Kemi Badenoch is desperately out of her depth with her Liz Truss tribute act: Ismail Mulla
Earlier this month the Prime Minister said the Conservative Party is “sliding into oblivion” and is a “dead party walking”. Now, I’m sure the majority of Tory party members will take little note of what Sir Keir Starmer has to say.
And he is hardly a doyen of wisdom; you only need to see the missteps his Government has made in less than a year.
However, the PM does have a point about the Conservatives. Any party would have spent time soul-searching and trying to get back to the basics of politics after the sort of shellacking the Tories suffered in last year’s general election.
As has often been said, Labour didn’t win at the last general election, the Tories spectacularly lost it. And the party is still struggling to find its way.
Kemi Badenoch is desperately out of her depth. Her Liz Truss tribute act is not gaining traction with the ordinary voter.
Usually after such a comprehensive defeat there is a reset. Instead the Tories are hell-bent on doubling down on the same policy failures that alienated voters at the last general election.
It is a party that is caught between a rock and a hard place. On one side the charismatic Nigel Farage is sweeping up the discontented, while on the other Starmer’s Labour is offering what the Tories promised but failed to even begin delivery on.
No doubt if Labour fails to deliver, the door will be ajar but that’s where Farage and his band of misfits stand to gain.
Badenoch resembles an unruly, but not overly disruptive child in a classroom. Easily shut down and no one really takes notice of her.
However, if the Tories believe that another leadership campaign is the answer then clearly they have not learnt their lesson. And the party should prepare for more time in the political wilderness. Worse still, it could even slide into complete irrelevance.
If the membership thinks Robert Jenrick is the answer to its problems then they may as well wrap it up and cease being a political party. Jenrick is an empty vessel who will get found out the moment he has to counter detailed policy. Painting over cartoons at an asylum seeker detention centre is not policy, it is posturing of the worst kind.
What the Tories need is a leader who is willing to reconnect the party to what has made it so successful over the years. The party of traditional values. The party of sound money. The party of business and enterprise.
The Tories are at their strongest when they are at their most serious. It can’t afford to become an anti-establishment pressure group.
Voters turn to the Tories because they want a meritocracy but they want compassion alongside this.
The reality is that the past decade and a half have damaged that reputation and rather than fixing the holes in the leaky ship, there are some within the party that are intent on making even more holes. Soon the party will resemble a sieve.
A lot of people have forgotten what got the Tories into Number 10 in the first place. Under David Cameron, for all his faults, the party underwent a drastic period of modernisation.
Lord Cameron, as he is known now, frittered that away in a desperate attempt to shore up support before the 2015 general election. But the public paid little attention to the Tories, even when Sir Tony Blair, as the former Prime Minister is now known, took Britain on foreign jaunts that were deeply unpopular with voters.
Following Brexit in 2016, rather than hold the party together Lord Cameron decided he had enough at playing Prime Minister. No one has come up with a better analysis of Lord Cameron than cockney actor Danny Dyer’s in 2018, the words of which cannot be printed in a family newspaper.
Brexit got done, at great cost. The party of business became the party of…not business. Traditional values such as probity were replaced with lies, lies and more lies. Democracy became a nuisance. And this was all just under one PM.
That is why the party is in desperate need of renewal. It needs a moderniser at the helm.
Someone who commands authority in Parliament and with members who want to see the party win elections and not become a glorified pressure group. And no this isn’t a case of undoing Brexit. Rather it is about shaking the hangover off. The sooner the Tories move on, the better it’ll be. The question of rejoining off the table anyway.
The problem is that the talent pool is very shallow and there are no obvious candidates to take the Tories out of the mire.