Newsletter #10: Is Sleepy Kemi giving Tories buyer's remorse?

PLUS: Romanian elections; Rupert Lowe; and the Liberal Democrats

Good morning.

Another drab week, so far as British politics is concerned — but this gives us an opportunity to give something of a mid-term Report Card for the three main parties in Opposition: the Tories, the Liberal Democrats, and Reform. Also today, we have our first foray into European politics, with some analysis of the shock Romanian election results.

This newsletter’s agenda: Is Sleepy Kemi giving the Tories buyer’s remorse? (free); Bombshell in the Romanian Presidential Election: far-right, pro-Russia candidate projected to win first round (free); The Rupert Lowe factor (paid); Where are the Liberal Democrats? (paid); The Petition: a brief note (paid).

The first half of this newsletter is free. Upgrade to a paid subscription — £8/month, or £80/year — to read the rest.

Is Sleepy Kemi giving Tories buyer’s remorse?

We warned you!

After a number of lackluster performances at PMQs, it seems as if some Tories are beginning to get just a little bit of buyer’s remorse from ‘Kemi’. Well, we did warn you!

Because what else explains the recent spate of articles defending ‘Kemi’ from the ‘online Right’ in the mainstream press? It seems odd for such a recent victor to even feel the need for this. Who are they writing these articles for?

As a signed-up member of the nasty, very online Right, I — as I am sure you have heard — do not like Kemi Badenoch. The dislike of ‘Kemi’ by such types as myself has been noted by a number of tedious mainstream outlets. (One can debate the merits of describing people as being ‘online’ in 2024, when everyone has an email address and has to use a computer for work, but this is their slur of choice for those who are actually interesting enough to win an audience on X while remaining anonymous — but let us ignore this anachronism for now.)

The main charge against us is that we dislike ‘Kemi’ purely because she is black. Of course, the people who like ‘Kemi’ assign absolutely no importance whatsoever to her race — hence why Niall Ferguson is providing a picture of her as evidence of how she is different to ‘the establishment’.

Today, we will defend ourselves from these baseless accusations. In fact, there are three very good reasons for thinking she is useless. None of them have anything to do with her race.

First, she has a work history that strongly indicates she is lazy and incompetent. There is more than enough evidence for us to conclude that she struggles to do her job at all; nobody has provided much evidence to the contrary. The Fence Magazine’s description of her conduct reads like one of a capricious middle manager:

She was ‘unbelievably crap’ according to one source, who relays that she was inefficient and idle, who struggled with organisation, loudly declaring that tasks were her ‘top priority, my top priority’, before leaving them unfinished at the end of the week.

She would make bizarre non-sequiturs in meetings, saying that ‘the Spectator is a shop, and the editorial team are the shop window’, and advertise that she spent a lot of time on the ‘message boards’. She also, in one source's telling, would announce that ‘there is no one more right-wing than me’ to her colleagues at the magazine.

Leaving in 2016 to focus on her nascent political career, she maintains friendships with Fraser Nelson and Andrew Neil, but operated a ‘kiss-up, kick-down’ policy, and was apparently combative and rude to her junior staff.

Badenoch puts in a lot of effort to presenting herself as an engineer. She once wrote: ‘So how are we going to do this? I’m an engineer, a systems thinker, a problem solver. In engineering you can’t overcome resistance with rhetoric.’ Badenoch, after graduating from the University of Sussex in 2003 — which she got into despite earning a D in A-Level Maths (how?) — spent three years nominally in a engineering role, before bailing out into law. You don’t need to have an intimate grasp of the sector to understand that, on the balance of probabilities, she probably did not write much code; certainly, she seems to have wanted to stop doing it rather quickly. We would be interested in hearing from her former colleagues here as well. Was her behaviour there similar to her behaviour at The Spectator?

This pattern does not seem to have disappeared after she entered frontline politics. Max Tempers has done brilliant work on X compiling all of this. Most recently, it was revealed in a book that an unnamed junior minister was doing much of her work when she was in the Cabinet. It’s all adding up to a consistent pattern: Kemi Latenoch.

Second, ‘Kemi’ is extremely closely linked to the Gove-Smith-Mirza Set: she has been groomed and promoted by them at every step. We at Pimlico Journal do not like Michael Gove one bit. Our understanding is that this erudite divorcee used his time in politics to blow up planning reform and crush HS2, while (inexplicably) maintaining a public image as a reforming, thinking man’s Conservative. The only evidence of good performance comes from when Cummings ran the Department of Education for him. Since steeping back from frontline politics, he has become Editor of The Spectator. He has been completely hopeless at this — his first act being endorsing Kamala Harris for President. Not a good look.

