In the battle for the Conservative party leadership, Kemi Badenoch’s candidacy was always the longest of long shots.
Knocked out of the race in yesterday’s round, she nevertheless performed far more strongly and pulled in far more support than anyone would have originally imagined for this junior government minster. Doubtless this puts her in a strong position for a top ministerial office under whoever is elected leader and thus prime minister.
But Conservative MPs have made a bad mistake in dropping her. Indeed, their behaviour in this contest has illustrated with dismal clarity that, as I previously wrote here, their problem has not been Boris Johnson. It is them — and behind them, a large swathe of party members.
Mordaunt is utterly unfit to lead the party and the country, as I wrote here and subsequently many others have observed. Yet despite all those revelations, and despite what by common consent were her lamentably poor performances in the TV debates, it’s absolutely jaw-dropping — as Stephen Glover writes in today’s Mail — that no fewer than 92 MPs have backed Mordaunt for the leadership.
With Badenoch out of the race, Mordaunt is now fighting Liz Truss for second place in the run-off against the all-but confirmed front-runner, Rishi Sunak. That run-off will be decided by the Conservative party membership. But polling suggests that, among them, Sunak (who is unpopular in the country because he has raised taxes, is resented over his wealthy wife’s former tax advantages and is perceived to have been less than transparent in running a slick campaign that was planned months ago) would lose to either Mordaunt or Truss.
The possibility that Mordaunt may actually become prime minister is provoking widespread incredulity, alarm and even panic in a number of quarters. As well it might.
But Liz Truss is also inadequate — opportunist (posing like Margaret Thatcher in a tank to channel the party’s yearning for that supposedly golden age was crass); intellectually weak (the TV debates exposed the economic illiteracy of both Truss and Mordaunt); and shallow (banging on about the need for tax cuts without acknowledging the commensurate cuts in public services is not only irresponsible and slippery but also wrongly identifies conservatism with a narrow economic focus).
That constricting economic prism is at the root of the problem that has brought the Tories to their current pass. For over the past half century or so, while the intelligentsia were swinging a wrecking ball at core institutions and values, the Tories were resolutely looking the other way.
Oblivious to the damage being done to British cohesion, decency and ultimately reason itself, many of them even went along with it. They totally failed to grasp that they were thus embracing the narrative of decline, demoralisation (in every sense) and social division that the left was trumpeting as “progressive” — while damning all who dissented as reactionary troglodytes. The Tories either refused to acknowledge this increasingly vicious intimidation or even offered their own backs to these cultural inquisitors to be flogged.
This was why Badenoch was such an electrifying candidate. For she alone articulated what true conservatism actually is — conserving, defending and promoting the core values that define British society and hold it together.
Many if not most of her colleagues in the parliamentary party just don’t get this. They think the “culture war” is a distraction from the only thing that matters — tax cuts, heaven help us. But the “culture war” is the one thing that really matters. What use are tax cuts if a nation no longer accepts that it is a shared national project at all — indeed, if rising generations no longer possess the knowledge, moral sense or capacity to think for themselves in order to identify those principles and institutions of priceless value that are in danger of being lost forever?
The Tories’ failure to grasp this shows they still don’t understand why Boris Johnson (before he crashed and burned) was such a priceless political campaigner and delivered an 80-seat majority by winning over formerly tribal Labour party voters. It was because he initially tapped into the deep public alienation from an entire political establishment — across all parties — that had connived at this ideological onslaught, and that sneered and jeered at the deep patriotism of the British people and their horror and grief at a Britain that was becoming to them unrecognisable.
Badenoch got this. She thus represented the clean break for which so many yearn. The sorry truth is that all three remaining candidates — Sunak, Mordaunt and Truss — do not. They represent instead the dreary, soggy, failed liberal-consensus politics of Major, Cameron, May and Johnson — in other words, every Conservative administration since Thatcher. They are the Three Mousqueteers. So why should anyone vote for yet more of the same old same old?
If Badenoch had become the leader of the Conservative party, she would undoubtedly have won a decisive victory at the next general election. With any of the three remaining contenders becoming leader, the very real prospect now looms of a hung parliament resulting in some kind of coalition between the Labour party, the Lib Dems, the SNP and the Greens.
I wrote about Badenoch here:
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?
Now we have our answer.
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