With the launch of her “Renewal 2030” campaign, Kemi Badenoch had a chance to address the nation and convince the British people that she heard their voices. She had a chance to prove that she understood the damage wrought by poverty, crime and institutional dysfunction. She raised her voice and took on — David Tennant.

Mr Tennant had boorishly said that Mrs Badenoch should “shut up”. For whatever reason, Badenoch made this the central feature of her introductory video. She is “not afraid of Dr Who” she said, in a performance that must have baffled the average viewer, who had no idea about the context of this obscure feud.

To be fair, Badenoch focused on the issues again at her campaign launch. I’m not suggesting this social media misstep should define her whole candidacy. But it raises a question — how to be “anti-woke” without being weird?

“Weird” is a word that has haunted the discourse since the Democrats applied it to vice presidential nominee JD Vance — and, by extension, Donald Trump — as part of their 2024 campaign. Now, with terminal laziness, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams is applying it to the Conservatives.

To be fair, she isn’t wrong that the Conservative frontrunners, Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, seem a bit weird — Badenoch because of her simmering fury and Jenrick because of his vague “second-hand car salesman” air. Then again, she doesn’t mention that Prime Minister Keir Starmer is weirder than both of them — a painfully robotic man who can’t mention a favourite book or poem, wears the near constant grimace of the victim of chronic indigestion and is still calling Rishi Sunak “Prime Minister” two months after he replaced the man. (Don’t get me wrong: I’m weird as well. But you can rest easy knowing that I won’t be a politician.)

Williams isn’t just talking about personalities — she’s talking about the issues. Sample tedium:

The Conservative leadership candidates also come off as weird, for their obsessive focus on things no one else is talking about: leaving the European convention on human rights; a cap on migrants (and whose cap is the lowest); the scourge of woke.

More:

Much of the Tories’ rhetorical weirdness – the new generation’s tough talk on migration and the culture wars – is a reheated version of the early post-Brexit years.

Yes, what kind of weirdo cares about immigration. It’s just — according to YouGov — the joint top most important issue for voters:

Granted, a politician who only talked about migration — at the expense of the economy, the NHS et cetera — would look pretty weird. But when it comes to its salience, Mrs Williams is the “weird” one.

Look at crime as well — another important issue for “anti-woke” candidates inasmuch as “wokeness” tends to be oriented towards anti-policing, pro-rehabilitation principles. It’s more important, for voters, than housing and the environment — and more than twice as important as taxes, pensions and education. 

Yet there is a danger of “anti-woke” candidates seeming weird. As much as I enjoy participating in the esoteric discourse of the online right-wing ecosphere, a mainstream right-wing candidate who started talking about raw milk and hormonal contraception would look, to the average voter, like an escapee from Broadmoor Hospital. With apologies to my “gender critical” friends, a candidate who made women in sports and single-sex swimming pools some of their bigger priorities would look at best eccentric. Perhaps one could argue that in an ideal world this would not be the case. But in our world, where voters tend to think in terms of the weight of their wallets and the safety of their streets, it wouldn’t work.

Even free speech makes for a bit of an odd campaign plank. Andrew Lilico writes in these pages:

The Right can only get a hearing for its critiques of woke positions on the economy, crime, immigration, education, the NHS, gender issues, the NHS, Islam or any other topic if it first insists on its right to put forward its own view and on its right to participate in commercial society and politics even if it does not submit. 

I doubt that this is true. Say what you like about the personal character and political decisions of Donald Trump — and there is a lot to say — but voters liked him in 2016 in large part because he ignored political correctness. He didn’t complain about people trying to stop him from saying X, Y and Z. He demonstrated that he was strong enough to say them. (Needless to say, mimicking Donald Trump’s campaign as a whole in a culture so much more reserved and ironic than that of the US would not be smart. But I think that this principle holds.)

Whether it is possible for candidates who have been so complicit in Conservative governance to succeed is questionable. I’m not sure that triumph in these leadership elections is not a poisoned chalice. 

Still, a promising right-leaning candidate, when and if they do appear, should be strong on the broad objectives of the culture war without being bogged down in the fierce and messy online skirmishes that blaze across our Twitter timelines. Twitter is real life but it is only a part of life. If we forget this, we do become weird — for better and for worse.