For one’s beloved to die usually rules out any frivolous subsequent infatuations. Not so with Margaret Thatcher and the generation of Tory boys she seduced for life throughout the 1980s. If anything, these admirers do an injustice to their heroine’s undoubted uniqueness by insisting on seeing her reincarnation just about everywhere.
Only recently, it was the turn of Theresa May. “Steel of the New Iron Lady,” ran the Daily Mail front page on 18 January, 2017. Though much feted by the mainstream Tory rags at this time as the unassailable heir to Thatcher, within a year May had squandered an historic majority and was watering down the terms of Britain’s departure from the European Union—all while continuing to preside, like her predecessor David Cameron, over treacherous levels of replacement migration. She is since on record proudly identifying as “woke” and, naturally awarded a peerage, spent her maiden speech in the House of Lords bleating about climate change.
Have any lessons been learned? If the avalanche of puff pieces glorifying Kemi Badenoch is any indication, it seems not. There is no end to the recyclability of this hoary routine. Badenoch, of course, has the added advantage of being not only a woman but a black woman—and not only a black woman but a black woman with perception enough to notice that ladies are not issued by nature with penises. This somehow makes her the answer to something.
The reasoning is never made quite clear. In his Daily Telegraph endorsement of Badenoch, Charles Moore—now Lord Moore of Etchingham—applauds her “immigrant patriotism for this country, an emotion often underrated by those of us brought up here.” This latter dig at Britain’s host population, the suggestion that we need foreigners to remind us how exceptional we are, is difficult to square with the fact that ethnic minorities overwhelmingly vote for unpatriotic left-wing parties.
Badenoch’s supposed “immigrant patriotism” is even harder to square with her own comments, while standing in a diverse London seat around a decade ago, regarding her intention as a Nigerian to lobby for West Africa in Westminster. “I am asking you to support a Nigerian who is trying to improve our national image and do something great here.” What were these “great” things? Well, they included peddling influence to “speak out against those who are cheating and robbing Nigeria” and working on behalf of any fellow Nigerians “who seek refuge for themselves or their money in the UK.” The best interests of her host nation—the very thing Lord Moore praises Badenoch for cherishing—appear to have been remote from her mind.
Needless to say, this is indistinguishable from the shameless ethno-politics played by the Democrat Party’s Ilhan Omar on behalf of her native Somalia or Labour’s Naz Shah on behalf of her Pakistani heritage. By any definition, including Badenoch’s own more recently expressed standards, the promise to agitate on behalf of Nigerian interests also constitutes foreign subversion of our national politics. Are we supposed to relax our rules if the immigrant in question dons a blue rosette?
Simon Heffer, also endorsing Badenoch in the Telegraph, makes the obligatory comparison to the Iron Lady. “Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher.” She is then showered with the sort of epithets that, to anyone fond of rigour, should not so much clinch the deal as arouse immediate suspicion: “hard-minded” and “deeply principled.”
I will confess to caring very little for what I have seen of these principles—of which more later. But one of them, it would appear, is an attachment to a peculiar form of anti-white bigotry. Badenoch is on record describing her own university peers as “stupid lefty white kids.” It was no singular indiscretion. True to such form, when attacked by the actor David Tennant for her gender-critical public stances, she responded by zoning in on perhaps the one unobjectionable thing about this otherwise irredeemable luvvie: his white skin.
A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end.
In an interview with my friend Steven Edginton, Jacob Rees-Mogg tried to downplay the significance of Badenoch’s having used whiteness as a pejorative, arguing that since she also called Tennant “rich” and conservatives naturally approve of wealth-creation, she cannot have meant “white” as an insult. I would dearly love to watch Rees-Mogg attempt the same disingenuous get-out if the celebrity in question had been David Baddiel and Kemi Badenoch had shot back writing him off as a “rich male Jew.”
One struggles to avoid the supposition, given the weakness of the arguments made by these two otherwise insightful gentlemen, that the likes of Moore and Heffer feel an exhilarating quality at endorsing a black immigrant ‘boss-girl.’ Such weak-kneed sentimentality is no doubt helped along by the concomitant hope that it will assist them in their quest to duck the other side’s constant accusations of racism.
