Kemi badenoch

Thursday

Tim Shipman

The real war is to come for the Tories

British politics often resembles a golden-age murder mystery, with multiple parties sitting anxiously on the sofas/green benches waiting for the detective/electorate to crack the case. The Reform, Labour and Tory conferences provided a plethora of clues. But just as Sherlock Holmes solved ‘The Adventure of Silver Blaze’ by diving into the significance of the dog that didn’t bark, just as much can be learned from what didn’t happen over the past few weeks. First, there was no serious leadership challenge from the pretenders in Labour or the Conservatives. Andy Burnham turned up in Liverpool with a knife between his teeth, only to discover he neither had a seat nor the

The Spectator

Letters: Why shouldn’t we eat swan?

Zero chance Sir: In Tim Shipman’s wide-ranging article on Kemi Badenoch (‘I have a lot of self-belief’, 4 October), she claims that net zero has become just a slogan and that we can’t tackle climate change alone. In that she is right, but she fails to recognise that unless we can be seen to be world leaders in reducing emissions, then we will never be in a place to lecture other countries – many of whom just want what we have already had. By being the ‘goody-two-shoes’ in the fight against climate change, we will have the very best chance of bringing the rest of the world with us, without

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Was that Kemi Badenoch’s last conference? Quite right! live from Manchester

42 min listen

This week, Michael and Maddie record Quite right! in front of a live audience at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester – with attendance down, the big question is whether Kemi Badenoch can survive as leader of the opposition. There is the unmistakable air of fatalism among MPs staring down electoral annihilation – but would another change in leadership cement the Tories as pathologically regicidal? They also debate Badenoch’s bold pledge to bar candidates who won’t back leaving the European Convention on Human Rights – a ‘calculated risk’ that could redefine the party’s identity or too little too late? Then, in the wake of the horrific Manchester synagogue attack, they

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch’s plan to save the Tories

18 min listen

The Prime Minister was set to announce his crackdown on the existing rights of refugees at the European Political Community meeting today; however, he has flown back to chair a Cobra meeting after a terror attack in Manchester. Two people have been killed and at least two others injured after a driver allegedly rammed a car into pedestrians outside a synagogue and attacked them with a knife. The suspect, who was shot by police, is also believed to be dead. Also on the podcast, Tim Shipman interviews Kemi Badenoch for the magazine this week. As she enters conference season with the Tories running third in the polls behind Reform and

Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch: how I plan to save the Tories

Kemi Badenoch is in ebullient form. She promises the Conservative party conference, which begins this weekend in Manchester, will be ‘more fun than usual’. But that does not mean the Tory leader plans to sweep on stage like Reform’s Andrea Jenkyns. ‘I won’t be wearing any jumpsuits with sequins on,’ Badenoch says. ‘I won’t be singing “Insomniac”.’ The state of the opinion polls, with the Tories at well below 20 per cent, ought to give her sleepless nights, but she is upbeat. What, I wonder, is her karaoke song? Her three children ‘are the DJs’ in the Badenoch household and ‘all they sing are Taylor Swift songs’. I push my

William Atkinson

The Tories must free themselves from the cult of Thatcher

Like every Tory Boy, I had a Margaret Thatcher poster. I put it up when I was 15 and had just joined the party. Above my bed, resplendent in blue, the Iron Lady glowered down at my teddies. Naturally, it came down when I first brought home a girlfriend. For any young Tories lacking in Thatcher tat, this week’s Conservative party conference will provide plenty of opportunities for purchasing some. It (almost) coincides with the 100th anniversary of Thatcher’s birth on 13 October. The occasion has been heralded by a series of think-tank initiatives, dinners and conferences and the release of a one-volume edition of Charles Moore’s biography. The Iron

Wednesday

Michael Gove

Is Labour ‘racist’ too? Plus Trump’s Gaza gamble & Rowling vs Watson

48 min listen

This week, Michael and Maddie report from the Labour party conference in Liverpool and unpick Keir Starmer’s big speech. Was his attempt to reclaim patriotism for Labour a genuine statement of values – or a clumsy exercise in stereotypes about steelworkers, chip shops and football nostalgia? And why does Labour’s attack line on Nigel Farage risk sounding like political ‘nuclear warfare’ that could backfire outside the conference hall? And what about the Tories? With Labour bringing the fight to the Reform party, where does this leave Kemi Badenoch and the Conservatives ahead of their conference later this week? They then turn to Donald Trump’s extraordinary new Middle East peace initiative.

