Contra Kemi

The term “Renaissance” ought to conjure images of vivid frescoes, grand churches and great literature — not the shabby ruins of this country’s Conservative Party. Still, with Kemi Badenoch at the helm, the Tories are desperate to frame themselves as enjoying a similarly grand rebirth. Sadly, the North West Essex MP’s cathedrals of the mind are unlikely to soon rival St Peter’s Basilica in their ingenuity.​

One frenzy of renewal that has erupted is the right-leaning commentariat’s enthusiasm for Badenoch. Just last week, Rod Liddle poured out an uncharacteristically effusive Spectator column on how “Kemi gives [him] hope”. Conservative Home’s Oliver Dean has also argued that Badenoch’s response to the murder of Southampton student Henry Nowak, who repeatedly told police he had been stabbed but was handcuffed after his killer falsely claimed he had been racially abused, “is proof she is the serious candidate on the right”. Writing for The Times ahead of May’s local elections, Melanie Phillips claimed that “Badenoch shows the spine voters want to see”.

​Even shadow frontbencher Katie Lam recently took a break from circling Badenoch’s decaying leadership like a half-starved vulture, to rebrand her boss’s record as blemish-free. The Tory “rising star” told Sky News on Wednesday: “Group-based grievance politics is a road to disaster. Kemi Badenoch has known this, and had the courage to say it aloud, for years… She was right then, and she’s right now.”

A response to this excessive fawning seems long overdue. 

​In the last few days, Badenoch has continued to demonstrate her shockingly short memory. In a Daily Mail column (rightly) lamenting the murder of Henry Nowak, she positively cited the contentious Macpherson report. The Tory leader wrote that the murder of Stephen Lawrence, which precipitated it, “forced the country to confront the intolerable and say: ‘This is not who we are.’ Indeed, many battles have been won in making our society better and fairer since then.”

Lawrence’s murder was tragic, and the police response certainly bungled and compromised, but if anything has made Britain “better and fairer” since 1999, it is certainly not Macpherson’s findings. When discussing the Nowak case, Badenoch’s erstwhile mentor, Lord Gove, correctly lambasted Macpherson for having encouraged police to put “the fear of being thought racist ahead of the need to maintain law and order effectively”. Indeed, the report deemed “a racist incident … any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person”.

​Such a declaration does not merely amount to an assault on truth in principle, but its insidious assumptions have been adopted en masse by the police and other public institutions, to the detriment of justice. The elevation of this radical report to Holy Writ by the “Blob” Badenoch claims to despise has fostered a culture in which such catastrophic misjudgments seem to routinely unfold.​

Take the mass rape of working-class British girls by predominantly Pakistani grooming gangs often permitted to escape justice due to the authorities’ terror at being accused of racial prejudice. In 2020 it was revealed that a security guard had a “bad feeling” about Libyan-born suicide bomber Salman Abedi — who killed 22 people at a 2017 Ariana Grande concert — but did not approach him for fear of being branded a racist. The same year this was revealed, Nottinghamshire authorities flagged violent incidents by Valdo Calocane. A subsequent inquiry was informed he was not committed to a psychiatric hospital in part due to professionals expressing concerns about “over-representation of young black males in detention”. In 2023, he murdered two teenagers and an elderly man..

It is not correct to believe that Badenoch has a long track record of completely eschewing racial politics. As Egyptian-British national security analyst Khaled Hassan highlighted via X: “During the black lives matter protests, Kemi Badenoch didn’t say all lives matter (as she is doing today); she said ‘black lives do matter’ and promised to focus on ethnic minorities rather than help everyone in Britain.” Do the Badenoch-niks share their leader’s historical amnesia, or are they simply not bothered by the hypocrisy?

Deploying “white” pejoratively is usually the preserve of the progressive types, but Badenoch has adopted such tactics

One thing Badenoch has been skilful at, however, is fashioning a vague sense of “anti-wokeness” into being her trademark. Yet she has also seemed comfortable using her own heritage as a political instrument when convenient. Deploying “white” pejoratively is usually the preserve of the progressive types, but Badenoch has adopted such tactics. She slated her University of Sussex peers as “stupid lefty white kids” and dismissed Doctor Who actor David Tennant as a “rich, lefty, white male celebrity”. What, to someone who supposedly dislikes identity politics, was the relevance of their being white?

Whatever right-leaning commentators say, Conservative polling figures continue to be dire. This is no surprise. The “renaissance” of the Conservative Party seems less like a period of bold and creative transformation than a shabby sequel to a once great television series.