My gloom about the state of our country was slightly dispelled by attending Kemi Badenoch’s Monday launch of her campaign to lead the Conservative Party.
Published: 5 September 2024
Nothing went wrong technically – she exuded energy, intelligence, good sense, confidence and belief in her country’s potential. And she recognised that the Tories had deserved to lose the election.
“We talked right but governed left, sounding like Conservatives but acting like Labour.”
Although two months ago I believed that after 14 years which included Brexit and covid, the Conservatives were clapped-out and needed a long rest, I hadn’t been able to bring myself to vote Labour in the general election.
As a civil servant in the late 1970s during Labour’s last four years, in the Department of Industry — which like the whole government was under the thumb of greedy trade unions — I knew what they were like.
Through what was usually a combination of ill-founded idealism and arrogance, they always leave a mess behind them.
As Margaret Thatcher put it: “The problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.”
Fortunately for the United Kingdom, the English electorate, which always has to pay the bill, is unlike the Celtic fringe in hating extremism. As is mine, their inclination is to vote for competence and steadiness. And some vision, humour and common sense as well.
So it wasn’t Sir Keir Starmer’s dullness that bothered me. It was his being so hard to read. Had he outgrown his youthful hard-leftist inclinations? Had he, as he claimed, been a faithful member of Jeremy Corbyn’s shadow cabinet because he was trying to encourage him towards the centre? Was he as authoritarian as he seemed as he took power in Labour?
Well, we know now. He is a fashionable north London socialist who seems not to like his country much. He tolerates no dissent. He embraces identity politics, undermines free speech, and appears to loathe the white working classes and the old.
Having spent his life as a lawyer, he thinks all political problems should be solved by courts, preferably under the guidance of international law.
Appearing not to have noticed that the UK is growing faster than the Eurozone, and that France and Germany are in a right old state economically and politically, he’s snuggling up to them as he seeks to take the UK back under the authority of Brussels.
Oh, and he has gone in bigtime for the cronyism he used to condemn. His two most important servants are Cork man Morgan McSweeney, his head of political strategy, and Sue Gray, daughter of Irish immigrants, married to Bill Conlon, a country music singer from Portaferry.
Their son Liam Conlon was given a parliamentary private secretary’s job immediately on being elected to the House of Common in July.
For Sir Keir, it seems, patriotism is so yesterday. The Islamists in the UK who oppress women and want a Sharia state seem to trouble him very little.
These days, in politics, it is often Conservative first or second generation immigrants who seem to love this country most. They know what their parents or they themselves escaped by getting to the United Kingdom, and they are proud citizens.
“I was born here but grew up under socialism”, says Kemi Badenoch, “so I know the reason why millions of people want to live here.”
Mrs Badenoch, a black woman born Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke in Britain who until she was 16 mostly lived in Nigeria, returned to Britain, qualified as a software engineer, joined the Conservative party – which, she said, became her family – and married her campaign manager, Hamish Badenoch, who is a supportive male spouse in the tradition of Denis Thatcher, Philip May and very briefly, Liz Truss’s Hugh O’Flaherty.
There’s a chance Hamish Badenoch could follow in their footsteps.
