Kemi Badenoch: One Hundred Promising Days

Today, Kemi Badenoch has led the Conservative Party for one hundred days. She has been easily the best Conservative Leader of my lifetime, and for several decades before that—though only if, like me, you really, really, want the Conservative Party to disappear. You see, her leadership seems almost designed to accelerate the Tories’ collapse. Polls now place them in third place, behind Labour and Reform, and yet she carries on as if this is some kind of normal midterm dip rather than a death spiral. If anything, she looks amused by the whole thing, as if watching a train crash in slow motion is a particularly interesting way to pass the time. Perhaps she just doesn’t care. Either way, the outcome is the same: the party is doomed.

The great danger, though, is that she’s also setting the stage for the corruption of its replacement. The Tories are dying—but the faster they die, the more likely it is that they will pass the contagion that killed them to their replacement. We are coming too fast to the tipping point. You can almost smell a great army of army of failed Conservative politicians readying their stampede toward the Reform Party. These are men who will say anything, so long as it keeps them in cocaine and teenage whores. And with them will come their even larger army of parasites—the “consultants” who sell access to them. Let these in, and Reform will become as bent and poisonous as the party it was set up to replace.

That is the danger. But let’s not look too closely at that. Looking on the bright side, Reform has already gobbled up the easy part of the Conservative vote: the rest will follow in due course. It’s also biting chunks out of the Labour vote. The great rabble of political vermin who swarmed into Westminster last summer may have only a brief spell on the feeding tube of the taxpayers’ money. I appreciate that Reform, even without a mass-defection to it of the Tory trash, may be too much for many traditional Labour voters. But the Farage of the left, of course, is George Galloway. Once he sets out his stall properly, both our historic parties of state will become less historic than history.

Back to Mrs Badenoch and her leadership. We can see this as an act of assisted dying for the Conservative Party. She is tightening the straps and checking the level of the killing fluids. Soon enough, the Party will be dead. Soon enough after that, the body will be gone, and only the memory of its stink will remain.