But beyond this — and much more importantly — the Gove-Smith-Mirza Set has abundant links to the sleaze and general bad behaviour rampant in the Tory Party. Much of this remains rumour, so we cannot give a more specific comment. But suffice to say, anyone who thinks we need to clean up Her Majesty’s Official Opposition are barking up the wrong tree if they expect Kemi Badenoch to do it.

The Gove-Smith-Mirza Set absolutely adore Badenoch, as exemplified by Gove’s public criticisms of Jenrick for being a white male (but it’s never about her race, is it?). It seems probable that the Set have promoted her because they believe — probably rightly — that they can puppeteer her, and continue to rule the Party from behind the scenes. You can judge people by their strongest supporters — and Gove is a terrible one to have.

Thirdly, ‘Kemi’ still doesn’t have any policies. During the leadership campaign, we were offered two strategies for their time in Opposition. Jenrick’s strategy was as follows: the Tories had betrayed their voters; therefore, they needed clear policies in order to restore trust; as such, he proposed beginning his time as leader with a flurry of right-wing commitments to win voters back from Reform. ‘Kemi’ took a very different view on strategy: she thinks it is somehow ‘unserious’ to offer a concrete set of policies; instead, she has promised that, guided by ‘Conservative values’ (never defined), we will discover the policies gradually — very, very gradually — over the next five years.

Of course, it should be noted that ‘Kemi’ has never actually given us any clear mechanism for how these policies are to be discovered — we just need to Trust The Plan, we are told.

But given who ‘Kemi’ is, and who she is friends with, why would we do this? No-one has ever bothered to explain. Get rid of her as soon as possible.

—Scott Goetz Deputy Editor, Pimlico Journal

Bombshell in the Romanian Presidential Election: far-right, ‘pro-Russia’ candidate projected to win first round

Calin Georgescu — or how to win an election on TikTok.

Exit polls for the first round of Romanian Presidential Election last night are pointing to yet another polling disaster. In fact, not only were the opinion polls a disaster: even the exit polls, while somewhat closer to the mark, were notably inaccurate. A complete unknown from the far-right will now go to the second round.

The opinion polls were all over the place, but in general, they showed Ciolacu (PSD, supposedly ‘centre-left’) finishing first by some distance. Second place was up for grabs for either Simion (AUR, right-wing populist) or Lasconi (USR, centre-right and pro-European). The exit polls, when announced, came as a big shock: Ciolacu was still in first place, but instead of Lasconi and Simion, it was instead virtual unknown Georgescu (Independent, far-right nationalist) battling it out with Simion. And, as the votes were counted, things got weirder still: Georgescu looked like he could actually beat Ciolacu to first place. It is perhaps one of the strangest, most unexpected elections in Europe in many, many years. What happened?

Near the head of the pack — as everyone, pollsters and non-pollsters alike — expected, is the Social Democrat (PSD) Marcel Ciolacu, at roughly 20% (with some votes, at the time of writing [3am GMT, 25/11/2024] not yet in for Bucharest and the diaspora). Ciolacu is currently Romanian Prime Minister. In many ways, his elevation to the presidency would be a demotion — certainly, he would have less power. In the Romanian system, the President’s main power is to select the Prime Minister and conduct (most) foreign policy. He has little direct power over domestic policy. As such, many are somewhat confused about why he is running. He hasn’t done a very good job explaining it. From my perspective, as a long-time hater of PSD, one concern is that if Ciolacu — who is far less bad than the average person in his party — wins, then he could be replaced by someone much worse as Prime Minister.

The main thing to understand about PSD is that although they are the most ‘left-wing’ of the major parties, it would be more accurate (at least by British standards) to place them as centre, if not even centre-right. This is especially true of their policy on taxation, which has generally favoured the current flat income tax, though a minority in PSD support adding a small degree of progression (if only to reduce Romania’s persistent budget deficit rather than to achieve redistribution per se). Ciolacu himself seems to believe that the implementation of progressive tax system is simply an inevitability — after all, almost all rich countries have progression! — rather than believing in it passionately as a point of principle. But with the Romanian Parliament so divided, nothing is likely to happen on this front for the foreseeable future.

