New Book Alleges Kemi Badenoch Sounded Out Cabinet Colleagues About Ousting Rishi Sunak in 2023
A new book by political biographer Anthony Seldon alleges that Kemi Badenoch, then serving as business secretary, phoned fellow Conservative cabinet ministers months before the 2024 general election to gauge support for removing Rishi Sunak as prime minister. The book, titled "Sunak at 10: The Last Conservative PM?" and co-authored with Tom Egerton, reports that Badenoch asked colleagues "if anyone was interested in changing the captain" (The Guardian).
The allegation places Badenoch's manoeuvring in 2023, a period when Sunak faced internal Conservative pressure over migration policy. According to the book, Badenoch used that window of dissatisfaction to sound out cabinet peers about a leadership challenge. She was business secretary at the time, a senior cabinet post that gave her both access to colleagues and visibility into the government's political trajectory.
The book is published by Atlantic Books, which describes Seldon as "the leading authority on our contemporary prime ministers" (Atlantic Books). Seldon has written political biographies of every UK prime minister since John Major, a track record that lends the book's claims institutional weight within Westminster's ecosystem of political reporting (The Guardian). "Sunak at 10" is being serialised in The Independent ahead of its 27 August 2026 publication date. The hardback edition carries a recommended retail price of £25.00, with an ebook format released simultaneously.
The title itself, "The Last Conservative PM?", frames the book around a question that has shadowed the Conservative Party since its July 2024 defeat: whether Sunak's tenure will prove to be the party's final spell in Downing Street, or merely the end of a chapter. Seldon's subtitle turns the book into both biography and political obituary, a dual register consistent with his earlier works on Blair, Brown, Cameron, May, and Johnson.
The broader context here is the Conservative Party's post-election reckoning with its own internal cohesion. The book's central allegation, if accurate, adds a new data point to the pattern of leadership instability that defined the party's years in government from 2016 onward, when multiple prime ministers were toppled or driven out by their own MPs. Seldon's reporting suggests that the impulse to challenge sitting leaders did not end with Sunak's arrival in Downing Street but persisted through the period when the party most needed unity ahead of a general election it was widely expected to lose.
For Badenoch, the timing of the book's release carries its own political charge. She now leads the Conservative Party in opposition, a position that requires her to manage precisely the kind of internal factional dynamics the book describes her exploiting while in government. The allegation that she was actively canvassing cabinet colleagues for a leadership bid in 2023, while still serving in Sunak's government, cuts against the image of party discipline that Conservative leaders typically seek to project. It also provides political ammunition to any current or future rivals inside the parliamentary party who might question her loyalty or judgment.
The detail that Badenoch phoned cabinet ministers individually, rather than operating through formal party mechanisms, is consistent with how leadership challenges historically germinate within the Conservative Party. The party's leadership rules require a formal threshold of letters to the backbench 1922 Committee — the body that represents Conservative MPs who do not hold government positions — to trigger a confidence vote. But the preliminary work of testing support typically happens through private conversations rather than through institutional channels.
Seldon's book does not appear to allege that Badenoch's soundings resulted in a formal challenge or reached the threshold for a confidence vote. What it documents is the exploratory phase, the testing of appetite among colleagues that may or may not mature into a declaration of candidacy. That distinction matters: in Conservative politics, sounding out support and launching a challenge are different acts with different consequences, and many leadership bids that begin with private conversations never reach a public stage.
The book's publication on 27 August, just over two years after the 2024 election, positions it within a familiar cycle of post-regime political literature, when former ministers, staffers, and biographers begin documenting what happened behind closed doors. Atlantic Books is releasing the title in hardback and ebook formats, signalling expectations for a general as well as specialist readership.
