I once thought Kemi was a Tory stop-gap. But I now believe she will be our next Prime Minister: ROSS CLARK

Published: 23:06, 24 July 2026 | Updated: 00:49, 25 July 2026 I have to admit that when Kemi Badenoch was elected Conservative leader in November 2024 I thought of the word 'stopgap'. She was a Michael Foot, an Iain Duncan Smith, a Jeremy Corbyn; a figure you didn't have to take seriously because she was never going to win an election. Her role was to keep her party ticking over gently until the Government became so unpopular that a Conservative administration became a realistic possibility again – at which point a bigger beast would replace her as Tory leader. Except, of course, in Badenoch's case there was a serious possibility that she would not even manage to keep the Tories alive. Throughout late 2024 and 2025, the real leader of the opposition appeared to be Nigel Farage. Badenoch was pretty poor in some of her early appearances, I seem to remember, meandering between unrelated subjects and failing to land a blow on Starmer. But it hardly mattered anyway. Starmer, with a majority of 160 and the apparent gravitas of a leading lawyer, seemed set for a decade in office. Some former Tory ministers came to the same conclusion, and switched sides to Reform UK, making the cold calculation that it offered the only chance of reviving their political careers. How different it all suddenly seems, now that Badenoch has outlasted Starmer on her party's front bench. She can reflect that she played her own part in his downfall, by skewering him over the Mandelson affair. At the same time, Reform has conspicuously lost two recent high-profile by-elections – Gorton and Denton to the Greens, and Makerfield to Labour – that they would have expected to win. Tory leader Kemi Badenoch leads a press conference in London earlier this week at the Institute of Engineering and Technology Reform UK leader Nigel Farage speaks at the CPAC GB conference in London earlier this month Farage is on the ropes over donations, including several from a convicted fraudster and £5million from a crypto-billionaire. And his decision to spark a by-election in his Clacton seat is descending into farce. Badenoch, hard though it would have been to imagine a year ago, found herself the most popular party leader in the country after a poll by Opinium last week gave her a higher approval rating than the incoming Prime Minister – scoring plus 2 compared with Andy Burnham's minus 3. On Friday, a YouGov poll deflated her balloon by giving her a net-favourability rating of minus 11, compared to Burnham's plus 3, but it was still far ahead of an astonishing minus 46 for Farage. Can we even begin to imagine what previously seemed impossible: that come 2029 Kemi Badenoch will be Prime Minister? There is a long way to go, of course. The Conservatives are still only commanding 21 per cent, according to YouGov. But then with Labour on 20 per cent and Reform UK on 23 per cent, all is to play for. It won't take much of a recovery to put the Conservatives in the lead and to look like genuine contenders. And it is they who have the upward momentum. What we don't know yet is how much of a bounce Labour will achieve under Burnham, and whether that will be temporary or longer-lasting. Burnham is a far better speaker than Starmer, and more politically astute. He is spot-on in detecting that the issue that matters most to voters is the cost of living. Yet Badenoch's attack on his 'spending spree' of small beer giveaways on energy bill VAT and bus fares – that 'he is behaving like he's still the mayor of Manchester' – has resonated.  Andy Burnham, center, holds a National Economic Council meeting at No 10 North at Heron House in Manchester on Friday As she said this week, 'He is now the prime minister of the United Kingdom, he needs to start acting like it.' The Government is heading over a precipice, and Burnham is hopelessly badly equipped to pull it back. The Office for National Statistics reported last week that the UK's public sector net debt at the end of June stood at £2.989 trillion, the equivalent of £100,000 per household. This month it will almost certainly tip over the £3 trillion threshold. That means the Government now owes the equivalent of the entire value of the UK economy, or GDP. But there is no sense that Labour MPs appreciate the very real danger that Britain could suffer a severe fiscal crisis, possibly on a par with that endured by Greece in 2010, which led to bail-outs from the EU. The MPs who elevated Burnham unopposed to the Labour leadership are the same ones who last July prevented Rachel Reeves from making even modest £6billion cuts in the runaway budget for Personal Independence Payments (PIPs) – a non means-tested benefit being claimed by people with ADHD, among other conditions. Tellingly, Burnham's choice of First Secretary of State, Louise Haigh, led those protests. And he knows that his backbenchers will squeal if he so much as threatens any cuts to welfare, healthcare or other services. A smiling Ms Badenoch is pictured during a visit to Newport Galvanizers Ltd, in Lanwern, South Wales on Friday It is highly improbable that Burnham will observe any fiscal rectitude. He himself has floated the idea of a National Care Service costing £19billion a year. Good luck trying to fund that through tax rises. The OECD and IMF – the latter of which the Chancellor John Healey may well have to go to for a bailout, like his 1970s namesake – both warned recently that taxes and spending in Britain are too high. Try to squeeze the pips even further and tax revenues may well fall as businesses and wealthy individuals relocate abroad. This leaves Badenoch with a huge opportunity. Once the bond market wolves appear at the door of the UK Government, political debate is going to change totally. We won't then be talking about how much extra money we could spend on this or that, or blaming everything on the years of 'Tory austerity'. Once Britain's dire fiscal position becomes common knowledge, the debate will revolve around how government must cut spending to keep the country solvent. We will be back to 2010, when the general election was held against the backdrop of the riots in bankrupt Athens. David Cameron and Nick Clegg formed a coalition with the public finances as its number one priority, reversing the fiscally-incontinent years of Gordon Brown. Badenoch has already positioned herself shrewdly in many areas, from ditching Britain's ruinous net zero policies, to threatening to withdraw from the European Convention of Human Rights so that finally we can make our own laws on immigration, not have them imposed on us by activist judges in Strasbourg. She now needs to do the same with the issue of public spending. She should be attacking the Government, week after week, for its extravagant outlay, while making the case for a genuinely balanced budget. This will involve apologising for the Conservatives' record in their last few years in office. She needs to issue an apology, too, for the Conservatives' miserable failure on migration, which soared to new highs just as we were supposed to be taking back control of our borders. But as a relatively fresh face – she was Rishi Sunak's business secretary – Badenoch should have no problem pulling that off. Burnham will be ill-advised to underestimate her, and even more on his guard against patronising her, as Starmer did. How ironic that Labour, which crows about equality from morning to night, has still to elect its first female leader when the Tories have had four. I'm not staking my money on it yet, but I am watching the political market carefully. While Burnham will enjoy a short honeymoon, I am beginning to think his successor as Prime Minister will be the woman waiting to lock horns with him over the Commons dispatch box in September. 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