Listen, I don’t want to sound like a big partisan in the race between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick. I’m not a member of the Conservative Party and, indeed, I live abroad.

I happen to hope that Mr Jenrick wins, yes, but I do so without illusions. Does he have magnetic charisma and groundbreaking vision on his side? Do I have ten million pounds and a villa in Spain?

You are very free, then, to support Kemi Badenoch — but I wish that people were supporting her without such obvious illusions. It is simply not the case, as James McSweeney writes, that she has the record — as opposed to the rhetoric — of an anti-woke warrior. (Politicians can change, of course, but there is no need to change if people tell them how amazing they are already.)

It is simply not the case that she has the Midas touch with the media. I wrote about her counterproductive prickliness with journalists six months ago, and it has become a great deal more clear. As Critic contributor Laurie Wastell observes, she has the same habits as Keir Starmer:

1. Create a negative media cycle out of nothing
2. Get on your high horse about it when questioned
3. Blame everyone else when it’s your fault
4. Manage to alienate otherwise friendly media

But the worst of Badenoch’s supporters’ illusions — because it is unprincipled as well as mistaken — is the idea that Badenoch’s ethnic background is a big advantage. 

While I have criticised Mrs Badenoch for using her sex and the colour of her skin to her rhetorical advantage before, she has not been doing this in the election campaign. These criticisms, then, apply to some of her supporters, not to her. 

Strangely, those supporters have been older white men — older white men who tend to dislike “identity politics” but have deluded themselves into believing that it can be defeated on its own terms. 

“A black African woman leading the oldest political party in the world would be a sight for sore eyes,” writes Lord Moore: 

The Left’s cant phrase in relation to racism – “lived experience” – would come back to bite them. Sir Keir, never eloquent, would be lost for words.

Did Rishi Sunak’s Asian heritage give Keir Starmer problems? Did the ethnic backgrounds of Priti Patel and Suella Braverman stop left-wingers from calling them racists, bigots, Nazis et cetera? Has the blackness of Clarence Thomas, associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, stopped him from becoming a progressive hate figure? Of course not. 

Leftists have spent years developing the argument that right-wing politicians and commentators from ethnic minority backgrounds are sell-outs (see, for example, the chapter “Black Skin, White Psychosis” in Kehinde Andrews’s execrable The Psychosis of Whiteness). It will faze them no more than Margaret Thatcher’s womanhood. 

“The simple fact of life,” Konstantin Kisin posts, in a similar vein: 

… whether you like it or not, is that the only leader who can deliver genuinely right wing policies on immigration is going to be an ethnic minority[sic].

The simple fact of life is that this is untrue. Giorgia Meloni, Mette Frederiksen and Petteri Orpo are all white leaders who have pursued restrictionist policies. Naturally, this doesn’t mean a politician from an ethnic minority could not do the same. But it does prove that you don’t need them to have a minority background. 

“Because of immigration,” Niall Ferguson writes: 

… we are a much more racially mixed country than we were 45 years ago. And that is why Badenoch would pose such a formidable threat to the Labour government if she were to be elected Tory leader. We British are not, despite our reputation in the New York Times, mired in nostalgia for the imperial past. It should come as no surprise that we could soon have Europe’s first black female leader – and that she is a Conservative.

The left argues that we are afraid of cosmopolitanism — so we’re going to be more cosmopolitan than they are. This is a textbook example of trying to beat leftists at their own game. In doing so, one accepts the rules of the game. What we should be arguing is that the rules themselves are bad.

By all means vote for Kemi Badenoch if you admire her as an individual. But please don’t vote for her because you think her sex and race are going to outfox the left. It is clever-clever nonsense — and it is condescending to boot.