In his latest column, PopCon Director, Mark Littlewood, offers some advice to Kemi Badenoch. "I suspect I’m not alone in beginning to feel that I’ve now seen enough of the trailers and I’m now wanting to see the full feature length movie." 

How much of a plan does the main opposition party need?

The Labour Party’s first six months in office has been so wretched that pointing out their missteps is surely as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. The economy is suffering under the weight of every higher taxes and more regulation. The government seems incapable of coming to terms with the horrors of rape gangs and the colossal failures of the state to deal with them. Having promised to clean up politics, sleaze allegations appear to be afflicting the new government on a very regular basis.

Unsurprisingly, support for Labour in the opinion polls is sliding, Their approval ratings are tanking. Any semblance of economic confidence has melted away.

In normal circumstances, the official opposition already would have built up a substantial opinion poll lead. As the old adage goes, opposition parties don't win elections, governments lose them. If the public are sick of the government and the most plausible alternative party comes across as broadly sane that should be enough to get into Downing Street. After all, that’s pretty much how Labour won last July.

If only the equation was so simple for Kemi Badenoch. She faces - and recognises she faces - a much greater problem. Having been a leading figure in the Conservative government, she always faces the allegation that her government failed entirely to fix the problems she now points to. Labour might be taxing the economy to death, failing to implement a working immigration policy and pursuing the madness of carbon net zero. But isn’t this pretty much what the Tories did in their term in office?

Her professed strategy is therefore to spend 2025 in trying to rebuild trust with the electorate, initially by restating core conservative principles. She is adamant that she doesn’t want to lay out specific policy pledges at this stage. In fact, in her first major speech of the year she railed against politicians reeling out policy announcements on television.

Detail, she insists, can wait.

I think she is only half right. It must be true that you can, for example, signal that you want to get the tax burden down without setting up the exact way that you would change income tax thresholds or recalibrate VAT. You can pledge to get immigration down without providing all of the specifics on how you would reorganise border force.

However, what’s missing from the Badenoch strategy is that you surely need to set out some clear positions – clearer than abstract principles, but not yet fully formed policies.

You don’t need months or years of deliberation to decide whether you think leaving ECHR is necessary in order to tackle immigration. You don’t need to determine your precise approach to energy policy in order to reach a decision about whether to abandon the 2050 carbon net zero target. You don’t need to work out exactly how you’d reform the BBC in order to be opposed to the continuance of a compulsory licence fee.

This is where I think the Conservative leadership needs to act with greater speed.

You can set down clear signposts without yet revealing your entire policy programme. If you don’t do so, there’s a risk that the media and the electorate will rapidly tire of mere reiterations of more abstract principles.

Kemi’s overarching vision – a functioning free market economy, a reduction in the powers of a bloated and inefficient state and the encouragement of greater assimilation in all corners of the UK – is attractive and persuasive.

But I suspect I’m not alone in beginning to feel that I’ve now seen enough of the trailers and I’m now wanting to see the full feature length movie.

Keep the flag of freedom flying.