I didn’t exactly have high hopes of Kemi Badenoch being the dynamic and politically realistic leader that the Conservative Party needed, but I did hope that she’d make some sort of go of it. Having been politically burned by supporting Boris Johnson in 2019 only to see him prop the borders open, mismanage Covid and continue to eviscerate freedom of speech, I’ve decided that no Tory leader is worth getting too excited over.
Whilst Badenoch, when the Tories were in power, looked as if she could be the anti-woke and economics and energy realist politician that we in the country need, Since then much has been talked about such as her alleged laziness, her exploitation of identity politics even whilst giving the appearance of despising it and her seeming lack of ability to do effective politics.
Badenoch should have been the new broom. She should have quickly realised where the Tories went wrong and why so many potential Tory voters chose the Apathy Party and stayed at home rather than voting for the Conservatives. She could have looked at the shitshow of migration, the growth of aggressive Islam, the penetration into government departments by the gender cultists, the failure to protect freedom of speech and the rise in DEI nonsense, all of which had the Tories name on them and drawn a line. Kemi Badenoch should have gone out there and said ‘OK we’ve fucked up’. She should then have put up some radical ideas about how the fuckups of her party were going to be put right by her party, after all this should be a case of they make a mess then they repair their mess.
A bit of humility on the part of Kemi Badenoch about the record of the Tories followed by a plan to put things right might have been much better than what we got from Ms Badenoch. Kemi Badenoch has not impressed with her speeches or her performances in the Commons, she seems bereft of new ideas and is giving me the distinct impression that she is doing the ‘politics as usual’ performance when what’s needed is something different, something better.
Even outside the Commons chamber I find Ms Badenoch distinctly unimpressive. She should never have got involved in the willy waving competition that Reform managed to easily goad Kemi Badenoch into playing. Ms Badenoch’s enthusiasm for playing the games of ‘my membership is bigger than yours’ and insults (some of which might turn out to be legally actionable) more suited for the playground, contrasts starkly with her low profile with regards creating a set of Tory policies that Britons would want to vote for.
After being burned and bullshitted by Boris over a multitude of things I was not going to have too many unrealistically high hopes about Kemi Badenoch’s leadership of the Tory Party. Basically I was not expecting much from her apart from making some effort to rebuild the party and make it electable again (which would mean dumping the lib dem element of the Tory Party) but it’s clear that we are not even going to get that. Kemi Badenoch, no matter how good she may have looked to voters and political commentators a year or so ago, is now looking more and more like a placeholder leader, a person who is merely temporarily occupying the leadership role until someone better comes along. At present Kemi Badenoch occupies the leadership position as a representative of the old style centrist Tory politics when what is needed is something much more nationalistic and muscular in the defence of British culture. To be quite frank she’s today’s analogue of Edward Heath in his second period as Opposition leader between March 74 to February 75. Her politics are tired and she’s lacking in ideas and hanging on until she is eventually replaced by new ideas and a new leader, one who is more in tune with the concerns and fears of the majority of the British public.