Kemi Badenoch delivered her Conservative party conference speech in Birmingham this afternoon. Here are fourteen things we learned from her speech:

1) Kemi Badenoch has her tail up

Anyone who read my interview with the Conservative leader last week, where she claimed: ‘I get better every day,’ knows that Badenoch is not lacking for confidence, having turned her personal prospects around with a barnstorming speech to the party faithful at last year’s annual conference. Today she seemed confident in herself, her views and the arguments she wants to make — though the delivery was a little less urgent than last year, the pauses too prevalent and the energy a little thin until the final ten minutes.

Badenoch’s plan is to remind people of how toxic that 2016-19 period was. Keep Brexit done might be her slogan

Badenoch’s plan is to remind people of how toxic that 2016-19 period was. Keep Brexit done might be her slogan

2) Her plan is to win back voters from the left first

Frontbenchers have been excitedly regaling journalists about a presentation given by the chief party strategist Stephen Gilbert, which explains a lot of the choices Badenoch made in her speech. They have looked at the polling and devised a two-part plan.

First, win back wealthy Southern voters who have abandoned the Tories for the Lib Dems and Labour in order to overtake Reform UK as the second force in British politics. Then persuade the tranche of Reform voters who just want to support the leading party of the right that Badenoch, not Nigel Farage, is the only one who can keep Andy Burnham and a rabble of left-wingers out of power. This makes some sense as the seats where the Tories, rather than Reform, are the major party of the right are predominantly in the South, the voters who are open to them once backed Cameron, Clegg and Blair.

The supermarket of choice for a lot of these voters is Marks & Spencer and Badenoch compared the Tories to that once distressed brand which has turned itself around and recently had a show at London Fashion Week: ‘Not so long ago critics said they were a bit stuffy and stuck in the past. Some were even questioning whether the brand would survive. Now M&S is back in fashion. Great looks at affordable prices…People are flooding back. Just like M&S we must learn from our mistakes win back trust and make people feel good about our party again.’

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3) Every major policy announcement was directed at this group

The big policy ‘rabbit’ out of the hat in the speech was Badenoch’s announcement that the Conservatives would scrap inheritance tax on family homes and let couples leave an additional £1 million to their children tax free. ‘No stamp duty when you buy your home, no mansion tax when you live in your home and no inheritance tax on your home when you pass it to your children or grandchildren,’........

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