At The Times’ CEO Summit this morning, we heard from a bunch of people: leaders in tech, banking and two politicians: Rachel Reeves (interviewed by Mehreen Khan) and Kemi Badenoch. Since the last Times CEO Summit, her popularity had gone from -32 to -8 (she claims minus 1), which, as the below chart shows, defies the usual gravity…

“I’m the least hated leader!” Badenoch chirruped. “We’re also now the least hated political party!” But the Tories as a party are flat at 17 points. When it comes to the Conservative rating there is no sign of a Kemi bounce - or any other kind of bounce.

On the above, Reform would be 81 seats short of a majority. They’d need a partner. So what are the chances of the Conservatives doing a deal and propping them up? “No chance whatsoever,” she replied. “I stay very, very clear. I’m not doing a deal with Nigel.” After the election, I told her.

“Same thing. What are we doing a deal on? He has said all sorts of things that I don't agree with. He wants to nationalise. He wants more benefits. He wants a bigger state: just one that he is in charge of. This goes against so many of the things that we believe in. At the last election, people were voting against [parties] more than they were voting for [them]. At the next election, there will be an undercurrent of : ‘how do we remove Labour and stop Farage?’… We are the answer to both questions.”

But with the Tories so far behind Reform, what are the prospects of her ever winning?

“The political landscape is completely fragmented. A lot of people talk about Reform UK, but they’re polling about where we were when we lost the election in 2024! And there’s three years to go. There’s everything to play for. In 2019, the question that the public was asked was: " How do we just get Brexit done? And there was a very clear answer in Boris Johnson.”

And the last general election? She was candid. “It wasn’t ‘who do we want to run the country?’ It really was: ‘How do we get the Conservatives out of office’? And people voted however they could to remove Conservatives. The mistake that Keir Starmer made was believing that there was this huge love for Labour, which the landslide - caused by Reform getting involved - gave him. But there wasn’t, and so he’s run into trouble because there wasn’t an agenda, there weren’t principles that were underpinning it.

At the next election, there’s going to be a question. What do we think it will be? It has to be something that goes across the board with a full agenda. Who is going to fix our economy? It has to be that, because if it is not then we are going to run into a lot of trouble and we will go bankrupt… People are going to be asking, who’s going to get me higher wages? Who’s going to create jobs? And real jobs: not government-created jobs that have no productivity whatsoever.”

So that’s the theory. YouGov polling suggests the economy is narrowly ahead of immigration as the concern that troubles the public most…

…and immigration is falling fast, with Shabanna Mahmood keeping a tight lid on. A message that has not really filtered through, but may do over time…

Reform UK is now switching to integration issues, racial politics (that whites are discriminated against) and drawing new dividing lines with foreign nationals whom they’d tax more and deny council accommodation to. Social media may create fertile ground for this messaging, and immigration may give way to ‘integration’.

But the bigger question for the Tories is whether, having messed so much up, they can be trusted when they promise (as they always have done) to cut taxes. What we got last time, I told Badenoch, was the highest tax rate in postwar history. And yes, she may say: ‘under new management’. But the Tories have been doing a good line in new management. So how can she expect voters to believe them this time? Might this be why their poll rating is marooned?

Her reply:-

“You are right. There’s been a lot of ‘new management’, and I think with Labour, we’re going to see some new management coming in as well. It’s getting harder to govern because people are straying from first principles. We need to start thinking again about what it is we are trying to do. If you want to know why I will be different, you only have to look at what I did when I was in government.

What did I do when I was business secretary? I deregulated, I scrapped loads of corporate audit regulations: lots of stuff was split in training in 2018 and landed on my desk in 2023, and I looked at it, I thought, well, all that will happen is that the good guys will have more regulation and the bad guys will just ignore it. Why are we doing this?”

She then asked if anyone was from KPMG was in the room. She had taken a swipe at Rachel Reeves, entrepreneur adviser, earlier on, so I can understand why the KPMG bod was reluctant to self-identify, but she was outed by others.

“I scrapped these regulations, and I got lots of letters from people and WhatsApp saying ‘thank you’. Nobody wanted this, so glad someone saw common sense. What was on the cover of the FT? KPMG complained that I got rid of these regulations, and I know why, because there was lots of advisory work that was coming that would have been fantastic for KPMG, but not for the rest of the system.

You need people who are going to be tough, who can say no, who don’t care about what the papers, especially the FT, are going to write. People who are prepared to take difficult decisions. What we have seen so far is a lot of changes in new management, with no principles underpinning.”

She’s right to say we’ll likely see a lot of new management in Labour if Andy Burnham replaces Keir Starmer. But can a party about to lose its deposit in Makerfield credibly pose as the plausible next government? If you think so, Ladbrokes is offering odds of 9:2.