Kemi Badenoch has brushed off ridicule over sparsely attended sessions at the Conservative Party conference, insisting the gathering in Birmingham is “buzzing” with energy despite viral images of vacant chairs in the main hall.
The Opposition leader was forced onto the defensive on Tuesday after Jeremy Clarkson, appearing as a surprise guest on Monday, quipped that “a lot of people have come dressed as seats.” Labour’s social media team amplified the jab, posting a screenshot of the half-empty auditorium during a speech by shadow education secretary Laura Trott with the caption: “People disguised as chairs latest.”
A defiant response
Asked by Channel 5 News whether the Top Gear presenter’s observation had been embarrassing, Badenoch was dismissive. “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. This conference is buzzing,” she said. “We have many more people than last year. I saw Jeremy Clarkson, I saw Jeremy Clarkson’s event – people were standing up, you could barely see him.”
She pointed to a Young Conservatives event on Monday night as evidence of enthusiasm. “You could barely get in. It was absolutely heaving. So maybe you should go to where the people are. I know the media always wants to talk about how quiet the conference is, we’re actually having a great conference.”
The exchange highlights a persistent image problem for a party still reeling from its worst electoral defeat in modern history.
The brand repair project
Badenoch used Tuesday’s media round to frame the conference as a turning point in a longer project of rehabilitation. “I’m working on fixing the brand and that means going back to our core principles,” she said. “What we’ve seen is that we’re in an era of multi-party politics. We had a government that came in with a landslide and the prime minister is out. Politics is volatile.”
Her argument rests on two pillars: personal popularity and structural opportunity. Recent polling shows her personal approval ratings have risen since taking the helm, even as Labour maintains a consistent lead in voting intention. The strategy is to decouple her leadership from the party’s 2024 rejection.
“What I’m showing is that this Conservative Party is different from the one people said no thanks to in 2024,” she said. “I know that people are warming towards me. I now need to show them that the Conservative Party is a different party.”
The Clarkson factor
Clarkson’s appearance was always a calculated risk. The broadcaster commands a vast audience but his politics are idiosyncratic — sceptical of net zero, dismissive of the “metropolitan elite,” yet hardly a conventional Tory. His joke landed because it contained a grain of visible truth: the main hall, particularly during morning sessions, has been notably underfilled.
For Badenoch, the incident encapsulates the difficulty of controlling the narrative when the visual evidence contradicts the talking points. A leader insisting the room is full while cameras show rows of empty seats risks appearing detached.
Yet her aides argue the metric is wrong. They point to fringe event attendance, membership sign-ups, and the energy in the exhibition hall as better indicators of party health than the main auditorium at 10am.
Why it Matters
The Conservative Party’s conference is less a policy forum than a psychological reset — a moment to convince activists, donors, and the wider electorate that the 2024 collapse was an aberration, not a terminus. Badenoch’s refusal to engage with the empty-seats narrative is a gamble: either she projects the confidence of a leader who sees what others miss, or she confirms the suspicion that the party is in denial about its diminished reach. With the next election potentially years away, the real test isn’t this week’s attendance figures but whether “fixing the brand” translates into by-election wins and polling movement before the political weather changes again.
