Friday, January 30, 2026
Is Badenoch driving moderate Tories towards the Lib Dems?
With Keir Starmer away in China, this was a week off for her from prime minister’s questions. A slot she would delegate to the even more useless Andrew Griffith. Clearly Badenoch does not welcome any competition so Griffith might get the deputy leader job for good.
But Kemi wanted, no, needed attention. Couldn’t let a day go by without some me time on TV. So she couldn’t resist the opportunity to give a speech on the future prospects of the Conservative party. The good news would be that it was understandably short.
Her basic message was that there was no future. No hope. Weirdly the 40 or so Tory MPs in the room – they would, wouldn’t they? – and the 150 or so party activists loved being told they were effectively irrelevant. They could just have been the last Tories in the country. Certainly the last of Kemi’s Tories. Better to die now than face a thousand deaths.
This was a rejection of the one nation, centre-right Tories. They were toast. They could all sod off. Pinko lefties. The only people who were welcome in the party were people who were as hostile to immigration as Kemi. It was, by any standards, insane. It might have made some sense if Kemi were polling well. Then you could make a case for expelling all moderates. But she isn’t. She has taken the Tories from the high 20s to the mid-teens. Kemi won’t be happy until she has completely destroyed her party’s credibility.
We need an end to the psychodrama. PSYCHODRAMA had been spelled out in capitals in the advance briefing. Clearly, one that had been written by a keen student of Donald Trump’s media team. Enough was enough. Starmer was in his own leadership crisis, Reform were just doing stunts to distract from the brilliance of the Tories.
Only Kemi was showing the country a way forward. Except she really wasn’t. The Tories are implicated in the psychodrama of British politics every bit as much as the others. She claimed many MPs were only interested in their egos. Desperate for attention. Kemi is not blessed with much personal insight. Half the Tories are on defection watch to Reform. And after today, the other half will be on defection watch to the Lib Dems. It was hard to take anything she said seriously.
The Tories were on a relentless march to the right, Kemi insisted. Anyone who didn’t like the direction of travel could fuck off now. It was her way or the highway. She alone dictated policy. Shadow ministers such as Chris Philp and Mel Stride were just her useful idiots. She got that bit right, I suppose.
In the trail, it had been promised Kemi would say that every day she had been leader of the opposition, the Tories had lurched further to the right. She had meant that as a promise. Dreams can come true. No matter that most people would take this as a threat. If she keeps this up, who knows where the Tories might end up in two or three months. How much further right can they go? At what point does Kemi get a call from Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump saying she has really gone too far this time?
My only beef with this line is that I can't really think of many Tories I would want with me in the Liberal Democrats.
