QUENTIN LETTS: They're all slightly terrified of Kemi... a pocket neutron bomb, an intellectual ankle biter, a 5ft 4in raptor

Published: 23:00 BST, 4 October 2026 | Updated: 23:03 BST, 4 October 2026

Just as the Greens were going the full goose-step in Brighton, here in Birmingham the Conservatives were listening to a chin-stroker of a speech about Schopenhauer. He’s not a footballer. He was a 19th-century German philosopher.

Matthew Syed, sometime England ping-pong ace and now composer of think-pieces for the Sunday Times, argued that Kemi Badenoch’s tough love on welfare spongers was in line with Schopenhauer’s theory of compassion. We all nodded like connoisseurs even if we hadn’t a clue what he was on about.

In recent years, Syed continued, the word ‘emergency’ had been devalued by concept creep. We now had a society in which sadness was called ‘depression’ and a hard week was ‘trauma’. Kemi understood that bailouts and welfare payments were ‘taking us inexorably to bankruptcy’ and he suspected voters would agree. Schopenhauer, the father of German pessimism, might have twitched at such positivity.

Mrs Badenoch stepped on stage to make a short speech. She entered to a low, Jaws-style chord. The activists, maybe 500, jolted to their feet in fright and gave an ovation to this tiny figure in a trousersuit. It was the same powdery blue that Grayson Perry paints his eyelids.

The day started with a Badenoch interview on BBC1’s Kuenssberg show. For this the Tory leader wore a Scotland rugby jersey. Dame Penny Mordaunt was on Kuenssberg’s studio panel and may have caused disappointment to BBC producers by enthusing about Mrs Badenoch.

We learned that Dame Penny had been admitted to the parliamentary candidates’ list. Kuenssberg muttered that she was being nice about Kemi only because she was after a seat. The other hot news: Mrs Badenoch had written a pamphlet, more correctly a jeremiad, entitled The Right Way. It is 95 pages long with not a single picture. Lucy Powell will never get through it. Alex Burghart, effectively deputy leader of the Tories, told the audience: ‘Grab a copy. It’s important.’

Deft pause, then, with a note of torturer’s menace: ‘Kemi will ask you questions about it.’ They are all slightly terrified of her. She is a pocket neutron bomb, a 5ft 4in raptor, an intellectual ankle biter, snap, snappity, snap. Stage technicians wheeled on a special, low-slung lectern for her. For all the terror, she actually did an unusual amount of smiling.

She has so many gleaming teeth, you wonder if she pinched some from Zack Polanski.

Tory leader Kemi Badenoch arrives to deliver her opening speech on the first day of the Conservative Party conference in Birmingham yesterday

Efforts are being made to create geniality. The stage has a drum kit on it. Dear lord, please tell us we’re not going to have a Katie Lam punk-rock concert.

The exhibition hall has a museum viewing room containing an 88ft mock-up of the Bayeux Tapestry. It shows the south coast being invaded by small boats, King Keir handing bags of gold to trade union barons, new King Andy sewing an EU flag and Chancellor Healey firing tax arrows into the eyes of British yeomen.

Tomorrow there will be a hall session about the fashion industry. They would not have tried that in Eric Pickles’ heyday. But not all the informality is going smoothly. Mr Burghart essayed small-talk with Shadow Welsh Secretary Mims Davies, who is English, and noted that she married a Welshman. Mrs Davies: ‘Er, that didn’t go so well.’ Oops. They divorced in 2017.

Could Mrs Badenoch show more generosity to her rivals sometimes? When Laura Kuenssberg asked her about physical attacks on politicians, Kemi could have said something warm about Nigel Farage and the horrible threats he has faced. She could have shown compassion – of the modern sort, not Schopenhauer’s – and it would not have cost her a groat. Might even have won some votes.

There are the usual platoons of young men in black suits, heading for the bar, but Badenoch’s Conservatives are laden by duty. It makes for a heavy dough. They could do with some of the cheery vulgarity seen at Reform. There are no flags being waved here.

No one, despite that amusing mock tapestry, is dressed as a medieval knight.