'Have a go' Kemi Badenoch is racing against the clock to keep Tory supporters on side - Christopher Hope

This 'have a go' attitude appears to have defined Badenoch's time as Tory leader since she replaced Rishi Sunak last November.

Her team tell me she has carried out 100 visits since then.

The problem is that despite stepping in and honestly entering debates when others choose not to - last week she discussed when she stopped being a Christian with the BBC - it has not shifted her party's standing in the polls.

I don't believe this is necessarily all Badenoch's fault - would replacing her with Robert Jenrick - who appears to be better at finding issues to campaign on - seriously be worth more than a couple of points in the polls?

The central problem for the Tories is that since the election last year most of the rest of the country has decided to put the party on mute and switch channels to other parties like Reform UK, which offers simple solutions to complex issues.

Badenoch has time to make an impact - but the clock is ticking.

She knows that after November this year Tory MPs can once again start to submit no confidence letters in their leader.

Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, the treasurer of the party's 1922 committee, set the cat among the pigeons when he told me on the Camilla Tominey Show on Sunday that Badenoch had a few months to prove herself.

And Clifton-Brown refused to tell me that Badenoch would lead her party into the next general election.

Badenoch made sure she gave a proper answer to my question about her future today, insisting that she will be the leader at the next election.

But what else could she say?

From November, that decision will not longer be in her hands.

Slowly, Badenoch is building a policy platform to take on Reform's simple answers and Labour's failures in office.

Today, she told me that her party would cut Channel crossings to zero, and move migrants out of hotels and into camps.

And she said her party will set out the detail of how her party might pull out of the European Convention of Human Rights at the conference this October so it can make an informed decision.

This is what Badenoch describes as serious politics.

Badenoch - famously an engineer - is very much trying to build a policy platform, slowly but surely, so that by the next election she can present an alternative to Labour and Reform.

"It takes time," she told me.

"The last three Oppositions were for 14 years, 13 years and 18 years.

"It is going to take some time."

She added: "My job is to show people that the Conservative Party has changed."

She is right, of course.

"This is a marathon, not a sprint", she is fond of saying. But the way I see it, the impatience among her own supporters might mean she does enough time to complete her race.