Inside Team Kemi’s plan for power

In elections, as in wine, lesser years can still produce good vintages. Tony Blair and Gordon Brown first won their seats in 1983, the year of Labour’s ‘longest suicide note in history’; William Hague’s landslide defeat in 2001 gave us David Cameron, George Osborne and Boris Johnson. The 2017 election is not recalled fondly by many Conservatives. Yet it produced the cluster of ambitious Tories running the party today.

Kemi Badenoch was marked for the top as soon as she entered parliament. ‘It was clear from the start she wasn’t there to make up the numbers,’ says a fellow member of the 2017 intake. She quickly made allies: Lee Rowley, Alex Burghart, Julia Lopez and Rachel Maclean. The quintet now run the Tory party. Rowley is Badenoch’s chief of staff; Burghart her policy brain. Lopez acts as her link to the parliamentary party and the ennobled Maclean is her director of strategy.

The five have been through three parliaments together. First, there was Theresa May’s minority government, in which the absence of a Brexit strategy infuriated Badenoch and her allies. Next came Boris Johnson’s 80-seat majority, in which his big tent conservatism collapsed under its own contradictions. Finally, there was Labour’s triumph, in which the party’s failure to prepare for government quickly became apparent.

Three very different parliaments, but each has helped to form the quintet’s way of thinking. Tasked with taking their party back to power, they are looking to the past for inspiration. Burghart, the historian of the group, is often spotted with a copy of the Thatcherite text ‘The Right Approach’ under his arm. Published in 1976, it declares that: ‘There is no future in trying to find a middle road between folly and common sense.’