Kemi praises Thatcher but faces fight with grandees

Just days before the 100th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher, on 13 October, Kemi Badenoch opened the Conservative conference by twice praising the party's heroine and three-time election winner.

"The facts of life are Conservative," the Tory leader declared, quoting the former PM, before praising her for breaking the cycle of high inflation, low growth and the stranglehold of the trade unions in the 1980s.

But as her rather flat delivery in her 28-minute opening speech confirmed, Ms Badenoch is no Margaret Thatcher.

(Perhaps she needs a voice coach, like Mrs T, who was transformed by tutoring from Gordon Reece in her early days as Tory leader.)

For lovers of political trivia, however, Kemi and Maggie do have one thing in common.

Both met their husbands when they were fighting a Labour seat before becoming an MP.

The dashing Denis Thatcher famously gave Margaret a lift back to London from Dartford, where she was candidate in 1950 and 1951, in his Jaguar sports car.

Some 60 years later, banker Hamish Badenoch, a former head boy at Ampleforth school - the Roman Catholic boarding school run by monks - gave Kemi lifts in his car when she was candidate against Labour's Tessa Jowell in Dulwich and West Norwood in the 2010 general election.

Sadly, Margaret Thatcher saw several acts of terrorism at close hand - the 1984 Brighton bomb being the most devastating example - and here Kemi Badenoch's speech began with solemn references to the Manchester synagogue attack.

She entered the hall to almost funereal music and her tone was solemn, before she launched into a fierce attack on the weekend's pro-Palestine protests, which the prime minister and home secretary had urged organisers to call off.

These marches were "carnivals of hate" and "theatres of intimidation", she declared, in an attack that rather overshadowed her much-trailed announcement of quitting the European Convention of Human Rights and plans to deport 150,000 illegal migrants a year.

The ECHR announcement did bring the rather subdued 1,000-strong audience to life, however, and they also applauded when she attacked Nigel Farage's controversial plan to axe indefinite leave to remain status for migrants legally living in the UK.

"I am British, as we all are," she said. "My children are British, and I will not allow anyone on the left to tell them that they belong in a different category, or anyone on the right to tell them that they do not belong in their own country."

To be fair, the sombre mood just days after the Manchester synagogue deaths meant this was not the time for a knockabout speech from the Tory leader.

That will come on Wednesday when she makes the final speech of this conference.

But before then, her leadership and her policies won't go unchallenged.

Shortly before she was praising Margaret Thatcher in her speech, there was a rumour that one of Mrs T's most devoted Tory MP fans, the Romford MP Andrew Rosindell, was being courted by Reform UK as a potential defector and was poised to jump.

"What would Mrs T say?" Sky News asked Rosindell, who's such a devotee that his Romford Tory HQ was officially opened by his heroine and is called Margaret Thatcher House.

He replied: "Mrs T would not believe all she read on Twitter. Fortunately, there was no social media in those days."

So was that a yes or a no? "No," he replied, adding: "If I decide to defect to the Lib Dems you'll be the first to know." What a tease!

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And as the Conservative party prepares to celebrate the Thatcher anniversary, who should turn up in Manchester but the big beast who did more to bring her down in 1990 than any other Tory politician.

Michael Heseltine, now 92 and once the darling of Tory activists and the party's favourite blond apart from Margaret Thatcher, is due to address a European Movement fringe meeting, where he will no doubt denounce Kemi's plan to bin the ECHR.

The woman dubbed KemiKaze by her critics ended her speech by claiming the Conservatives are "up for the fight". Unfortunately, her ECHR plan may provoke a fight with big beasts and grandees like Michael Heseltine in her own party.

But on the evidence so far, and given her claim in her speech that the party has changed, she's up for the fight with the grandees too.

(c) Sky News 2025: Kemi praises Thatcher but faces fight with grandees