IF a week is a long time in politics, then the past year has been a whole era for Kemi Badenoch.
The jury is out on whether this was an Ice Age that saw the Tories locked in the electoral deep freeze, or a Golden Age where an empress vanquished her rivals and flourished.
Badenoch arrived in Birmingham as arguably the most sure-footed of any Conservative leader in modern times.
Her position at the top is totally unassailable and the bars at are disarmingly free of the usual bitching and backbiting.
This lack of internal competition has allowed her the breathing space to grow more confident in her own abilities.
For a fairly reserved woman, a subtle swagger is starting to seep into her interviews and Commons performances.
Is such confidence arrogantly misplaced? critics certainly think she is living in cloud cuckoo land.
In the year since the Tory tribe last met, the party has nudged a mere blip from 17 to 19 per cent, according to Politico’s poll of polls.
Hundreds of councillors were put to the sword at the , and the party crashed to fourth and fifth respectively in Wales and Scotland.
And while the Conservatives have bumbled along in third in national polls, there has been serious horsetrading at the top as Reform slipped from 30 per cent to 23 per cent, while Labour jumped from 20 per cent to 26 per cent.
These are the new political waters in which Badenoch is swimming. Her first year was spent tangling with a runaway and a downtrodden
Now, she is dealing with a wounded Farage and an energised Labour under the new management of .
How does Badenoch play her hand?
Aides point to three moments last year that cemented her leadership.
First, she brought the house down at the last party conference with a popular pledge to abolish .
Next, she made mincemeat of with a devastating response to the
Finally, she ruthlessly dispatched from her Shadow Cabinet, punching the wind out of his planned defection. All three moments were glitzy, headline-grabbing events that put Badenoch up in lights.
There is no doubt they helped give her a hearing from a public that had stopped listening to the Tories.
But her team puts a higher premium on the painstaking legwork that happens behind the scenes. The stuff which nobody sees.
Badenoch is clear that nothing gets announced without being 100 per cent copper- bottomed.
Sometimes, this can be uncomfortable. Reform tore lumps out of her while she spent months conducting work on whether leaving the ECHR was feasible.
Everyone knew that quitting was a foregone conclusion, but Badenoch was determined to show she does not make policy on the fly. Short-term pain, long-term gain.
Ditto with , and similarly with the current reluctance to make a commitment to bin inheritance tax without finding the first.
Announcements are therefore political sushi: a juicy morsel on the surface, but built on a layer of substance.
This is where Team Badenoch hopes to find a gap.
Burnham is already proving himself a liability, forced to eat his words with metronomic regularity.
He wanted to bung billions to , before rowing back when he learned of the cost.
Similarly, he railed against the personal allowance being too low, only to backpedal when handed the potential price tag.
The ban on drinking at football matches was a “discriminatory” disgrace that should be scrapped, until Burnham found himself on the wrong side of both fans and the .
Man City’s owners were deserving of our sympathy and gratitude until the PM needed reminding they were
Reopening the toxic debate would leave Britain “stuck in a permanent rut”, until he did just that.
It is difficult to know which to believe.
Farage is trying to show himself as a serious contender for government by producing meaty documents to accompany each pledge he makes.
But he is constantly blown off course by various scandals that risk turning off wavering voters.
His conference was supposed to be a showcase of Reform’s first 100 days, but was upended by the sting on dodgy donations.
Farage is still dogged by claims he has too little to say on issues such as defence and healthcare. Stop the boats and you might also shoot his fox.
It is therefore clear why Team Badenoch sees obvious electoral mileage in being the diligent, patient antidote to chaotic times.
Rome was not built in a day, and her allies believe they are creating the foundations on which to build.
It includes outlining her “first principles” in a 95-page document released yesterday called The Right Way.
Perhaps this is Kemi’s Iron Age. It’s not flashy. It’s sometimes bloody. But it is a necessary period of development to make the next leap.
So, I was struck when Badenoch said last week she was readying her troops for an early election.
“We could be having a next May,” she prophesied.
She made the prediction trying to exude confidence and show she was up for the fight.
Deep down, however, the prospect of a snap poll must give her cold sweats.
A recent mega-poll projection found the Tories would only marginally increase their current lot if an election were held tomorrow, bagging just 130 seats, up from 118.
Research by More In Common shows that Brand Badenoch far exceeds Brand Tory, and that Kemi still has work to do in detoxifying her party’s image.
Undoing the damage from 14 years will be a marathon, not a sprint, however appealing it might be to spray out sexy policies to compete in the attention economy.
Badenoch knows this. But she must also know that the last thing she needs is an early election.
