A broad church no longer.
Kemi Badenoch is redefining Britain's Conservative party as...conservative. Pass the smelling salts.
This is an expanded version of my column in today’s Times (£).
Kemi Badenoch, who has earned a fearsome reputation for taking no prisoners, has now flourished her knuckledusters at members of her own party.
She is refusing to allow some former Conservative MPs to stand again at the next election because they don’t support her rejection of the 2050 net zero target and her pledge take the UK out of the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR).
Saying that she was building a “party for the future”, not a “retirement home for failed politicians,” she said that some of her former colleagues “should never have been candidates before” and would soon be informed they wouldn’t be again.
Her move is certainly gutsy. It’s not just that she’s provoking some big beasts in her party by targeting the kind of Tories memorably scoffed at by Margaret Thatcher as “wets”. She’s also challenging one of the cardinal orthodoxies of politics — that to succeed, a party has to be a broad church. She has decided instead that, to meet the demands of these most polarised of times, a political leader has to pick a side.
With Nigel Farage having got himself into serious difficulties over financial questions, causing a significant drop in opinion poll support for Reform, Badenoch’s gamble might just start to haul her party up from the pit from which it has been widely assumed it cannot possibly climb out.
Blogger: how many decades has it taken for the Tories 'to get it?' - I'll still not support them until i see the evidence though!
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