Two-tier Kemi? The Conservative Party's DEI Hypocrisy
The Conservative Party is still offering DEI internships in 2026
As we have discussed this week, Kemi Badenoch has attempted to position the Conservative Party as the party of ‘meritocracy’. Their own ‘diversity’ internship and historic relationship with the Patchwork Foundation tells a rather different story.
On Tuesday, following the murder of Henry Nowak, Kemi Badenoch gave a speech at the Institute for Government announcing her plan to scrap the Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), the statutory requirement on public bodies to consider equality when making decisions. The PSED, she argued, had become the legal foundation for the identity politics and DEI bureaucracy that she believes contributed to the police response on the night of Nowak’s murder. The move was a deliberate attempt to pitch the Conservatives as the ‘adults in the room’, with well-thought-out policies rather than policies based on knee-jerk reactions and political point-scoring.
Is this actually a sincere change in direction? Sadly not. Whilst preaching this change, and highlighting her own historic opposition to DEI, it appears the Conservative Party itself is at this moment still actively involved in a number of DEI initiatives.
One such initiative the Conservative Party supports is a set of exclusive ‘diversity’ internships at CCHQ. These internships are noted in the Patchwork Foundation’s annual report as ‘diversity’, with the charity itself stating that its mission is to empower young people from ‘disadvantaged and minority communities’ in British democracy and civic society.
The Conservative Party remains officially partnered with the Patchwork Foundation, and the Party’s own website is currently advertising the 2026 summer internship, which starts in late June, with the page boasting: ‘Working together with the Patchwork Foundation, we’ll help you discover the diversity of modern politics.’ (For any plucky ‘diverse’ Conservative-supporting Pimlico Journal readers, we regret to inform you that applications for this internship have already closed.)
The CCHQ summer internship is a clear expression of the DEI frameworks that Kemi Badenoch was so passionately attacking this week. The placement offers a six-week paid position at CCHQ for young people who are at least partially selected on unspecified diversity criteria. This internship is run in collaboration with the Patchwork Foundation, which again describes itself on the Conservative Party website as a charity working to ‘promote and encourage the positive integration of disadvantaged minority communities into British democracy and civil society’.
These internships have been called out in the past for the DEI agenda they promote, especially thanks to their connection to the Patchwork Foundation. The Telegraph revealed that in 2021 and 2022, the Patchwork Foundation development sessions held for interns at CCHQ included ‘privilege walks’, in which participants stepped forward in response to questions about their race, gender, sexuality, and disability, with whoever had stepped furthest declared the most privileged, all of which took place outside the Margaret Thatcher boardroom of the head office.
The Conservative Party’s position at the time was that these sessions were ‘run solely by the Patchwork Foundation and not influenced by CCHQ’, though they were held on Conservative Party premises, during a Conservative Party internship, for Conservative Party interns. While the privilege walks were dropped after the story became public, the Conservative Party has retained a close connection with the Patchwork Foundation since, and as we have shown, the Patchwork Foundation remains involved in selecting individuals for their summer internships.
Conservative Party politicians have been very vocal in their support for this internship scheme, with Lord Darren Mott (the former CEO of the Conservative Party and current Conservative peer) speaking about the importance of the internship in the Lords. Pimlico Journal readers will hardly miss just how perverse it is for such a person to be advocating for such a course action. Lord Mott, who is conspicuously ‘male, pale, and stale’, is now looking to find ways to deny the opportunities that he previously benefitted from to the ‘privileged’ young white men of 2026.
Over the week, Nick Timothy, the Shadow Justice Secretary, did admit that the Conservative Party had been influenced by the DEI agenda in the past. He points to three factors in explaining why this had happened:
Conservatives were intellectually slow to understand woke ideologies.
Some in the Conservative Party are sympathetic with woke ideologies.
Those who did oppose the ideologies faced an uncooperative government bureaucracy.
There is every reason to believe that Timothy’s unhappiness with the Conservative Party’s support for DEI agenda is sincere, and the factors he gives to explain why the Party had been influenced by it in the past are reasonable enough — although we might add that to understand all is not to forgive all. And yet, while he might be able to explain their many failures over the course of their their fourteen years in power, Timothy remains unable to explain the Conservative Party’s continued connection to the Patchwork Foundation to this very day, even after their landslide defeat in July 2024 and after Kemi Badenoch won the Conservative leadership election in November 2024.
The relationship goes beyond the internship scheme, with the Conservative Party currently involved in the ‘Patchwork Masterclass Programme’. This is a ten-month programme granting young people, selected on diversity criteria, private access to senior political figures, with past sessions held at 10 Downing Street, Parliament, and CCHQ itself.
Kevin Hollinrake, the current Conservative Party Chairman who wrote only this week on X about the need to ‘defeat identity politics’, hosted one such Masterclass at CCHQ for Patchwork cohorts just weeks ago.
Kemi Badenoch has claimed that ‘the Conservatives are the only party with serious plans to make sure that everyone is treated equally’ in her speech this week. On the evidence of what her Conservative Party is doing inside its own headquarters in its hiring and promotion of DEI events, that claim is frankly impossible to take seriously.
This article was written by Novanglus, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
If you wish to support what we do, please consider subscribing. If you are already subscribed, why not upgrade to a paid subscription?
I have some sympathy for Kemi Badenoch. I believe she is someone who does have genuinely conservative instincts but she finds herself leading a Tory Party that doesn't....and - apart from the Thatcher years - hasn't for the entire post-WW2 era. Most of the MPs she leads are, I suspect, pretty much Blairism-lite.
So what is do be done about our two-tier anarcho-tyrannous British state? No politicians...whether Badenoch, Farage or Lowe....are going to make much real difference without a huge parliamentary majority behind them with a passionate appetite for a brutal dismembering of the unelected lefty managerial state....including wholesale sackings of civil servants, judges et al, tearing up contracts if necessary. All of which is hugely improbable without a full-on civil war.
"Intellectuals like the American activist Christopher Rufo have argued that conservatism might have to use “the principles of the Gramscian left.....to organise a kind of counterrevolutionary response to the long march through the institutions”. This kind of talk could prove energising after long years of party-political inertia and effective defeatism on the Rght. Set against this however are some trenchant assessments that give pause to such optimism. Like this one: “Conservatism is to a large extent self-eroding. A philosophy that (rightly) salutes enterprise will not attract enough people who want to serve in the culture-shaping institutions”.
My own hesitation is that notions like ‘Gramscian counterrevolutions’ can seem like a shying away from an even more disturbing reality. In Britain you could say that ‘the (Leftist) regime’ counts among its adherents easily 50% of young-to-middle-aged professionals – more or less on board with such notions as the supposed problems of white racism, systemic bias in favour of men and the ever-urgent ongoing need to advance the interests of ‘the LGTB+ community’. Among those emerging from ‘higher education’, make that 90%." https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/mrs-thatcher-and-the-good-life
How would a Reform/Restore regime fight all that?