The revolutionary creed of Kemi Badenoch.
She's a Conservative leader who actually believes in conserving what's most valuable
This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£).
British politics is currently convulsed by the struggle going on inside the Labour party to defenestrate the party’s leader and prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer.
The catastrophic local government election results last week have brought to a head the mutinous alarm among Labour MPs that Starmer is leading them to annihilation at the next general election. Rejecting their mounting pleas to resign, Starmer has provoked widespread ridicule by producing no fresh initiatives to back to his claim of a governmental reset.
At this morning’s Cabinet meeting, he dared rebels to oust him. At time of writing, four government ministers have resigned in order to force him out.
If they succeed, however, his replacement won’t save the party. The three candidates who are considered the main contenders for the post of party leader, and therefore prime minister, will all take the party further to the left. Since it is left-wing fixations that have mired the Starmer government in serial incompetence, economic illiteracy and administrative paralysis, voters are hardly likely to be impressed if a new prime minster dives even further down this ideological rabbit hole.
The Starmer government, let us not forget, was hardly elected two years ago on a wave of enthusiasm. On the contrary, Starmer was already disliked and distrusted. He came to power entirely on the back of unbridled fury at the Tories, after successive Conservative governments had themselves exhibited such serial incompetence that the voters decided the party should never hold power again.
As a result of this mass disillusionment with both main parties, the British political scene has fractured along the fault lines of British patriotism, Islamic sectarianism and youthful nihilism.
Nigel Farage’s Reform has overtaken the Tories in popular support, and is also attracting disenchanted Labour voters who want to “put Britain first”. The Greens have reinvented themselves as a hard-left, anti-capitalist, Israel-hating and Jew-baiting party, and have allied themselves with Islamists out to destroy Israel, hound out the Jews and then conquer Britain and the west for Islam.
Scottish and Welsh nationalists are also having their day in the sun as a result of the implosion of both Labour and the Tories. And the Liberal Democrats are gaining support from the non-metropolitan middle classes who also sign up to liberal universalism, Israel demonisation and the climate apocalypse but find the various left-wing insurgencies a bit too much for their delicate sensibilities.
Despite Labour’s travails, this new, fractured political reality might well mean that the next government ends up as a nightmare coalition of Labour, Greens, “Gaza First” Islamists and LibDems. This is because the Conservatives, the main opposition party, are still held to be unelectable.
With Reform triumphant in the local elections, and the political world transfixed by Labour’s fratricidal psychodrama over which leader would lose less support to the Greens, the insurgents of Reform and assorted sectarians, conventional wisdom has it that the Tories don’t have a prayer.
Well, conventional wisdom may just be wrong. There’s the Conservative party, which is indeed on life support; and then there’s its leader, Kemi Badenoch. And she most certainly should not be written off, because she’s actually doing rather well...