Even if, as is highly doubtful, this latter calculation is true, to win on the terms of one’s adversaries is to lose monumentally. Just as it would be a huge victory for the Right to get leftists embracing demographic realism, so in actual fact it represents an immense victory for the Left that it has managed to get conservatives celebrating diversity and treating straight white men, particularly under David Cameron’s management, as the effective political equivalents of lepers. It does conservatism no long-term favours to treat bitter race communists as the rightful arbiters of moral authority in Britain.
It is a tall order to imagine a more impoverished concept than ‘woke Right.’ Effortlessly dismantled here by my friend Connor Tomlinson, the term is best thought of as a rhetorical club with which ‘free-thinking’ liberals, exiled for insufficient enthusiasm by a fanatically strident Left, now hope to police the boundaries of permissible thought among their sudden conservative bedfellows. Set aside the conceptual promiscuity involved in stretching the meaning of ‘woke’ to describe more or less anything one finds undesirable; for strategic reasons alone, we should refuse to be schoolmarmed by people who, if they even identify as right-wing at all, only joined the ranks ten minutes ago.
In any case, a much stronger definition of ‘woke Right’—though it is pointless to try and redeem the term at this stage—would be one that identifies and calls out supposedly right-wing figures who, in the course of fighting woke activists, manage themselves to draw inspiration from the woke moral universe. As we have already glimpsed, both Badenoch and her cheerleaders fit this mould.
“A black African woman leading the oldest political party in the world would be a sight for sore eyes,” writes Moore in his Telegraph tribute. Implying that diversity is a good in itself, this is a spineless surrender to the assumption—far more beneficial to left-wing onslaughts than conservative politics—that the British people are not properly ‘anti-racist’ unless they consent to be governed by a foreigner. Would Moore wish to see the Israelis browbeaten into accepting for themselves a similar standard: namely, that a non-Jewish prime minister must be installed to appease the cries of racist wickedness that Israel receives every day? Would a Palestinian Arab lady leading the party of Menachem Begin be “a sight for sore eyes” or an unmistakable sign that the Israeli Right had lost confidence in its own people?
Heffer again: “she [Badenoch] is an outspoken enemy of the insidious ideology of woke, which does so much harm to our liberties, our identity as Britons, and our idea of ourselves.” Presumably, Heffer concludes this on the basis of the smattering of impassioned speeches Badenoch made against trans ideology at the despatch box during her time as minister for equalities. It may be more educational to look at her policy record.
Of course, the first and last item of business for any truly anti-woke firebrand who rose to become the minister for equalities would be to liquidate such a sinister neo-Jacobin post altogether. The driving purpose of DEI is to pounce upon tribal grievances and treat different groups unequally in order to make them equal. Badenoch not only refused to disband her department for its inherently left-wing character, but made sure to continue and even escalate the entire grift.
In 2022, Badenoch won much praise in the Tory media for her response to the Sewell Commission’s report on ethnic disparities, summarised in a paper she wrote and defended in parliament, Inclusive Britain: An Action Plan. She was hailed as an anti-woke warrior for her pugnacious style and uncompromising delivery, but James McSweeney points out in The Critic how few people must have actually read it. Anyone who bothered to do so cannot have been encouraged by Action 17:
To close the gap in pay between different ethnic groups working within NHS England, we will commission a new Ethnicity Pay Gap research project. The project will consider the scale and causes of the ethnicity pay gap across the NHS and produce actionable recommendations on how to reduce it.
As McSweeney reports, the plan also included loans awarded on the basis of race and a crackdown on ‘hate speech’ in private messages. Would Governor Ron DeSantis, apparently enamoured of Badenoch, tolerate any of this in the state of Florida? The DEI agenda continues to infect just about every organ of Britain’s body politic. Heffer is a hopeless judge if he sets greater stock in the odd bit of suggestive rhetoric than he does in the demonstrable fact that Badenoch not only allowed “the insidious ideology of woke” to become more triumphant than ever, but helped to consolidate its power.
“Modern Conservatism,” Moore insists, “should have no 39 Articles to which supporters must swear allegiance.” 39 may be a little exacting, but we could do with a few cast-iron principles. After decades of betrayal at the hands of successive Tory governments, some small set of bare minimum standards, if not quite as many as Cranmer had in mind for the Church of England, would enable us to draw a line between solid political allies and untrustworthy chancers. Whatever standards we might prioritise, there can be little doubt that Badenoch falls short on more or less all of them.
