The Conservative party conference is in full swing in Manchester with plenty more speeches and fringe events to go. Despite being rather poorly attended this year, the atmosphere among members is not downbeat – although already Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has had to defend herself again some rather unfortunate poll results. A YouGov poll has revealed that half of all Tory members don’t think Badenoch should lead the party into the next election, which is hardly the best of news for the party leader to receive in the middle of her group’s big annual meet…
But Badenoch has hit back, complaining to Times Radio today that she is being ‘written off’ much like Margaret Thatcher was when she was in opposition. She went on about the Iron Lady:
What is most interesting is how many things sort of rhyme from what [Thatcher] experienced in opposition and what I’m experiencing now. I read this really great book, A Tory and Her Party, and it’s contemporaneous. It talks about her experiences between ’75 and ’77 and pretty much everything that I’m experiencing now, she did.
She was written off. There was a charismatic person who was taking a lot of attention and people thought, well, you know, the Tory party’s finished, this is the person who’s going to be the opposition. No one even talks about him any more, Jeremy Thorpe. And at the time people were terrified.
Could that be a thinly-veiled warning to those talking up Badenoch’s onetime leadership rival Robert Jenrick?
On a more positive note for Kemi, two-thirds of the audience at the Spectator’s Coffee House Shots Live event today would like her to lead the party into the next general election. She may be down, but she’s definitely not out…
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