Kemi Badenoch's Dead Cat Bounce

Why the attempts to pretend Kemi Badenoch's leadership of the Conservative Party has been anything other than an unmitigated disaster simply won't wash

There is a term in financial trading for when a declining stock makes a brief recovery, only to continue on its previous downward trajectory.

Named a “Dead Cat Bounce” after the idea that “even a dead cat will bounce if it falls from a great height,” it is a phrase that perfectly encapsulates what we are now seeing with Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch.

Over recent weeks there have been a spate of articles in the British press arguing that Badenoch’s leadership is somehow ‘bouncing back’.

“Whisper it, but Badenoch is dragging the Conservatives back from the brink,” wrote former Conservative minister Theresa Villiers in the Telegraph.

It is a theme picked up elsewhere in the paper, where correspondents note that “the Conservative vote share has risen from 17 to 19 per cent.”

Now I’m not sure which polls the Telegraph have been looking at, but if we look just at the polling averages, Badenoch’s party has stayed solidly at an average of between 16 and 17 per cent since last May.

More importantly this compares to an average of 26% that the Conservatives were recording when she took over in November last year.

So in other words, Badenoch inherited the worst ever poll rating for the Conservative party in its history, and has succeeded in shaving a further nine to ten percentage points off of that figure

This has been reflected in actual elections, with the Conservative party losing 674 of its councillors and the control of 16 of its councils in May, and most of the local council by-elections it has fought since.

If this is the “Badenoch bounce back” we’re all being told about, then I struggle to imagine what the opposite would look like.

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The Worst Opposition Leader of Modern Times

The picture gets even worse when you compare Badenoch’s performance to previous opposition leaders.