The Tory leader proclaimed that only her party refuses to offer cost-free solutions. The post Andrew Gimson’s Conference sketch: Badenoch yearns to rend Starmer and Farage limb from limb appeared first on Conservative Home.
Kemi Badenoch looked entirely at ease. Her manner was that of a head teacher who has thought out exactly what she wants to say, and is confident her pupils will love it.
The problem is that Badenoch Academy is unfashionable. It is written off by pundits as a failing school, and many of its pupils have been lured away, at least temporarily, to a new establishment, Reform UK, founded and run by the charismatic Nigel Farage, who promises his followers top results at zero cost.
Badenoch poured scorn on the “vacuous posturing” of Farage, and also on “the vague mush” which “we see day after day from Labour”.
Only the Conservatives under her leadership can be relied on to do the homework needed to draw up a proper plan to deal with the small boats, and to deport foreign criminals, by leaving the ECHR.
There was in Badenoch’s manner an undertone of righteous anger. She alone, she implied, offers the rigorous thought and fierce discipline required to surmount Britain’s difficulties.
“I didn’t say it would be easy,” she reminded her followers. “I didn’t say it would be quick.”
Conservatives thrilled to her gospel of hard work and perseverance. Here at last is a leader with the strictness and honesty the times demand: a leader who reveres what Rudyard Kipling called The Gods of the Copybook Headings.
She spoke of Manchester’s first Jewish community, founded in the 1780s in what was then still a market town. From the first, “Jewish people have been part of the fabric of Manchester”, and the murderous attack of a few days ago was an attack on us all.
We will no longer stand, she went on, for “protests which are in fact carnivals of hatred directed at the Jewish homeland”.
Kevin Hollinrake, the Conservative Party Chairman, had earlier spoken of the need for “tough love”, for “that is what builds resilience”, and said that in government, “We were too eager to please.”
Tough love is Badenoch’s thing. Every so often she rewarded her followers with a warm smile, as if to say “I know you get it”, but she does not seek to please by pretending there are cost-free solutions.
While passing through Crewe on the way to Manchester I glimpsed an old InterCity locomotive called Wolf of Badenoch. Badenoch the politician yearns to fall like a wolf on Starmer and Farage.
She may or may not succeed, but at least within the modest hall in which she spoke, she roused the warrior instinct within her fellow Conservatives. They too yearn to rend those specious figures, Starmer and Farage, limb from limb.
The post Andrew Gimson’s Conference sketch: Badenoch yearns to rend Starmer and Farage limb from limb appeared first on Conservative Home.
