Kemi Badenoch’s first Conservative Party conference speech shows she “has the authority of a stressed supply teacher and credibility of a shady used car dealer”, writes Kevin Maguire
No wonder Kemi Badenoch’s first Conservative conference keynote speech as Tory leader might be her last.
She has the authority of a stressed supply teacher and credibility of a shady used car dealer done for a dangerous cut and shut.
Perhaps no leader in her party’s long history, not Disraeli or Churchill or Macmillan or Thatcher, could revive this lot so soon after last July’s crushing, humiliating election defeat.
And the wrong question is surely asked if she’s posed as the answer, the penny dropping with the half of Tory members who already want her gone.
Haring after Nigel Farage, lurching further to the reactionary Right, is a lunatic strategy when Green policies are popular and voters value their human rights.
If everything is broken, who smashed it up? The Conservatives.
Who left key public services on their backside? The Conservatives.
Who put up taxation? The Conservatives.
Who oversaw record net migration and failed to stop the boats? The Conservatives.
Who added £1.5trillion to the national debt? The Conservatives.
Who’ll raise living standards, improve services and give folk hope? Not the Conservatives.
Badenoch’s cowardly refusal to call out the “didn’t see another white face” racism of rival Robert Jenrick was telling.
As was Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride saying he’d put up Income Tax when the Tory fantasy line is bungs for everybody.
As too was frontbencher Andrew Rosindell pleading for a Right-whinge truce with Reform.
Badenoch isn’t strong enough to lead her party never mind a country she trashed in power.
Listing grievances, smearing opponents, inventing fantasy policies, talking economic rubbish and bashing migrants wasn’t so much a peroration as a suicide note.
Best state of the nation analysis heard in Manchester was by a country mile Michael Heseltine’s brutal comparison of the rise of Reform in the UK and Far Right parties in France, Germany, Spain and Italy to the rise of Fascism across Europe in the 1930s.
Immigrants have replaced Jews as the problem which needs a solution, warned a Tory Tarzan once Deputy PM, and to brand them as thieves or rapists is dishonest and encourages the worst sort of prejudice.
READ MORE: Join our Mirror politics WhatsApp group to get the latest updates from Westminster
Will Badenoch still be Tory leader this time next year?
For her it’s at best 50-50. Next May’s elections in Wales, Scotland and parts of England will be a major test she’s likely to fail. Maybe the Cons are lumbered with a dud, the memory of three PMs over two months in 2023 paralysing some critics.
Jenrick, however, isn’t so much waiting in the wings as scheming to occupy the tarnished throne.
Badenough falls and she could be succeeded by worse. The Conservatives are in a deep hole and still digging.