PSD’s main support base is generally older people, especially in rural areas, and industrial workers. Most younger people — and especially younger educated people — strongly dislike this party. There are many reasons for this: they are the ‘establishment’, ‘continuity’ party (they are the direct heirs in terms of personnel from the initial post-communist party, FDSN); they are indisputably the most corrupt of the major parties in Romania (see the recent Nordis scandal); they are very pro-pensioner; and, perhaps most importantly for the Romanian yuppie, whether in London or in Bucharest, they are generally culturally (though usually not socially) conservative — they’re extremely fogeyish. On European and global economic integration, they lean more ‘sovereigntist’ than rivals PNL and USR, though nowadays (unlike in the ’90s and early ’00s) it would not really be correct to describe them as ‘nationalist socialist’.

(It is worth briefly noting here that many socially conservative causes, especially anti-abortion, are much less popular in Romania than in a lot of the rest of the Eastern Bloc, as they are associated with Ceausescu — who banned both contraception and abortion to boost fertility rates. Gay marriage, however, is an actually contested matter (it isn’t yet legal), though even this is not of much interest to many (most?) voters.)

The other of the two ‘establishment’ parties, the National Liberal Party (PNL), has done very badly. Once again, this came as a surprise to no-one. In hindsight, we can see that since progressive taxation was defeated in 2005, PNL have been struggling to find an identity for themselves. These chickens have finally — after nearly twenty years — come home to roost, with their vote squeezed, bit by bit, from almost every imaginable angle. Their voter base is mostly wealthier and more educated older people: it was, and is probably still, the most ‘respectable’ party in Romania.

Over the last five years, PNL have been in an on-again, off-again partnership/alliance/coalition with the Social Democrats. They even presented a united ticket for the recent European Parliament elections. They have been seriously harmed from the real or perceived closing of the gap between them and the ‘Left’, perhaps irreparably. Their candidate, Nicolae Ciuca, is uncharismatic, was exposed as a plagiarist, is personally unpopular, and was Prime Minister during a particularly bad period (2021-3) under the outgoing President Klaus Iohannis (formerly PNL — though the President has to resign from his party upon taking office). It is somewhat mystifying why they picked him to run in the first place.

It is the rest of the results that are much more interesting.

First, we have the somewhat amusingly-named ‘Save Romania Union’ (USR). USR’s voter base can be summarised as ‘Romanian yuppies, at home and abroad’. They do best in major cities like Bucharest, Cluj, and Timisoara. If you are a reader of Pimlico Journal, then it is very likely that most of the Romanians you know personally probably vote for this party. (For instance, virtually all of my Romanian ‘yuppie’ friends in England voted for USR. Me? I went for Simion — see below.)

On cultural and social issues, USR are basically the ‘Woke’ party — for instance, they are the only major party who are actively pro-LGBT. They are also extremely pro-European. But they are also a party that, on economics, are probably more right-wing than PNL, the traditional party of the Right in Romania. This makes logical sense given their voter base’s youth and affluence, and the fiscal problem of the pensioners. They can perhaps be best compared to the old Civic Platform in Poland.

USR’s candidate, Elena Lasconi, was harshly criticised during the campaign for seeming inauthentic: she was constantly appearing in Romanian national dress shirts, and wearing crucifixes (nowadays, she often wears two at once) to pander to Christians. But despite what most think was a lackluster campaign, she will probably come third, winning 18% of the vote. As this article goes to press, however, there is still a small chance she could beat Ciolacu to the final round off the back of diaspora voters — who overwhelmingly favour either Georgescu (lower-class) or Lasconi (higher-class).

Most interesting of all, however, was the performance of the two ‘far-right’ candidates: George Simion and Calin Georgescu.

The first of these two, George Simion — who won 14% of the vote — is a conventional right-wing populist with close ties to parties like Meloni’s FdI and Poland’s PiS. His party, AUR, are mostly indistinguishable from other right-wing populist parties across Europe. His views on European integration and immigration are what you’d expect. He is, in short, a very normal European phenomenon. The only real point of interest for the outsider is that the Party was originally founded to pursue the unification of Romania with Moldova. Much like Meloni, Simion is steadfastly pro-Ukraine, despite much of the media claiming otherwise with zero evidence.

Calin Georgescu, by contrast, is very much not normal. He is the aforementioned ‘complete unknown’ who, for reasons that will probably always remain something of a mystery, has managed to win the first round, with 22% of the vote. Georgescu’s victory is one of the most stunning in recent history, and should be studied across the world.

Georgescu is a curious case: a posh PhD agronomist by trade, married to a woman who works at Citibank, who spent most of his career at the United Nations working on ‘sustainable development’ — perhaps suggesting an ‘eco-fascist’ streak? — before (seemingly abruptly) turning to the far-right upon entering Romanian politics. He is, at least outwardly, a distinctly respectable figure, despite his radical, populist politics.

