Newsletter #7: The bad candidate won

PLUS: Southport bombshell; and the farmers are angry

Good morning.

The bad candidate won.

This newsletter’s agenda: The bad candidate won (free); Southport Bombshell: What did Keir Starmer know? (paid); The Budget V: The farmers are angry (paid).

The bad candidate won

Badenoch with her Tory boy husband, Hamish.

Kemi Badenoch, as I am sure readers are all already aware, has become the new leader of the Conservative Party, beating out rival Robert Jenrick with 56.5% of the members’ vote. This was a rather smaller margin of victory than I was anticipating, given she was always the clear favourite: I was expecting her to win at least win 60% of the members’ vote. One interesting point: Tory membership has been revealed to be just 131,000 — a big fall from 172,000 as recently as 2022. What happened to these 41,000 people? Given their age profile, many are dead, I would assume, and some others probably left in disgust. Turnout was also low: just 72%, a drop of roughly 10pp from turnout in 2022.

Obviously, Pimlico Journal are not happy with this development. Nor, so far as I can tell, are almost any right-wingers under the age of about thirty-five, barring those who stand to personally gain from their victory (keep note of those who are keeping conspicuously silent on X, presumably not wishing to trigger a dogpile by openly celebrating their imminent job offers). Who else was happy? Tim Stanley, apparently, who writes:

‘Mummy won and I’m very happy’ – she’ll give this country the kick up the backside it needs

Mummy won! … Millions will ask: “Who is this black woman the Tories just elected leader?”

Readers, she is a star. She rose to her feet, lifting her heel off Rob’s toe, and accepted, “the most enormous honour... to lead the party that I love.” Get down to business, she said: “stand up for our principles.” There’ll be a role for Jenrick in Badenoch’s new team, no doubt. Someone has to polish those shoes...

Kemi is too confrontational, said a few, too aggressive with the media. They don’t realise that most male journalists rather like that, that we’re still little boys seeing how far we can wind up mummy before she gives us a smack.

Never mind “do the Tories need her?”, the country needs her. We are wet, self-indulgent and, in my case, wearing week-old underwear. This woman can give us all a good kick up the backside.

From this, we have a vague idea of what the average Kemi Badenoch supporter is like.

Within minutes of her victory, we were given a taste of what five years of Kemi Badenoch will look like. James Cleverly decided to post on X that Labour were ‘male, pale, and stale’, and that ‘Labour’s constant obsession with identity politics doesn’t actually translate into action’. The problem for the Tories — it seems — being that Labour’s ‘identity politics’ are not acted on strongly enough. The idea that Badenoch’s ethnicity will be an effective shield against left-wing attacks whenever the Tories try to talk tough on immigration doesn’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny. While a few idiots can probably be caught out when they inevitably call Badenoch a ‘coconut’ or a ‘choc ice’, anyone with any ounce of intelligence will avoid this and just call Badenoch a bigot without any reference to her race required. After all, it’s not like anyone was ever afraid of doing the same with Suella Braverman.

Badenoch herself has been slow off the mark, despite being victorious in a leadership race that everyone expected her to win. Nigel Farage had a video out well before she did. Since then, she has said surprisingly little. She has informed us that she thinks that Rachel Reeves becoming the first female Chancellor of the Exchequer is ‘nowhere near as significant as what other woman in this country have achieved’. While obviously true, this seems like a completely pointless remark which rankles opponents while achieving absolutely nothing, all the while leaning into ‘identity politics’ — as is typical of Badenoch. On her second day, she decided — for some reason — to tell everyone that she thought Partygate was ‘overblown’. Although she also criticised the Covid rules in this interview (which was good), and while I do not disagree with her in principle, this seems like a rhetorically foolish way to approach the issue. If you want to talk about this, why would you not mention Sue Gray? One of the problems with Badenoch is that she does not actually seem to want to be liked; indeed, quite the opposite, hence why she likes picking fights all the time, even when it’s obviously pointless, and does not like taking the most rhetorically appealing approach to the issues.

The big question that everyone has is whether Badenoch will make it to 2029. Will there be yet more Tory infighting? I think that Tory infighting is overrated as a concept (see below). If Badenoch is removed, it won’t be because of petty personal squabbles or even ideological disagreements. Rather, it will be because she has cratered in the polls and the Tories are afraid of getting annihilated at the next election. Given Badenoch’s penchant for saying ridiculous and unpopular things, there is a real chance that this might happen.

Maybe in anticipation of this, the rules have abruptly been changed, so that 33% rather than 15% of Tory MPs are required to force a leadership challenge. 15% is a very small figure, and becomes absurd when the Tories have so few MPs. Of course, in practice, despite the way in which the media talk, the Tories have not been especially quick to get rid of unpopular Prime Ministers: Sunak, after all, survived despite repeated rumours of an impending coup; May dragged on long after she had lost the confidence of both Tory MPs and members; and Truss and Johnson were only removed after becoming overwhelmingly unpopular with their colleagues. It’s not like it was no more than a tiny band of rogues who took down any of these Prime Ministers. Nonetheless, the change is definitely logically defensible. However, from my perspective, anything that makes it more likely that Badenoch lasts until 2029 is a disaster for the country — at least unless Reform get their act together.

