Never Trust a Kemi? Looking Back at 14 Years of Conservative Government

An opinion piece for the Fat Boris Store political satire collection

Fourteen years is a long time in government.

From the Conservative-led coalition in 2010 through to the Conservative defeat at the 2024 general election, the Conservatives were in government for a period that included austerity, Brexit, Boris Johnson, COVID-19, the Truss premiership, the cost-of-living crisis and record levels of taxation.

There is plenty to debate about that record. Some policies produced results that Conservatives point to with pride; others became major sources of criticism. But if the question is whether the party left government with a record entirely free of serious failures, the historical record plainly does not support that interpretation.

And that, essentially, is where the “Never Trust a Kemi” satire comes from.

Immigration: from control to record numbers

Immigration became one of the defining political issues of the Conservative years.

In 2019, net migration was around 180,000. By 2023, the Office for National Statistics estimated net migration at roughly 685,000, while later revised estimates put the peak considerably higher. The House of Commons Library notes that net migration reached 944,000 in the year ending March 2023, an unprecedented level.

It is worth being precise here. The dramatic increase did not simply result from one decision by Boris Johnson. Much of the largest increase occurred after he left office, particularly through expanded work and student visas, health and social-care recruitment and humanitarian routes. The House of Commons Library identifies those as major contributors.

But the Conservative governments collectively presided over the period in which the post-Brexit immigration system was created and then produced these record figures.

For critics, that creates an uncomfortable contradiction.

The political message was often about “taking back control”, yet the numbers subsequently went in the opposite direction.

Whether someone regards high immigration as beneficial, damaging or a mixture of both is a political judgment. What is not really in dispute is the extraordinary scale of the increase.

The Channel boats: a problem that never went away

Then there is the small-boat crisis.

In 2018, just 299 people were detected arriving by small boat. By 2022 the figure had reached approximately 46,000, the highest annual total at that point. Numbers subsequently fluctuated rather than disappearing: around 31,000 arrived in the year ending June 2024, around 41,000 in 2025 and approximately 33,000 in the year ending June 2026.

Almost all people arriving by this route subsequently claimed asylum.

So describing everyone arriving by small boat as an “illegal immigrant” is not technically accurate. The crossings are an unauthorised method of entering the UK, but the majority of those arriving make asylum claims, which then have to be processed under UK and international law.

That distinction doesn't make the problem disappear.

For successive governments, the central political promise was to stop the boats. Yet the numbers became substantial and persistent.

The Conservative government introduced policies including the Rwanda scheme and various measures intended to deter crossings, but the boats continued.

For a political party that repeatedly presented control of Britain's borders as one of its defining commitments, that became a particularly damaging contradiction.

The “Boris wave”

There is another uncomfortable part of the immigration story.

Boris Johnson's government fundamentally changed Britain's post-Brexit immigration arrangements. The new points-based system came into operation in 2021, replacing free movement with a system that permitted significant migration through work and study routes.

The subsequent explosion in immigration cannot fairly be attributed entirely to Johnson personally. The biggest numbers came after he left Downing Street.

Nevertheless, it is understandable why political opponents and some voters associate the period with a “Boris wave” of immigration.

The scale was remarkable: long-term immigration reached 1.47 million in the year ending March 2023, according to the House of Commons Library.

And immigration at that scale inevitably raises questions about housing, infrastructure, public services, wages, population growth and the ability of communities to absorb rapid demographic change.

Those questions deserve serious discussion rather than slogans from either side.

COVID: enormous spending and serious procurement failures

Then came COVID.

It is important not to rewrite history. Governments around the world were confronted with an unprecedented emergency, and spending enormous sums to protect lives, jobs and businesses was not in itself evidence of incompetence.

But the way some of that money was spent deserves scrutiny.

The National Audit Office recorded £124.3 billion of programmes, initiatives and spending commitments announced in the early stages of the pandemic. It also noted that the emergency required spending decisions to be made much faster than normal, sometimes without the usual level of appraisal.

PPE procurement became one of the clearest examples.

The government ultimately committed around £15 billion to PPE for England during 2020–21. The NAO found that prices increased dramatically in the extraordinary global market and estimated that price increases alone cost taxpayers around £10 billion.

A later NAO investigation found that billions remained at risk and that £737 million had been spent storing PPE between March 2020 and October 2021, including £436 million in container-storage penalty charges.

Emergency circumstances explain some of this.

They don't make every decision immune from criticism.

And then came Partygate

Perhaps nothing symbolised the political damage of the Johnson years more effectively than Partygate.

While the public was being told to follow restrictions, gatherings were taking place inside government buildings.

