Written by Dr Alia Middleton. Alia is a senior lecturer of Politics at the University of Surrey and Co-Director of the Centre for Britain and Europe. She is CBE’s foremost expert in Electoral politics, party campaigning strategies, UK strategic political communication, party leadership/constituency relations, and UK general election candidate recruitment.

Rishi Sunak slowly being rained on outside Number 10 feels a long time ago, as does the whirl of football ground visits, bungee jumping and placard waving in the weeks that followed. The 2024 general election was a dark night for the soul of the Conservative Party, leading to their worst electoral defeat in history. Along with the 251 Conservative MPs lost were a former Prime Minister, the Father of the House, eight sitting Cabinet ministers and numerous former senior and junior ministers. The Conservative Party in Westminster today is a very different beast from the one that dominated it for 14 years. While it struggles to come to terms with its new position, it has been unable to successfully capitalise on a Prime Minister who has a commanding majority, and is failing to win over much of the public.

So where does the party go from here, and (how) can they recover? At her first party conference speech as leader, Kemi Badenoch surprised some with an announcement on stamp duty and a golden rule to use half of the funds accrued from spending cuts to service the deficit. Praise spilt from some sections of the press, revelling in its ‘unashamed Conservativism’. Borne out of a period of post-election and post-leader shift, as well as a conscious decision to allow Labour’s policy decisions to dominate the headlines, the Conservatives have had a quiet, reactive year under Badenoch. Farage has taken advantage of this. Yet it may be too early to foresee the inevitable doom of the Conservative party – and Badenoch’s speech may mark a shift in the party’s thinking. A period of reflection and recovery after a shattering electoral defeat is a natural event in the lifecycle of government, particularly under the alternating predominance model. Under this model, governments typically serve multiple terms before experiencing a dramatic electoral defeat. The defeated party then takes multiple terms to recover before they are in a position to re-enter power. We may observe parallels between the current state and the long Conservative recovery post-1997 defeat. During this time of recovery and reconsolidation, parties become introspective and take some time to reposition themselves as a competitive electoral force, often involving multiple leaders along the way. With this in mind, the Conservatives will likely require multiple terms before they become a viable governing force again, and only the most optimistic could envision a single leader steering them through this course. Of course, the natural recovery of a party is by no means a foregone conclusion, and assumes that the only electoral threat is the governing party.

Haunting Badenoch too, is her defeated rival, Robert Jenrick. Just last week, he sparked controversy with his comments on not seeing another white face in Handsworth. Badenoch herself supported Jenrick, arguing that it was merely a factual statement. Yet other senior figures in the Conservatives were more circumspect, with the Shadow Chancellor indicating that it was a poor choice of words. It would appear that an unrepentant Jenrick could be a continuing thorn in Badenoch’s side. Looking back at the results of last November’s ballot, perhaps this is inevitable. Of the four MP ballots, Jenrick topped two, whereas Badenoch only topped the final one. Badenoch’s victory amongst the members too was not quite as decisive as Johnson’s 66% back in 2019; indeed, the results in 2024 were almost identical to the Truss/Sunak contest of 2022. So Jenrick knows that he has significant support among both MPs and members, a figure confirmed by a recent poll showing that 46% of party members preferred him as leader over Badenoch. It has been mooted that Jenrick could be a prominent defector to Reform, but more likely, he is positioning himself as the natural successor to Badenoch.

The glass cliff theory of leadership proposes that organisations – including political parties – choose female leaders and leaders from minority backgrounds at points of instability and crisis. By choosing a leader who is visibly different from a more traditional stereotype of leadership, a party can overtly signify that they are enacting change. However, due to the instability of the party at the point of their election, their leadership itself is inevitably precarious. As such, female leaders, those from minority backgrounds – and in particular female leaders from minority backgrounds – become unfairly associated with poor performance. Such leaders can be set up for failure. So is Kemi Badenoch teetering at the edge of the glass cliff, with her leadership inevitably doomed to fail? Recent patterns in the Conservative party leadership may indicate so; after Johnson’s spectacular downfall in July 2022, the party membership chose a female leader to signify change (notably thought Truss was never the top choice of Conservative MPs in five rounds of voting). After Truss’s historically brief period as Prime Minister was ended by the repercussions of the mini-budget, Sunak’s election marked another visible shift in the leadership. As a minority leader, Sunak was elected at a point of crisis and precarity for the party, and he was unable to prevent the freefall of it into the cataclysmic electoral defeat of 2024. Badenoch, as a female leader from a minority background, has taken up the baton of leadership at a fundamental juncture where the party questions its own identity. Should the party collapse entirely, or if she is ousted in the not-too-distant future, it does not mean she is a bad leader. She has been placed in an almost impossible position.

So, what does Kemi Badenoch need to do? Ultimately, she can do little more for now than sit tight and begin to prepare the party for its (not inevitable) recovery. However long that takes, it is unlikely she will be at the helm to reap the benefits.