By Alex Wickham and Lucy White
UK Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch is facing internal criticism and potential removal due to poor poll ratings and a perception that she has focused on the wrong issues.
Six months after Kemi Badenoch was elected leader of the UK Conservatives, the conversation in the party is already turning toward removing her.
With the Tories expected to lose large numbers of seats across England in local elections on Thursday, more than two dozen MPs and officials told Bloomberg that Badenoch — who became leader on Nov. 2 — is not the right person to take the them into the next general election due by mid-2029. Instead, the party’s lawmakers are increasingly of the view she should be replaced with Robert Jenrick, the right-wing shadow justice secretary, they said, requesting anonymity discussing internal unrest.
The discontent is a by-product of dire Tory poll ratings and a perception that Badenoch, 45, has performed poorly and focused on the wrong issues, leaving her party squeezed by Nigel Farage’s right-wing Reform Party. A spokesman for Badenoch declined to comment. A spokesman for Jenrick pointed to an interview he gave to GB News on Friday in which he endorsed Badenoch’s leadership. “I think people should give her a break,” he said.
All of that could be compounded by potentially devastating election results next week in which the math does not favor the leader. When the councils up for grabs were last contested in 2021, then Conservative premier Boris Johnson was at the height of his popularity after rolling out the Covid Vaccine, and the Tories won about half the races. Since then, they slumped to their worst-ever general election result last July.
“It’s going to be total wipe-out for the Conservatives,” said Rob Ford, professor of political science at the University of Manchester. “To go backwards from your worst performance in 200 years, when you’re supposedly the natural party of government, in your first electoral test is a total and unmitigated disaster.”
After fleetingly pulling ahead of Labour in December in Bloomberg’s composite poll, a rolling 14-day average using data from 11 polling companies, the Tories have fallen more than five percentage points, to trail Reform and Labour by two.
Until recently, the assumption within the party had been that Badenoch would be given until the summer of 2026 to improve the party’s fortunes before she faced a leadership challenge, according to the Tory figures. But there is a worst-case scenario where the time-line could be brought forward to this year, they said.
One senior party figure said they believed Badenoch already entered the political death zone, with her immediate future now the main topic of conversation among donors and members of parliament.
Badenoch inherited an arguably impossible task when she succeeded former premier Rishi Sunak following his defeat in July, which saw Keir Starmer’s Labour secure an historic landslide and the Tories resoundingly rejected by voters after 14 years in office defined by political and economic turmoil.
“Kemi is not only struggling to expand the Conservative coalition but is currently only just above water with those loyalists who stood by the party in 2024,” said Scarlett Maguire, founder of the new pollster Merlin Strategy. “Many Conservatives think they hit rock bottom in 2024, but the truth is that the Conservatives may still have further to fall.”
The leader’s defenders insist she is only at the beginning of a process of making the party electable again, something that will inevitably take time after the scale of defeat last July and the anger of voters. She secured a win last week