Looking online, his voter-base seems to be fairly young and mostly lower-class — and with lots of diaspora supporters; he won crushing victories among the diaspora in most of Europe, including Britain — but it’s not easy to tell from the results. One sign is that of the six ‘Sectors’ in Bucharest, he performed the best in Sector 5, the poorest. Another thing we can say is that he performed poorly in the PSD strongholds of the southwest, and the USR strongholds of Romania’s more cosmopolitan towns and cities. Where he performed well, however, is harder to ascertain an obvious pattern from — ranging from wealthier Sibiu, to poorer Tulcea; from Suceava in the north, and Ialomita in the south.

Technically, it is not quite true that he is a ‘complete unknown’. It is, however, true that perhaps fewer than one in fifty Romanians could recognise his face scarcely two months ago. Georgescu was first touted as a potential Prime Minister as early as 2012. More recently, Georgescu was a senior figure in AUR. However, he left the Party in 2022 due to differences with Simion. This was after Georgescu, in an interview, refused to retract comments endorsing Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, leader of the fascist Iron Guard, and Ion Antonescu, who led Romania during much of the Second World War. While endorsing the latter is not totally beyond the pale in Romania (see the comments of former President Traian Basescu, a very much mainstream politician), endorsing the former very much still is in polite society — if only because most Romanians worry what outsiders might think.

Georgescu seems to have almost entirely eschewed traditional campaigning, instead focusing on TikTok and other social media. Some of his videos are clips from interviews, where he is shown citing such figures as Goethe in his defences of hard-right politics — accompanied, bizarrely, by phonk music in the background. This sort of thing, as any Romanian knows, is literal catnip to many of our countrymen. Other videos are less intellectual, showing him doing karate, swimming in freezing lakes, and riding horses. In the more mainstream Romanian media, he is mostly known as a ‘pro-Russian’ candidate. This is not quite fair, at least based on his own words — but it is certainly true that he is very, very anti-Ukraine; that he seems to blame the United States for the war there; and that he is (perhaps) even anti-NATO. He has said surprisingly little about immigration, probably because it is not yet a major issue in Romania.

There were, in hindsight, some signs that something like this could have happened. One of the most important events of the Election was the surprise decision of the Romanian Supreme Court to disqualify Diana Sosoaca on the grounds that she threatened national security and the constitution, due to her dealings with Russia. This caused an outcry — even Ciolacu condemned the ruling — but nothing was done to reverse it.

Sosoaca, currently an MEP for her own party (SOS), was another pro-Russian candidate. She was also one of the main anti-vaccine activists in the country. Later, she took a strong anti-Israel stance over Gaza — a very unusual opinion in Romania. Her antics have included being removed from the European Parliament for screaming; unlawfully detaining journalists; wearing a muzzle (because, apparently, she has been muzzled); and being very, very fat. That she was doing so well in the polls before she was disqualified should have been evidence that something was happening, even if we didn’t yet know what.

It seems almost inconceivable that Georgescu will win the second round. If he did, it would cause a political earthquake — the realignment of one of the most consistently pro-American states in Europe. On top of the 20% Ciolacu himself won, looking at the results, it seems plausible to believe that more or less the entirety of Lasconi’s 18%, Ciuca’s 9%, Geoana’s (a centre-right independent) 6%, Kelemen’s (UDMR, the Hungarian party) 5%, and Diaconescu’s (a centre-right independent) 3% will go to PSD (assuming USR don’t beat them to second place). This adds up to 61% of the vote. The interesting question is where Simion’s vote will end up going. But even if he wins all of it — which is unlikely, though he will presumably win most of it (especially now Simion has endorsed him) — it shouldn’t matter. The closest analogy is with the 2000 Romanian Presidential Election, where far-right poet Vadim Tudor made it to the final round, but lost to PSD’s Ion Iliescu 66-33. But is there a chance that people now hate PSD so much that they’ll behave somewhat strangely — like they did today?

Given today’s results, maybe it isn’t too wise to make such confident predictions just yet.

—Anonymous Contributor, Pimlico Journal

[UPDATE 10:30am GMT, 25/11/2024: It now looks like Lasconi has — just barely (by just a few hundred votes) — beaten Ciolacu to second place, off of the diaspora vote (Ciolacu won less than 3% of the diaspora vote). This will set up a much more interesting contest. For while it seems reasonable to think that effectively all of Lasconi’s voters would turn out to stop Georgescu, will Ciolacu’s voters do the same to the benefit of Lasconi?]

The Rupert Lowe Factor

No-one with this face has ever been Woke.