What will Kemi Badenoch’s Shadow Cabinet look like? Only one appointment has been made so far: Rebecca Harris, MP for Castle Point, has been made Chief Whip. So far as I can tell, by the standard of Tory MPs, Harris is solidly right-wing, but this is not very relevant for Chief Whip. In terms of other appointments, Andrew Griffiths, MP for Arundel and South Downs, has been heavily tipped for Shadow Chancellor. Griffiths has had a genuinely impressive pre-political career, with a string of roles in senior management at big companies prior to becoming an MP in 2019. I know relatively little about him politically, though have heard more positive than negative. Griffiths, who is currently the Shadow Science Minister, has held a number of big roles in the only five years since he became an MP: PPS to the Prime Minister under Boris Johnson, Financial Secretary to the Treasury under Liz Truss, and Economic Secretary to the Treasury and then Science Minister under Sunak. Will he earn yet another big promotion?

Beyond this, we have very little to go on beyond Badenoch previously promising positions for all of her rivals. While she can renege on this completely, this seems foolish, especially when she can get around the promise by offering jobs that are unappealing for whatever reason, leading to them refusing to join the Cabinet. Cleverly has already said that he wants to go to the backbenches. Of the other four, Tom Tugendhat would probably be easy to appease: unfortunately (given his bloodlust), it seems more than plausible that he ends up at Defence. Mel Stride has been angling to be appointed Shadow Chancellor, but this would seem an unlikely appointment, in my view. And if she follows through on her promise, where would Priti Patel end up? She’d presumably just be happy that her career has been unexpectedly rescued after the collapse in her reputation when she was Home Secretary.

But the big question is, of course, what she decides to do with Robert Jenrick, and how Jenrick responds. Many have suggested that Badenoch should offer him Shadow Home Secretary. Jenrick is one of the few people who would convince Reform voters that the Tories mean business on immigration, which is absolutely essential if they don’t want to lose by default due to vote-splitting in 2029. In many respects, I think this would be the sensible choice for Badenoch, even if she has made doing this more difficult by taking the gloves off in the final phase of her leadership campaign, declaring that Jenrick had a ‘whiff of impropriety’ about him (which she later bald-facedly lied about saying). Why would you appoint such a person to your Shadow Cabinet? This is, however, a surmountable hurdle. More difficult would be working out a position on the ECHR. It seems impossible for Jenrick to accept the role unless given assurances that Britain would leave the ECHR, which — while Badenoch has flip-flopped on this issue — seems unacceptable to Badenoch and her team.

But beyond this, it is clear that the CCHQ ghouls who seem to be puppeteering Badenoch absolutely loathe Robert Jenrick, and will push for him to be kept out — probably through offering him an insultingly junior position. A friend says, very accurately in my view, that these are the sorts of people whose ‘primary motivation in life is to drink extremely heavily and molest each other… any threat to that mode of life is met with murderous rage’. Jenrick was clearly a threat to them, and was treated accordingly. Personally, for all of these reasons, I think it is unlikely that Jenrick will become Shadow Home Secretary. He may want to wait on the backbenches anyway, hoping for another shot to become leader if or when she crashes and burns (which also seems to be Cleverly’s plan).

Another friend — one of the few people I know who favours Badenoch — claims that now she has won, CCHQ — which, despite stiff competition, everyone agrees is the worst element of the Conservative Party — will be disposed of now their support is no longer needed. While I agree that not everyone on Badenoch’s team is irredeemably loathsome — probably at least in part because many people, some of them well-intentioned, most of them not, believe they can control her — I see no reason to believe this. Quite aside from her being the Gove-Smith-Mirza candidate, Badenoch’s first video on Instagram after the election was of her praising CCHQ. Perhaps merely pro forma, but it does not help that all the employees seemed to be visibly delighted that Jenrick has been kept out.

But what should the Right do? Firstly, while I would recommend joining Reform, I would not recommend actually leaving the Conservative Party (if indeed you are a member). It’s not like they actually check to see whether you’re a member of another political party, and there’s a good chance that there will be another leadership contest before long. What would be useful, however, is to try to trigger some kind of story about an exodus of younger party members. I am sure that people friendly to helping create such a narrative can be found at either The Telegraph or (in particular) GB News, so long as you give them a little help. Reform themselves should also be looking to do this. Fortunately, they seem to be fairly on it at the moment — even Farage seems to have woken up.

Even if Badenoch looks like she can beat Keir Starmer — which, given recent polls, doesn’t seem implausible despite her being completely useless — I don’t think it’s worth switching your support just to get rid of him. While it is true that Labour are (amazingly) far worse than the Tories, the idea of the Tories getting back into power completely unreformed is utterly pointless. Ideally, we want Reform to be doing so well that Tory MPs get skittish and remove Badenoch. But at the very minimum, we need to make sure that Reform are strong enough to make a Tory victory without an agreement — very preferably in a form that leads either directly or indirectly to a coalition or a confidence and supply agreement — impossible.

Southport Bombshell: What did Keir Starmer know?

Why does it seem that someone farts every single time they try to draw him?