Kemi Badenoch’s ratings have improved since last autumn, but the Conservative party’s image remains poor

Key takeaways

  • Positivity towards Kemi Badenoch has increased over recent months, with 38% of Britons now saying she is doing well as leader and 27% seeing her as prime minister in waiting, relative to 15% and 8% respectively feeling so last October
  • Britons now tend to see Kemi Badenoch as decisive, strong and competent, but not trustworthy
  • Opinion towards the Conservative party is significantly less positive than opinion towards Badenoch, with only 19% of Britons feeling the party is ready for a return to government
  • Most Britons believe the Conservatives are out of touch, untrustworthy and only care about a select few group of people
  • Feeling the party has not learned the lessons from its 2024 election defeat is the top reservation about voting Conservative among both loyalists and defectors

In recent months, Conservative-supporting newspapers have been filled with comment pieces suggesting that the party’s nadir is coming to an end, supposedly thanks to the public being excited by Kemi Badenoch’s performances in the Commons. Some have termed it a ‘Kemi-comeback’ or even a ‘Keminaissance’.

Nonetheless, the Tories still suffered devastating losses in this year’s local and devolved elections, have lost their deposit in two of the four parliamentary by-elections this year, and remain significantly below their 2024 vote share in voting intention polls.

So what is the truth about the ‘Keminaissance’? Using YouGov’s trackers, as well as returning to other recent polling, we can examine how much Badenoch has actually won over the public, and why any improvement does not appear to have yielded significant gains for the party.

Kemi Badenoch’s personal ratings have improved…

Undoubtedly, opinion towards Kemi Badenoch has grown more positive since last autumn, with this evident across all of our key trackers.

After a stagnant first year in post, belief that Badenoch has been doing well as Conservative leader and that she looks like a prime minister in waiting both increased significantly between October and December last year, and have trended further upwards since April.

Today, 38% of Britons believe Kemi Badenonch is doing well as Conservative leader, up 23 points since last October, while 27% of the public now believe she looks like a prime minister in waiting, roughly triple the 8% who felt so at the time of the Tory conference last year.

Improvement in Badenoch’s favourability figures over this period has been less dramatic, though has followed a similar pattern, peaking at 35% in our most recent figures, up 14 points from 21% last October.

Notably, during last summer, the proportion of Britons with a favourable opinion of Badenoch was consistently higher than the proportion who felt she was doing well as leader, while the opposite has been true since last December, indicating that a small proportion of those who believe she’s doing well as leader do not necessarily like her.

The growth in positivity has not been uniform. Comparing our most recent favourability polls to those prior to last November, the proportion of 2024 Conservative voters with a positive opinion of Badenoch has risen 21 points to 74%, with a similar 20 point rise (to 53%) among 2024 Reform UK voters.

By contrast, an average of 24% of 2024 Lib Dems have a favourable opinion of the Tory leader in our most recent favourability polls, up 13 points since last autumn, with a nine point increase in favourability among Labour voters (to 17%) and seven points among Green voters (to 13%).

This improvement in attitudes towards Badenoch can also be seen when it comes to how the public would describe her, with Britons now roughly twice as likely to describe the Tory leader as decisive (43%) than indecisive (21%), while also tending to see her as strong rather than weak (by 40% to 24%) and competent rather than incompetent (by 40% to 27%).

In all three cases, the proportion holding the positive view has increased by 16-18 points since last October.

There’s been less progress when it comes to trusting Badenoch, however, with just 25% of Britons saying they considering the opposition leader to be trustworthy, up just seven points since last October, while a greater 37% consider her to be untrustworthy.

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Nonetheless, despite these improvements, nearly half of Britons (46%) still hold an unfavourable opinion of Badenoch, with a similar 46% believing she does not look like a prime minister in waiting.

…but the Conservatives’ ratings remain poor

Yet, despite all this, the Conservatives have not made much progress in the polls. Last October, they consistently recorded a 17% vote share in our voting intention tracker; over the last month, they’ve averaged 20% of the vote. This is far short of mirroring the double-digit improvements in Badenoch’s personal figures.

At the core of this is the fact that opinion towards the Conservatives remains poor, even if there have been some improvements since last autumn.

Just one in five Britons (19%) believe the Conservatives are ready for government, which even if up from just 9% last October, are still outnumbered three times over by 57% of the public seeing the Conservatives as unsuited for a return to power.

This situation is much closer to Labour’s situation prior to the 2019 election under Jeremy Corbyn, when Britons saw them as not ready for office by 62% to 22%, than Labour’s situation before they won the 2024 election, when the public were divided 38% to 43% over the opposition’s suitability for government.

Likewise, the party performs poorly across a range of image-related questions. Whereas Britons tend to see Badenoch as competent by a 13 point margin, they tend to see the Conservatives as incompetent by a more decisive 47% to 22%, with the public also seeing the Tories as untrustworthy (by 55% to 15%), out of touch (by 51% to 17%) and weak (by 44% to 14%).

Just 26% of Britons believe the Conservatives have a clear sense of purpose, while nearly half (46%) are unclear what the party stands for, with 57-60% of Britons seeing the party as both caring only about a select few and only serving their own interests.

Notably, however, this ‘Kemi bonus’, whereby she is seen more positively than the party, is not symmetrical, with it being particularly prevalent among Reform UK voters.

For instance, over the last three months, those who voted Reform in 2024 have on average been 20 points more likely to say Badenoch looks like a ‘prime minister in waiting’ than to say the Conservatives are ‘ready for government’, compared to a ‘bonus’ of 5-7 points over this period among other voters.

This gap emerged around last winter, around the same time that Conservative voters first became more likely to see Badenoch as prime ministerial than feel the Tories were fit for office, having previously seen things the other way.

Why has the ‘Keminaissance’ not led to Conservative gains?

Returning to our Big Voter Study from last month, we can perhaps see why an improvement in Badenoch’s ratings has not filtered through to the party.

A belief that the Conservatives have not learned their lessons from the last election is a major reservation about voting for the party for 28% of those who’ve stuck with the party, as well as for 36% of those who’ve switched to another party or now say they are unsure who to vote for.

One in six loyalists (17%) also say that that the party's poor behaviour in office is one of their main reservations about the Tories, a view shared by 27% of those who’ve defected. These defectors are also likely to cite a lack of trust about Conservative promises in general (24%) as one of their biggest hesitations about the party, alongside a lack of trust on immigration specifically (31%).

Also potentially holding back the Conservatives is that, even if Badenoch’s ratings have improved, she currently compares unfavourably to Andy Burnham.

In our latest data, nearly half of Britons (47%) have a favourable opinion of the new prime minister, relative to a lower 36% seeing him unfavourably, with the public also tending to view him as decisive, competent and strong by 40-44% to 21-23%, as well as being split 30% to 31% over whether he is trustworthy or untrustworthy.

The public also back Burnham over Badenoch by a twelve point margin in a head-to-head over who would make the best prime minister (38% vs 26%), even if Britons back Badenoch over Farage by 41% to 17%.

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