The battle for the conservative soul
The battle for the conservative soul
Only Kemi Badenoch has what's required to lead Britain away from the cliff-edge
In the British Conservative party’s unedifying leadership election, party members will ultimately decide between the last two in the race after the other candidates have been eliminated by Tory MPs.
Encouragingly, a Conservative Home poll suggests that Kemi Badenoch is in second place in party members’ current preferences by a mere ten votes.
Less encouragingly, her candidacy is reportedly at risk as Tory MPs vote today to whittle down the eight candidates who are still in the frame.
And appallingly, in first place at present among Tory members’ preferences on that Conservative Home poll is is the current trade minster, Penny Mordaunt. This tells us that, unless Conservative party members have totally lost the plot, they haven’t been paying attention.
Mordaunt appeals because her feisty demeanour and her background as a naval reservist suggest no-nonsense qualities. At her campaign launch this morning, she suggested she would lead a return to traditional values.
This is certainly nonsense. In her former role as equalities minister, Mordaunt said that “trans men are men, and trans women are women”.
This of course is the cardinal principle of transgender activists who currently drive the gender politics debate. But it isn’t true and denies the facts of biology, as a number of transgender individuals have testified. As Debbie Hayton wrote here:
Mordaunt is wrong: transwomen are male, and women are female. Male people are not female people, and therefore transwomen are not women. As a transwoman I should know: I fathered three children – I am definitely male. Their mother was a female person. She is a woman, not me.
The transgender madness has done immense and unforgiveable damage, particularly to children as I wrote here. Any politician who supports it shouldn’t be given the time of day.
The Conservatives for Women campaign group has called Mordaunt “a “committed warrior for the trans lobby”. Mordaunt has tried to row back on her position, saying that she had merely meant some people would assume a new gender “in law”. But this reinforced anxieties that she was trying to massage her views.
For Mordaunt has also claimed that it was she who “changed maternity legislation that was drafted in gender-neutral language to use female terms.” But this has been challenged, as the Spectator reported:
The legislation in question was about the right of government minsters to take maternity leave. But commentators like Tim Shipman of the Sunday Times have rejected Mordaunt’s account, reporting that she actually wanted the term “pregnant person” in the legislation but was overruled by colleagues such as Liz Truss and Nadine Dorries.
And now Braverman [Suella Braverman, who is also a Conservative leadership candidate] herself has entered the debate, releasing a lengthy statement setting out her own account of the 2021 row over the Ministerial and other Maternity Allowances Act. While she declines to name Mordaunt, she says that “to have my female body referred to as being that of a ‘pregnant person’ was distressing and unnecessary”adding that it was “the Cabinet Office who were for responsible for the bill”.
At the time of course Mordaunt was serving in that department as Paymaster General… Braverman ends with a veiled barb: “It is my hope that just as we should call pregnant women what they are, we will all of us accurately recall what we did and said in office”.
Nor is this Mordaunt’s only deeply questionable judgment. After protests, she was forced to remove from her campaign launch video footage that had been included of Oscar Pistorius — two years before he was convicted of killing his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp.
How can any conservative believe that this individual stands for no nonsense and that her judgement is to be trusted over critical affairs of state?
The quality of the debate between most of the candidates is generally depressing (ferrets in a sack is more like it). Several are falling over themselves to declare their support for tax cuts, as if this is the single most important issue facing the country (and without coming clean over the public services they would have to sacrifice as a result).
This emphasis shows they just don’t get it. There is no more important issue than fighting the culture war.
Identity politics, victim culture and “intersectionality” madness over race and gender have institutionalised bullying and intimidation, destroyed free speech and are causing immense injustice and social division. This nihilistic agenda, aimed at weakening and destroying western culture and society, has penetrated British institutions such as universities, schools, the civil service and even businesses to a terrifying degree. Left unchecked, it will ultimately destroy the country as a shared national project and will cripple its ability to thrive and even survive.
Which is why Kemi Badenoch is so important. For among these eight candidates, only she has clearly understood this — and has the intelligence to deal with it appropriately. She has robustly and consistently denounced the “zero-sum game” of identity politics and emphasised the need to “stand up for our shared institutions, for free speech, due process and the rule of law”.
She is against the green insanity, terming Net Zero “unilateral economic disarmament”. Committed to reducing corporate and personal taxes, she has nevertheless refused to join the “bidding war” on tax cuts saying that her main priority would be to tackle inflation. She would “not promise things without a plan to deliver them”, and “to make promises you cannot keep is a betrayal of everything that I stand for”.
She was also a Brexiteer when it mattered. Other candidates who were Remainers during the great battle for Brexit — such as the Foreign Secretary Liz Truss, who is considered a front-runner for the final slate of two — have now suddenly become staunch defenders of Britain’s independence from the EU. But they can’t undo what they said at the time. As Danny Finkelstein writes in The Times (£):
Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries have endorsed the foreign secretary. Dorries said that “she’s probably a stronger Brexiteer than both of us”, and Rees-Mogg agreed. This statement is, of course, flatly untrue and its main value comes as an indication of how people can persuade themselves, and seek to persuade others, of flatly untrue statements.
One of the best speeches against Brexit during the 2016 referendum campaign was made by Truss at a dinner of the Food and Drink Federation. I was there, and it was very striking at the time, but it is even more striking now to watch it on YouTube. She spells out the potential economic costs of leaving the single market and urges businesses not to stay neutral. They need to inform their workers and consumers of the damage Brexit would do to investment and livelihoods.
Such naked opportunism by Truss strongly suggests she would not do what’s necessary for an independent UK — because she never understood why its independence was necessary in the first place.
With so many clapped-out or compromised candidates in a Conservative party that no longer knows what it needs to be for or against, it’s important to have a fresh face who can make a new start. One such candidate is Badenoch; and the other is Tom Tugendhat, who has never held ministerial office but is the chairman of the Commons foreign affairs select committee.
Tugendhat, a former soldier, has many very impressive qualities. But he is also a former Remainer; and his agenda, expanding upon Boris Johnson’s “levelling up” policy to tackle inequality around the country, misses the most important agenda of all: to fight the culture war.
The main point that is said to count against Badenoch, who was a junior local government minister until she quit the government last week among scores of other ministerial resignations in protest at Boris Johnson, is that she is very young at 42 and has only ever had junior ministerial experience.
But Sir Tony Blair was 43 when he became prime minster having held no ministerial office whatever — and he became the most successful Labour party leader for decades who won three general elections.
The Conservative party is not only reeling from a shambolic leader with no integrity or consistency. It has itself ducked the really important issues, showing that it too has no idea of what conservatism really is.
The party and the country need a leader with a clear and coherent vision rooted in reality and patriotism, and who possesses a backbone of steel. Badenoch has shown courage, independence of mind and a recognition of the cultural cliff off whose edge Britain is inexorably sliding.
Only she ticks the most important boxes. Accordingly, she is the candidate whom Labour will fear the most. Will the Tories be able to overcome their deep inadequacies as a party to understand this? We’ll soon find out.
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