The Sue Gray investigation identified significant failures, and Boris Johnson ultimately received a Fixed Penalty Notice. Johnson himself apologised to Parliament and accepted responsibility for his attendance at the June 2020 gathering.

For millions of people who had cancelled weddings, missed funerals, stayed away from elderly relatives and endured lockdown restrictions, the issue wasn't merely about parties.

It was about trust.

And once trust in government is damaged, rebuilding it is considerably harder than losing it.

Taxation: record levels

Another uncomfortable part of the Conservative record is taxation.

According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, tax revenue as a share of national income was around 33% throughout the 2010s, but had risen to around 36% by 2024, the highest tax burden since 1948. The parliament beginning in 2019 saw the largest increase in the tax take of any parliament in the IFS's historical series.

That is an important fact regardless of one's political philosophy.

A party that traditionally campaigns on lower taxation ended its period in office with taxation at historically high levels.

There are legitimate explanations: the pandemic, increased public spending, debt, demographic pressures and economic shocks all played roles.

But explanations don't alter the number.

The tax burden rose.

Net Zero and the energy debate

Then there is Net Zero.

The Conservative governments embraced the UK's legally binding commitment to reach net zero emissions by 2050 and, under Boris Johnson, published the 2021 Net Zero Strategy.

The government presented the transition as an opportunity for investment, jobs, energy security and lower future bills. Its strategy projected up to £90 billion of private investment and hundreds of thousands of jobs in green industries.

Critics saw something very different: expensive targets, increased regulatory burdens and policies that risked putting additional costs on households and British industry.

The energy-price story, however, is more complicated than simply blaming Net Zero.

Household energy bills rose dramatically during the 2021–23 energy crisis. Government figures show an average dual-fuel household bill of around £1,200 in 2019, compared with around £2,051 in 2023.

The Climate Change Committee notes that exceptionally high gas prices were a major factor in the period and that high gas prices also contributed to industrial closures.

So the argument that Net Zero caused the energy crisis would oversimplify the evidence.

The more substantial political argument is about how quickly Britain should decarbonise, who should pay for it, and how environmental policy should be balanced against industrial competitiveness and household affordability.

That debate is far from settled.

Has the Conservative Party changed?

And this brings us to Kemi Badenoch.

Badenoch became Conservative leader in November 2024 and remains leader of the Conservative Party and Leader of the Opposition.

One criticism frequently made by Conservative critics is that the party became too willing to accept policies associated with the political centre or centre-left during its long period in office.

That criticism is contested.

It is also worth noting that the Conservative Party isn't ideologically uniform. It contains competing traditions on economics, taxation, immigration, welfare, social policy, environmental policy and Britain's relationship with Europe.

So saying that the party has literally been “taken over by the left” is better presented as a political argument rather than an established fact.

Badenoch's challenge is therefore not simply about changing a few policies.

She has to demonstrate what sort of Conservative Party she wants to lead — and whether she can unite MPs and activists with substantially different views.

Her current programme includes particularly tough proposals on immigration, including a proposed ban on asylum claims for new unauthorised entrants and major changes to the UK's legal and removal framework. Those are the Conservatives' own stated proposals, rather than established government policy.

Whether Badenoch can successfully reconcile the different factions of the modern Conservative Party is something that can only be demonstrated through political events rather than assumed in advance.

So why “Never Trust a Kemi”?

And now we arrive at the mug.

“Never Trust a Kemi” isn't intended as a literal claim about every person named Kemi.

It's political satire.

The joke takes the broader argument about Conservative credibility and attaches it to the current Conservative leader.

Fourteen years of government produced an extraordinary list of issues for voters to debate:

Record immigration.

Persistent small-boat crossings.

The COVID spending explosion and procurement controversies.

Partygate and the resulting damage to trust.

A historically high tax burden.

The difficult and expensive transition towards Net Zero.

And a Conservative Party that ultimately lost office after fourteen years.

Supporters of the Conservatives will point to a very different list of achievements and argue that governments faced extraordinary circumstances, including COVID, the Ukraine war and the global energy crisis.

Critics will look at the same period and see broken promises, policy failures and a collapse in political trust.

That disagreement is exactly what political satire is supposed to provoke.

Never Trust a Kemi

It's deliberately cheeky.

It's deliberately provocative.

And it's deliberately political.

Whether a voter actually trusts Kemi Badenoch — or the Conservative Party she leads — is ultimately for that voter to decide.

But after fourteen years in government, the Conservatives have certainly left behind enough political ammunition for Fat Boris to put the kettle on.

Never Trust a Kemi — now available as a satirical 11oz mug and T-shirt from Fat Boris Store.

Political satire and commentary. Not affiliated with or endorsed by Kemi Badenoch or the Conservative Party.