'I CANNOT TELL YOU HOW MUCH ABUSE AND VILIFICATION HAS BEEN PUT MY WAY'

Kemi Badenoch believes she is the antidote to the existential crisis plaguing the Tories. But can she convince her party — and the country — she can be Prime Minister?

- DYLAN JONES

“I don’t scare easy,” 45-year-old, Wimbledon-born Kemi Badenoch (full name Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke Badenoch) said to me in the back of her car on her way to Kent on Tuesday, to lend support to all the Conservative candidates fighting for survival in the local elections on May 1. “I’m tough. I have to be.”

Well, she needs to be, because Badenoch has not been having such a great time recently. She is struggling to attract donors (apparently, although she quickly says this is not the case — “Completely untrue!”), struggling in the polls, and seems rather unloved by media and public alike. Keir Starmer’s party might be increasingly unpopular — Labour's honeymoon period was over before they got themselves elected, and every time Rachel Reeves opens her mouth, her divorce from her job looks a little more likely — but the Tories are doing even worse. Labour currently has a 23 per cent rating, Reform are on 25 per cent, while Badenoch’s Tories are on 20 per cent.

The forthcoming local elections might seem like a referendum on Starmer, but if the predictions are correct, the Tories could lose hundreds of seats. Not only this, but a new poll also suggests that if a general election were held today, Nigel Farage’s party would win 180 seats, with the Tories and Labour on 165 each. So she is obviously hugely concerned about the outcome of the local elections.

“Campaigning for the local elections is going well in the sense that I'm enjoying it,” she says, “but I know it’s going to be difficult. I'm knocking on lots of doors and people are telling me what they are thinking about everything, and there's just a general disillusionment and a ‘fedupiness’ about politics, that it doesn't work. And I want to inspire people that it does work. But my party needs to rebuild trust with the public. Because ‘we've just been kicked out.”

And the tactical campaigning with Reform, how is that going?