Thursday

Jeffrey Archer

What Nigel Farage told me

I recently attended the Young Dancer of the Year competition at the Royal Opera House, organised by the formidable Jacquie Brunjes. Sixteen young girls and boys aged 14 to 16 who had won a place in the final, all strutted their stuff in the hope of becoming the eventual winner. I watched each performance with a keen amateur eye, and selected my three to be awarded prizes, and not one of them made it to the final. Dame Arlene Phillips selected Cooper Filby, and I asked her afterwards if he had a chance of making it on to the professional stage. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘The standard of young dancers

Thursday

Toby Young

You can’t cancel the cancelled

When Theresa May appointed me as a non-executive director of the Office for Students, the Downing Street press office decided to embargo the news until midnight on New Year’s Day 2018. It may be that it hoped to slip it out under the radar, calculating that most journalists would be too drunk to notice. If so, it didn’t work. The Guardian decided it wasn’t going to let the government get away with this sleight of hand and stuck the following headline on its website at 12.01: ‘Toby Young to help lead government’s new universities regulator.’ The offence archaeologists immediately set to work digging through everything I’d said or written, looking

Tuesday

Tim Shipman

Will Shabana stop the boats?

19 min listen

With the announcement yesterday that the government would be prepared to suspend visas for countries that don’t cooperate with the UK over deportations, has Shabana Mahmood shown she has what it takes to tackle immigration? Tim Shipman and James Heale join Patrick Gibbons to discuss whether the new home secretary can ‘stop the boats’. But, as the government ‘reset’ continues, all eyes are on Labour’s deputy leadership race. The most high-profile MPs to throw their hats in the ring are education secretary Bridget Phillipson, former shadow foreign secretary Emily Thornberry – and Lucy Powell, fresh from her sacking as Leader of the House of Commons. Is the race shaping up

Thursday

Tim Shipman

Robert Jenrick: ‘Asylum seekers should be detained in camps’

On a table in Robert Jenrick’s parliamentary office lies the first part of Ronald Hutton’s biography of Oliver Cromwell, a conventional MP who became radicalised by events and usurped a monarch. The shadow justice secretary is very on message when it comes to the prospect of regicide in the Conservative party (‘I’m just doing my job. Kemi is the leader’). But as one who recently travelled to Calais to berate the French authorities for facilitating Channel small boat crossings, Jenrick has found unlikely inspiration in another bloody-minded leader. ‘I’ve been reading biographies of de Gaulle over the summer and he had a line that “Treaties are like roses, they last

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Kemi Badenoch’s North Sea plan is just another soundbite

‘We’re going to get all our oil and gas out of the North Sea’ was certainly a winning line for Kemi Badenoch to deliver to the Offshore Europe conference in Aberdeen this week, just as she might open with ‘I love puppies’ to a spaniel breeders’ convention in Surrey. But other than as an appeal to climate-change-sceptic would-be Reform voters, how much sense did it make? A recent study by the industry body hosting the Aberdeen event says that if – in some Ed-Miliband-free alternative universe – all remaining reserves under the North Sea were licensed for development, they could provide half the UK’s hydrocarbon needs until 2050, by which

Wednesday

Tim Shipman

PMQs: Rayner defended as Badenoch flops

17 min listen

Keir Starmer and Kemi Badenoch faced off in the first Prime Minister’s Questions following summer recess. With the date of the Budget announced that morning, the economy was expected to dominate – which it did, to the surprise of most MPs, who expected Badenoch to attack over the Angela Rayner tax row. The deputy prime minister had admitted that morning she underpaid stamp duty on her flat in Hove. The leader of the opposition did question Starmer on it initially, but as political editor Tim Shipman says she more than missed an open goal. Tim joins Isabel Hardman and Lucy Dunn to discuss how damaging the row is for Rayner

Thursday

The Spectator

Britain is broke – and we all need to face it

Sometimes when I go to bed, I think that if I were a young man I would emigrate,’ said James Callaghan, the then foreign secretary, in 1974. He was referring to that decade’s chronic economic dysfunction, with its double-digit inflation, growing unemployment and stuttering growth. Two years later, as prime minister, he would have to go cap in hand to request a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. Two years after that came the Winter of Discontent. Today’s economic picture may not be quite so bleak. Even so, the young see only intractable stagnation, cost-of-living pressures and visible decline. A recent poll suggested that more than a quarter of 18-

Wednesday

Freddy Gray

Does MAGA prefer Jenrick?

