I voted Conservative for the first time in 2019, for Boris, and because of Brexit. Before that, I had spent years on the other side, including a childhood memory of a local election in Bristol South in the 1960s and a public declaration in 2013 that I had always voted Labour and always would.
That is what makes my own drift so revealing. In 2024, I wrote an essay in praise of Kemi Badenoch, and she sent back a pleasant message. I even sent her an admiring poem written by a ChatGPT robot, and Badenoch handled it with the kind of poise that has become part of her appeal. She is likeable, and she is one of the few figures on the right who still seems to understand that politics is not only about fury.
That matters now because the next general election is shaping up as another test of just how far voters are willing to keep moving away from the parties they once trusted. By 2025, I was writing about Reform, and when I say that when I can vote again Reform seem the obvious choice for me if it was not for Kemi Badenoch, I mean it as a confession, not a slogan. She remains a brake on the kind of complete break with the Conservatives that Reform is trying to sell.
The reason is simple enough. Badenoch is not merely a personality; she is one of the last Tory leaders who can still sound human to people who have not yet given up on conservatism. She once captured a certain mood when she said, “I’ve always voted Labour and I always will.” In another line that did the rounds, she joked, “I’ve got to have one stupid, docile, bovine part of me and that’s the part that votes Labour.” Those remarks mattered because they showed a politician willing to talk across old loyalties rather than just exploit them.
That is why the writer’s newer warning about Reform lands with force. As she puts it, “When I and millions of other former Labour voters choose Reform at the next general election, it’s not because we’re rabid Right-wingers. It’s because we’re done with being lectured by clowns.” She also reached for John Lydon’s line about the Right becoming “the cool ones giving the finger to the establishment” while the Left turned into “the snivelling self-righteous ones going around shaming everybody.” The point is not that Reform has suddenly become respectable. It is that anger has become more important than tribal memory.
But there is a catch, and it is a big one. Badenoch may be personally appealing, yet the party she leads spent nearly a decade and a half permitting every source of power from the police to the civil service to become part of the problem in the eyes of many voters. That is the unresolved damage Reform is feeding on. If Badenoch can contain it, the Conservatives still have a path back. If she cannot, voters drifting toward Reform may discover too late that the protest they chose was easier to feel than the country they helped make.
