour’s feet to the fire over its creep back towards Brussels, and Claire Coutinho had some memorably combative exchanges with Ed Miliband when he was Environment Secretary. The Tories are beginning to hit their stride against a government whose popularity will decline sharply as its shortcomings become ever more glaring.

But they can’t rely on the failings of others. Rather they must keep up the pressure and channel the words of Margaret Thatcher before her 1979 victory: ‘We want to be elected so that we can do better, not because we couldn’t possibly do worse.’