11 min listen

JD Vance has been in the Cotswolds this week on his Britain fantasy tour. This has been billed as a ‘holiday’ but he did take the time out of his busy schedule to meet with some of Britain’s right-wing politicians. Robert Jenrick, Chris Philp and Nigel Farage were all granted an audience with the vice-president, and even Danny Kruger and pillow salesman/Apprentice star Thomas Skinner got the call-up. The notable exclusion is, of course, Kemi Badenoch, who despite claiming to be firm friends with Vance was NFI’d. CCHQ claim this is due to scheduling, but clearly it’s an embarrassing snub. So who is MAGA’s favourite UK politician? And do the

Friday

Tim Shipman

Kemi Badenoch’s God Delusion

18 min listen

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has given a wide-ranging interview to the BBC’s Amol Rajan in which she touched upon her Nigerian upbringing, her feeling of identity and she even revealed she called out a peer for cheating at school. But perhaps her most interesting comments came when she revealed how she lost her belief in God. The Reverend Fergus Butler-Gallie, author of Twelve Churches, and Tim Shipman join Oscar Edmondson to discuss Kemi’s comments. Is it credible to call yourself a ‘cultural Christian’? And, with both an atheist Prime Minister and agnostic Leader of the Opposition, is the decline of religion in politics inevitable? Plus: with the news that Germany

Thursday

Michael Gove

Why the Tories should oppose regime change

As a minister I lived by mantras: simple principles that summed up how I believed you got things done. Faced with a PowerPoint presentation as means of influencing policy, I’d sling it back in the box with the injunction ‘Think in ink’ – in other words, make a proper sustained argument on paper instead of trying to advance shonky argument with a series of unevidenced assertions, a dodgy graph and the words ‘levelling up’ on every page in bold. Told that the prospect of a judicial review should mean shelving a policy, I’d write on the submission: ‘If the legal advice says no, get a better lawyer.’ Informed by officials

Tuesday

Tim Shipman

Can you ‘take the politics out’ of the grooming gangs scandal?

13 min listen

Yesterday Yvette Cooper announced a national inquiry into the grooming gangs scandal after the Casey Review found that a disproportionate number of Asian men were responsible and that governments and authorities had failed to step in over fears of racism. Anxious to press Labour on their U-turn – memorably, Starmer accused the Tories of ‘jumping on the far-right bandwagon’ – Kemi Badenoch held a press conference, joined by victims of the gangs. ‘I’m not doing politics now, when I’m in the Houses of Parliament, when I’m in the Commons, I will do politics’, she said. But can you really take the politics out of the grooming gangs scandal? Elsewhere, Donald

Thursday

Rod Liddle

Kemi’s one chance at recovery? Trussonomics

You may have noticed that for some while the BBC News people have stopped referring to Reform UK as ‘far right’ or ‘hard right’. That’s not because Nigel Farage has tacked to the left a little on such policies as nationalisation; one characteristic of the left is that if they consider you ‘far right’, they will not commend anything you say, even if they fervently agree with it. You will never gain their favour, even if you join Greta Thunberg on her stupid and narcissistic boat expedition to Gaza and then pronounce your solidarity with all trans folk. This is one of the mistakes often made by people who are

Thursday

Matthew Parris

The battle over fishing is a sideshow

So far, so routine. Labour wants to update and if possible upgrade the United Kingdom’s arrangements with our immediate neighbour and by far our biggest trading partner, the European Union. As any new government would. The recent destabilisation of world trade adds urgency to the task. So our government goes to Brussels and (after the customary silly European ‘to the wire’ theatrics) hammers out what looks like a sensible improvement on the existing unnecessarily irksome restrictions and procedures. The deal involves – inevitably – a few concessions on both sides (we concede a bit on fishing) but overall looks modestly advantageous for us and for them. A thoroughly workmanlike result.