Is Badenoch bouncing back?

Conventional wisdom says the Tory leadership of Kemi Badenoch is close to crisis. This is perhaps because the prevailing political mood is much more heavily influenced by hindsight than by foresight. The manufacture of almost every opinion that gains the status of conventional wisdom depends on a time lag to allow its repetition and dispersal among mid-wit cadres. The polls seem to at least back up the view that Badenoch is in trouble; most aggregation sites put Reform above the Conservatives in terms of average ratings. Yet patterns of opinion recorded in polls are also based on a time lag, capturing the impact of events that first came to public attention a couple of weeks previously.

There is no doubt that Badenoch had a bumpy December. Her main mistake was to get into a tussle with Nigel Farage about Reform’s membership surge which ended up amplifying it in the public mind.