Kemi Badenoch not planning to announce big policies for two years
Kemi Badenoch is reportedly not planning to announce big policies for the next two years as she plans to focus on rebuilding voters’ trust.
The Conservative leader is said to have told her shadow cabinet on Tuesday that she has a “three-year plan” based on transforming her party’s fortunes following the July election defeat, according to the Sun.
Badenoch told her top team that plans for government would not be set out until the end of 2027 at the earliest, the newspaper reported, with the turnaround plan said to lean on Sir Keir Starmer’s own success in transforming the Labour Party and entering government.
On Wednesday, a Conservative spokesperson said: “What you can see is, as we did with the immigration announcement last month, is that we will show you our direction of travel.”
They added: “So we said that we will have a strict numerical cap [on immigration], we said that we’ll have a restriction on visas, but we’re not setting out the fine details of those because we’re not creating policies for 2028 in 2025.”
Badenoch reportedly presented the three-year long roadmap to Conservative colleagues, and urged them to make links with Donald Trump’s Republicans and other right-wing parties.
It comes after the Tory leader apologised before Christmas for the party’s failings on migration policy over the past 14 years in power.
She is planning to continue to focus on regaining voters’ belief over the next 12 months, with further such apologies reportedly expected, before aiming to spend 2026 “establishing credibility” in a bid to take on Nigel Farage’s Reform UK challenger.
The Conservatives also want to be ready to fight an election by 2028, the Sun reported, with one senior Tory citing the Labour government’s “record low in popularity”.
Badenoch also admitted last year at the Confederation of British Industry (CBI)’s annual conference that the Tories had “lost the confidence of business” at the July general election and firms “knew we were going to lose”.
But she insisted that Labour’s Budget had got the diagnosis wrong, leading to an “unprecedented raid on businesses”.