When Kemi Badenoch rose to speak in the Commons yesterday evening, she found steady footing.

Responding to Bridget Phillipson’s statement following the Supreme Court’s gender ruling, she demolished the government’s embarrassing u-turn, reminding the Labour benches that back in 2023 Sir Keir Starmer said “99 per cent of women don’t have a penis” – and the whips ensured the Tory leader’s MPs were crowded around her, braying in support.

“I spent years battling abuse from Labour Members as I fought to uphold biological sex in government and blocked the SNP’s introduction of its mad self-identity laws, and I will take no lectures from them about what to do on this issue… I spent years battling abuse from Labour Members as I fought to uphold biological sex in government and blocked the SNP’s introduction of its mad self-identity laws, and I will take no lectures from them about what to do on this issue.”

The gender wars is a battle she knows well – and it showed. Her colleagues’ reviews to ConHome included the impressed and the surprised.

“Did you catch Kemi in the chamber?” one asked me, “she was fantastic”.

Another added: “She finally had the confidence she showed before becoming leader. We need more showings like that.”

The surprise came because it marked a far cry from some of her other performances. Recent stints in the chamber, alongside media appearances like her interview yesterday morning on BBC 4’s Today programme, have left Badenoch’s Conservative colleagues feeling uncertain about the future.

“That most people’s reviews centre around ‘alright’ isn’t the best sign,” one of her MPs says. “You don’t really want to be in a situation where so many people are continually talking about whether you’ll last the course.”

The issues that they, and others, highlight often come back to a simple, but root cause: reaction speed.

There is a feeling that the party, and more specifically the party leadership, is too slow to realise a moment that they should be grasping hold of. With gender issues, it was clear for Badenoch, but with others there is a fumbling.

Getting clearance to intervene on an issue outside of people’s briefs takes too long and has to go up too high in the party ladder (although Robert Jenrick reportedly gets a free pass in ignoring this rule); there are complaints that briefing lines on leading topics are weak and often ignored; and Badenoch herself appears too reluctant to move with the tide and take opportunities when they come her way if it hasn’t been scheduled as part of her phased scheme for success by chief of staff Lee Rowley.

They are lacking a fundamental nimbleness. While Jenrick’s team have opted for a ‘speed is king’ approach to get onto an issue before Labour and Reform, it has not yet made its way to the rest of the party, or LOTO.

Take Badenoch’s BBC appearance yesterday morning. When confronted by polling of more than 3,000 party members from this website that showed 55 per cent think she is moving too slowly on policy, Badenoch batted away the need for speed.

“I’m not changing my mind or getting blown off course, Left or Right, because of a poll of a very, very tiny subset of people …those aren’t the full members. That’s one poll on a website. What the members voted for was someone who would take their time to get things right because previous leaders who rushed things out got things wrong. I am not going to make that mistake again.”

Given she won a leadership election of Tory members – a small subset of voters themselves – Badenoch may want to take more notice of this “tiny subset”, but her key message was: “It is going to take time to fix this.”

And taking time to come to conclusions they are. When a LOTO figure told me that issues around chlorinated chicken were “a moral panic” and “successful marketing and protectionism” from British farmers, there was internal dismay at the position, with pretty much the entire shadow Defra team publicly opposed.

It was two weeks later that Badenoch came out and said she wouldn’t even eat chlorinated chicken. “It speaks to a broader problem of how slow LOTO are at getting on the right side of the issue,” one frustrated Tory figure tells me.

While a slower approach to policy may be one thing (and many Tory MPs express support for it given the distance from the next general election), it can’t be allowed to bleed into other political arenas – and it looks like it is.

Reaction speed has been put under a spotlight at PMQs, with Badenoch seeming reluctant to leave behind lines that have been tested and scripted to adapt with the situation in front of her.

The worst from the view of the press gallery being back in February where, as she pushed on a report of Palestinian migrants being allowed to live in Britain under the Homes for Ukraine Scheme, Starmer effectively batted it away by flagging the decision was taken under the last government and agreeing that it was, indeed, the wrong decision. It looked like Badenoch had no other line of enquiry to go off; stranded in the middle of the Commons.

But she has shown before that she can think on her feet. Her performances in the chamber are best when, at the despatch box, she lets go of whatever perceived airs and graces she thinks she should have as leader of the opposition and instead speaks plainly, as herself, being reactive.

It is this candour, those in her party think, which translated into her original leadership win. One MP says: “When I’ve seen her perform at events recently, she does so with confidence, openly. People like her and she’ll take people on and win them over. It is back in Parliament that she seems to get more nervous.”

There are three Cs that a Tory leader needs to master: Confidence (which is in there but clearly shakes), Communications (Badenoch is known not to like the media), and Clearance (there is no swift operation to allow nimble responses from her party). Badenoch requires work on most of these, but many in her parliamentary party are keen that she gets there – and performances like last night show that she might be able to.

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