Badenoch Already

Ben Wildsmith

Entertaining as Conservative leadership contests always are, it’s a mystery why they bother with them.

They could avoid all the unpleasantness and public derision by being the change they seek and simply appointing their richest member to head the party.

Why bother with the tedious, lefty nonsense of an election when innate talent and capacity for hard work are exactly represented by capital assets accrued? If those assets happen to be inherited, all the better, as they indicate their owner’s biological fitness to govern.

The Chairman of the 1922 Committee could reveal the results of a contest on the tarmac at Heathrow Airport after travelling to the Cayman Islands to examine the relative virtues of each candidate.

The party’s current predicament is the perfect illustration of why democracy is a bad fit for it.

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Exhausted

The wider UK electorate is exhausted by years of ideological batshittery and was willing to elect a Labour Party that offered no policies at all on the basis that they looked too boring to cause any further damage.

The ‘legitimate concerns about immigration’ crowd were offered a bespoke service by Nigel Farage’s Reform UK who didn’t have to account for fourteen years of perceived chaos at the borders on their watch.

So, the Conservatives were left with voters who mirrored the party’s mainly elderly membership.

The membership, who you’ll remember were googly-eyed for the charms of Liz Truss, are perhaps not ideally placed to shape a political response to the challenges of the mid-21st century, but candidates for the Tory leadership must pander to their concerns with the zeal of an inheritance-hungry grandchild.

‘Wake up Edith, that nice Robert Jenrick has come to see you and he’s brought a Terry’s Chocolate Islamophobia for your birthday.’

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Tawdry

It’s a tawdry spectacle, but let’s go through the runners and riders. After all, it might be the last time anybody cares.

There are two candidates, James Cleverly and Tom Tugendhat, who are running on a return to sanity platform. It’s been a long time since the Tories were boring.

Even John ‘Goat’ Major managed to put the nation off its breakfast when details of his dalliance with Edwina Currie emerged. Now though, after fourteen years of reckless toffs, thieves, and foamed-mouthed idealogues running amok, we all want a bit of normal.

To be fair to James Cleverly, he ended up being the nearest the party had to a dependable performer during the last years of the tyranny. He was there, though, and however convincingly he poses as a purveyor of vanilla governance, he was both Johnson and Truss’s go-to guy for defending the indefensible on TV.

Concerned

Tom Tugendhat’s persona has similarities to the one affected by Keir Starmer. He is perpetually concerned, furrowing his brow in consternation at the decline of all around him.

Like Starmer, he emphasises his service to lend moral weight to his disappointment in the rest of humanity. Hair shirted earnestness is a logical position for a disgraced party to take but Tugendhat’s problem is that Starmer is already occupying that space.

Would the nation be able to tolerate more horn-rimmed, performative gravity? Nobody wants a return to Bojo the Clown-style fatuity, but five years of PMQs with this pair would grate on an already grated public.

Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick enjoyed Boris & Liz’s Excellent Adventure so thoroughly that they’d take the brakes of the Trump-adjacent rhetoric and accelerate the Tories towards the alt-right.

American politics

Jenrick projects an artificial sincerity that we associate with American politics. He’s currently the frontrunner and it’s puzzling that his frantic ambition seems not to be deterring his supporters.

In recent days, he’s made unsubstantiated claims that the SAS engage in extrajudicial killings.  If the modern Conservative Party is content to overlook that then it will have abandoned all relations to its traditional outlook.

Which leaves Kemi Badenoch. She’s currently running third according to the bookies and I’d argue the Tories are missing a trick.

The party is barely clinging to its perch as the natural party of the right. Outflanked by Reform UK and eaten away by a chameleon Labour Party, it needs to land consistent punches on the government or face oblivion.

Badenoch’s bruising rhetoric is rooted in moral conviction and that would be a problem for Labour who, having boxed themselves into soft-right economics, are unable to counter that from the left.

Moral renewal

Her social conservatism is a draw for a section of the Reform vote who equate the Tories with decadence. The alt-right belief is that Western culture is due some sort of moral renewal. If the Tories choose Badenoch, they will be betting on that.

The Tories are one bad decision away from going the way of the Liberals after World War I.

For me, Badenoch causes Labour more problems than the others, but the position is so dire that they may already be sunk.

Labour is effectively unopposed from the left and the right are in disarray. That’s a lot of political real estate going begging.