When Kemi Badenoch steps up to the dispatch box for prime minister’s questions on Wednesday, she will face a very different opponent. And while all eyes will be on Andy Burnham’s first PMQs, those in the Conservative ranks will be watching their own leader’s performance just as closely.
Badenoch attempted to get out of the traps quickly this week, instigating a reshuffle of her frontbench like a conscientious head girl refilling her pencil case for the start of term. Out went the unassuming shadow chancellor, Mel Stride, replaced by the Thatcherite Andrew Griffith. He will lead a new economic unit alongside the City minister, Richard Fuller, and Claire Coutinho, who will replace Griffith as shadow business secretary and act as his deputy after her parental leave.
Priti Patel was also sacked as shadow foreign secretary and replaced with the former Tory leadership candidate Tom Tugendhat. The attention-grabbing anti-migration MP Katie Lam replaced James Cleverly as the shadow communities secretary, after he resigned from the shadow cabinet to run for London mayor.
The new shadow cabinet will quietly get its first ensemble outing on Wednesday, against the soundtrack of 403 excitable Labour MPs keen to show support for their own new leader. Badenoch’s performance will matter.
“Kemi has to change tack because she’s facing different opposition,” said the Conservative peer and polling expert Robert Hayward. “Like the manager of any football team, you have to adjust to the people you’re playing against. Kemi and everyone in the party knows she will have to adapt.”
In the final weeks of Keir Starmer’s premiership, Badenoch fully embraced her cage-fighter instincts, showing little mercy or grace towards the former prime minister even after he announced his resignation. But early indications suggest she understands that Burnham’s folksy Hovis advert charm may require a different approach. Before the start of recess she referred to him as “a pair of eyelashes and a black T-shirt”, only for Burnham to playfully counter, in a social media video, “it’s dark blue, actually”.
“When your opponent is an unpopular prime minister who’s been there a while, you can afford to take the gloves off,” said the Conservative commenter Henry Hill. “But when they are new and in the first flush of their honeymoon, it requires a little more subtlety.”
While that is a quality that has rarely been associated with the MP for North West Essex, advisers were likely to have told her to keep her powder dry and see how Burnham plays his hand, said the Conservative Home editor, Giles Dilnot. “Kemi has her own way of doing things, but she won’t necessarily have to land a knockout blow on day one.”
Her reshuffle, argued Dilnot, was less a reaction to facing a very different type of leader than a move to make her party battle-ready should Burnham announce a snap election in 2027. “Everything has shifted on its axis,” he said. “She knows they have to be ready.”
Bringing more recognisable figures into the cabinet, including her former rival Tugenhat – seen as one of the party’s surviving One Nation centrists, despite his hawkishness on foreign affairs – indicates that Badenoch’s summer purge of the Wets may have pragmatic limits. The addition of Damian Hinds, seen as more to the centre than his leader, as health secretary backs up the theory. “It gives lie to the accusation that she’s trying to lead a clique,” said Hayward.
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Some new faces suggest Badenoch is casting her net wider to find talent. The Scot Andrew Bowie at energy is likely to maintain the “drill, baby, drill” stance that helped the Conservatives win a byelection in Aberdeen South in June. Harriet Cross, the new Scotland secretary, is touted as a rising star.
It also is a tacit recognition that, while Badenoch herself is polling relatively strongly – YouGov found her popularity has improved in recent months, with 38% of Britons now saying she is doing well – the “Keminaissance” has not translated into support for her party: polling remains dire and has fallen from 25% at the end of 2024 to 19% now.
“Her personal polling has gone up, but it hasn’t lifted the party with it,” said Hill. “I think there’s an understanding that if there was a general election now, they would get absolutely hammered.”
The reshuffle is not without risk. Griffith was a Treasury minister during Liz Truss’s mini-budget, and repeatedly defended it during the economic chaos that followed. Critics warn that Tugendhat’s hawkishness could lead the party into dangerous territory. Lam’s incendiary rhetoric may turn off as many voters as it attracts.
But with conference season ahead and a Labour party flushed with the success of Burnham’s first summer, Badenoch had to show she was not only the right woman for the job, but that she had a feasible team to run the country, said Dilnot. “Last year was all about Kemi, and this year it has to be about the brand,” he said.
