Kemi Badenoch was supposed to be the next Maggie, though why you would appoint a new party leader to look and sound like a relic from political history is beyond me. She was elected largely because she was a breath of fresh air, which she delivered in that she has been full of fresh hot air. She is so bad that she makes Starmer, who is not known for his political charisma, look good. She has prostrated herself in front of the Tory electorate and begged forgiveness for the party’s failure and sins of the previous years, but has failed to provide a new forward-looking narrative. Clearly, platitudes are not enough, as can be heard when she launched her Policy Renewal Programme in March 2025, which is full of guess what? Political gobbledygook and platitudes.
Left click and then left click on Kemi Launches
https://www.conservatives.com/news/watch-live-kemi-launches-the-policy-renewal-programme
A significant reason why Tory MPS elected her as party leader was her obvious charisma, intellectual rigour, and ability to rebuild the Tory brand. On all counts, she has failed. Her confrontational style at PMQS was meant to send the shivers up the PM, and on this, she has also failed, leaving the PMQ’s media spotlight to Ed Davey and Farage. As the leader of the opposition, she looks uncomfortable and wooden in front of the cameras. Like the PM who banged on about his father being a toolmaker, she bangs on about her upbringing in Nigeria. So, on this basis, the men in suits from the 1922 committee are waiting to pounce. Adding to the crisis, party donors are in hiding, and Farage and Reform are breathing down her neck.
Now to the substance. She thinks Starmer was too hard on the thugs involved in the Southport riots, living up to the second syllable of her surname (Enoch). She complains about Labour’s response to Trump’s tariffs as if it were the UK that started it. She implies that it is all China’s fault, wrong; her understanding of the principles of comparative advantage seems to be devoid. China was invited into the WTO in 2001, and this was the start of rampant globalisation supported by Blair and Clinton. China’s comparative advantage was not tech, oil, gas, high-tech manufacturing, or minerals, but cheap labour. Guess what? Companies driven by shareholder tyranny were forced to go offshore to China, making it the world’s manufacturing capital. This improved corporate profits, more profits mean more dividends, widening the income and wealth gap and inevitably creating rust belts in the US and the UK. She bangs on about her oven-ready trade deal with the US. In that case, she would not get past the first round of “Bake Off”. She continually talks about tax cuts and rewiring the state as if she were some sort of sandwich board crazy born-again Christian. What she means by tax cuts is cutting public services, the sum total of her economic agenda. Clearly, the state and government need to be reformed and, to use her term, “rewiring”. However, it is not a 3-pin plug. She is against the 2050 net-zero target enacted by a previous conservative PM. That comes as no surprise, as she has failed to lay out a plan for the country’s energy security other than bang on about new oil licenses.
She has invested too much time cosying up to Trump and his sycophants, such as J D Vile (beautiful photo) and reportedly said at a conference in the US, that the UK needed its very own version of MAGA to save it. I doubt that would be the view of many here. She spoke at a conference organised by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, founded by billionaire and owner of GB (not) News and the Spectator, Paul Marshall. This organisation also includes, Jordan Peterson, who supports the views of Germany’s AfD, Vivek Ramaswamy, who ran as the Republican candidate for President, Mike Johnson, a fundamentalist Christian and the Republican leader of the House of Representatives, Douglas Murray and born-again convert Danny Kruger and many others on the loony-ish Christian and rich right. There, she took aim at Diversity, Equality and Inclusion programmes and climate activism, referring to both as poison and then went on to talk about threats to Western Civilisation, further aligning herself to the Trump agenda. Let us be clear, Trump’s agenda is a slow march to authoritarianism. Her understanding of culture, identity, values, and belonging is simply weird, and she conflates integration with assimilation, but she has found her voice when it comes to Trans issues, defining a woman and toilets.
She has barely condemned Israel for its continuing human rights abuses and war crimes in Gaza and has shown little empathy for the 15000 children killed by Israeli forces. As Trade Secretary, she continued to arm Israel during its brutal onslaught on Gaza. When she was the Women’s and Equalities Minister, she was moved by the release of hostages but now seems to lack any empathy over the killing of 30,000 Palestinian women and children. Just before becoming the leader of the party, she congratulated Netanyahu on the moral clarity of his response to October 7th. By the time of her comment, 20,000 women and children had been killed by the IDF.
Now, she has spoken out in support of the Israeli government, which refused entry and expelled two Labour MPS who were on a humanitarian visit to the West Bank, to observe work being done by charities. She accepted the Israeli narrative (otherwise known as BS) that the two Labour MPS intended to spread hate speech. This could not be further from the truth, and many Tories have criticised her comments. On Sunday mornings, Laura Kuenssberg’s show, she went on to say and support the Israeli premise that the two MPS “may not” comply with their laws, a sort of Minority Report pre-crime. I would advise her to watch Louis Theroux’s programme called The Settlers; it may help her understand a bit more about the apartheid imposed on Palestinians in the West Bank. On the same show Bad Enoch also conflated the two democratically elected MPS with Abdullah Qadri Al Ahdal, a Muslim extremist preacher, Stephen Donald Black the extremist founder of the neo-Nazi website Stormfront and Erich Gliebe, a Neo-Nazi far-right political leader who all were rightly refused entry into the UK. She has made no public comment about the execution by the IDF of 15 emergency workers in Gaza; maybe she also sees them as collateral damage. However, to be fair, I cannot remember the PM showing any real outrage. So, what does Kemi stand for? Who the hell knows? What we definitely know is that she was born in Nigeria.
Hopefully, the local elections tomorrow will result in her demise. So, a bit of advice from someone who gets a giggle at the turmoil in the Tory Party: get rid of Kemi. Sunak was a terrible party leader and PM; Kemi has surpassed him; I am sure you can do better.
Suneil Sharma
30th April 2025


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