Kemi praises Thatcher but faces fight with grandees

Just days before the 100th anniversary of the birth of Margaret Thatcher, on 13 October, Kemi Badenoch opened the Conservative conference by twice praising the party's heroine and three-time election winner.

"The facts of life are Conservative," the Tory leader declared, quoting the former PM, before praising her for breaking the cycle of high inflation, low growth and the stranglehold of the trade unions in the 1980s. But as her rather flat delivery in her 28-minute opening speech confirmed, Ms Badenoch is no Margaret Thatcher.

(Perhaps she needs a voice coach, like Mrs T, who was transformed by tutoring from Gordon Reece in her early days as Tory leader.) For lovers of political trivia, however, Kemi and Maggie do have one thing in common. Both met their husbands when they were fighting a Labour seat before becoming an MP.

The dashing Denis Thatcher famously gave Margaret a lift back to London from Dartford, where she was candidate in 1950 and 1951, in his Jaguar sports car. Some 60 years later, banker Hamish Badenoch, a former head boy at Ampleforth school - the Roman Catholic boarding school run by monks - gave Kemi lifts in his car when she was candidate against Labour's Tessa Jowell in Dulwich and West Norwood in the 2010 general election.

Sadly, Margaret Thatcher saw several acts of terrorism at close hand - the 1984 Brighton bomb being the most devastating example - and here Kemi Badenoch's speech began with solemn references to the Manchester synagogue attack. She entered the hall to almost funereal music by Russian composer Kirill Pokrovsky from his Divinity series and her tone was solemn, before she launched into a fierce attack on the weekend's pro-Palestine protests, which the prime minister and home secretary had urged organisers to call off.

These marches were "carnivals of hate" and "theatres of intimidation.