Kemi Badenoch would like you to know that everything is going very well and that she has plenty of time. That, in its most digested form, was the message from her marathon Today programme interview. Will her MPs be reassured? It may be a little more complicated.
In fairness to the Conservative leader, as she said several times, she has been in the job for little more than seven weeks, and turning around a party that has just slumped from 344 MPs to a mere 121 is not a simple task.
Within that context, she told Amol Rajan, even being able to assemble a frontbench team while avoiding internal party warfare was something of an achievement. The job so far had gone “as well as it possibly could do”, she said.
Similarly logical on the face of it was her insistence that it would be counterproductive to throw out endless policy ideas, saying her first task was to “re-earn the trust” of voters after 14 sometimes chaotic years of Tory rule.
But such pronouncements can risk feeling detached from the political world as it actually is. Rajan made this point repeatedly: while Badenoch is biding her time, Nigel Farage is all over the airwaves and rising in the polls, filling the Tory policy vacuum with his own eye-catching solutions.
Badenoch was unmoved. The British public, she said, were sick of people offering soundbites and simplistic policies and would respond positively to more serious fare.
Badenoch will argue that Conservative members did just this, choosing her more methodical approach over Robert Jenrick’s scattergun policy announcements. But to some of her MPs, this could seem complacent.
To begin with, as Rajan also stressed, she may not have the full four or five years to hone her message, especially in a party with a track record of removing leaders seen as underperforming.
Secondly, even on broad principles, it’s still not especially clear what Badenoch is actually selling. She can be fluent and thoughtful, but the longer she talks, the more she can resemble a humanities academic throwing out ideas in the university common room.
Perhaps the UK does need “a revolution in how our state works, how society functions,” as she told Rajan. But when you’re going up against the deliberately simplified populism of Farage, it risks sounding woolly and off-putting.
More widely, Badenoch faces a political bind in her attempt to persuade people that her party is under new management. While Keir Starmer could happily junk the entire Jeremy Corbyn project, Badenoch must still argue that the main reason her party lost the election was because it was too leftwing, which almost no one else believes.
Finally – and there is no delicate way to put this – Badenoch can sound, well, a little bit weird. If anything she has said since becoming Tory leader has properly cut through, it is perhaps the eye-catching dismissal of sandwiches as “not real food” and moist bread as a culinary outrage.
In Monday’s long BBC interview there were similar quirks, including a series of mangled and mixed metaphors, and a slightly jarring section in which Badenoch argued that the former Tory minister Andrea Jenkyns had defected to Reform out of personal dislike for her.
Badenoch insisted she did not care at all, illustrating her live-and-let-live approach to politics by citing the late 1990s spoken word song/personal growth manifesto by the Australian director Baz Luhrmann, Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen).
Lots of successful politicians can be slightly odd. Boris Johnson delivered some almost unsettlingly strange political speeches, and had a suite of cultural references points that seemingly ended in about 1955.
But he undeniably had a vision, however unrealistic, and one that voters could easily understand. Badenoch does not, at least not yet. And the clock is ticking, As ever in politics, it is almost certainly later than she thinks.