In addition to everything recounted above, Badenoch has also boasted about giving money to race communist NGOs and lobbied for fewer checks on legal immigration, even going so far as to imply that such is her duty as a first-generation immigrant. For a guest in a new country to identify more with the general pool of prospective immigrants than with the consistently expressed desires of the people hosting her to see immigration drastically reduced reveals a staggering ingratitude. It is certainly not the hallmark of assimilation.
While both Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, her last standing rival in the Tory leadership race, have their flaws, hers are a special case. The uniquely dreadful thing about Badenoch is that, despite every imaginable ground for knowing better, she is still widely perceived as something of a right-wing saviour in the making. A Badenoch victory would thus be particularly insidious, for it would encourage a complacent sense among conservatives that all is right with the world again—or at least will be soon. We do not have time for this.
Jenrick’s sincerity as “a late convert to the blindingly obvious,” as Connor Tomlinson likes to put it, is a debatable question. If it is a genuine Damascus moment, it would make him not only less bad than Badenoch, but essentially good. That said, even if we still regard him as untrustworthy, at the very least with his commitment to leaving the ECHR and his talk of not just halting but reversing much of the damage done by mass immigration, Jenrick is putting pressure on Nigel Farage to be more politically ambitious. This is vital at a time when, on mass deportations and much else, Reform’s rhetoric has been softening.
A scenario in which both Farage and Jenrick feel moved to outbid each other from the Right in order to win and maintain our affections could set in motion a very agreeable conservative arms’ race. For this reason alone, a Jenrick win would be considerably more useful to those of us intent on seeing our inheritance restored and the spite with which we were cheated out of it avenged.
Kemi Badenoch: The Real Woke ‘Rightist’
Leadership candidate and Britain’s main opposition Conservative Party Shadow Housing, Communities and Local Government Secretary Kemi Badenoch delivers a speech on the final day of the annual Conservative Party Conference in Birmingham, central England, on October 2, 2024. (Photo by Henry Nicholls/ AFP)
For one’s beloved to die usually rules out any frivolous subsequent infatuations. Not so with Margaret Thatcher and the generation of Tory boys she seduced for life throughout the 1980s. If anything, these admirers do an injustice to their heroine’s undoubted uniqueness by insisting on seeing her reincarnation just about everywhere.
Only recently, it was the turn of Theresa May. “Steel of the New Iron Lady,” ran the Daily Mail front page on 18 January, 2017. Though much feted by the mainstream Tory rags at this time as the unassailable heir to Thatcher, within a year May had squandered an historic majority and was watering down the terms of Britain’s departure from the European Union—all while continuing to preside, like her predecessor David Cameron, over treacherous levels of replacement migration. She is since on record proudly identifying as “woke” and, naturally awarded a peerage, spent her maiden speech in the House of Lords bleating about climate change.
Have any lessons been learned? If the avalanche of puff pieces glorifying Kemi Badenoch is any indication, it seems not. There is no end to the recyclability of this hoary routine. Badenoch, of course, has the added advantage of being not only a woman but a black woman—and not only a black woman but a black woman with perception enough to notice that ladies are not issued by nature with penises. This somehow makes her the answer to something.
The reasoning is never made quite clear. In his Daily Telegraph endorsement of Badenoch, Charles Moore—now Lord Moore of Etchingham—applauds her “immigrant patriotism for this country, an emotion often underrated by those of us brought up here.” This latter dig at Britain’s host population, the suggestion that we need foreigners to remind us how exceptional we are, is difficult to square with the fact that ethnic minorities overwhelmingly vote for unpatriotic left-wing parties.
Badenoch’s supposed “immigrant patriotism” is even harder to square with her own comments, while standing in a diverse London seat around a decade ago, regarding her intention as a Nigerian to lobby for West Africa in Westminster. “I am asking you to support a Nigerian who is trying to improve our national image and do something great here.” What were these “great” things? Well, they included peddling influence to “speak out against those who are cheating and robbing Nigeria” and working on behalf of any fellow Nigerians “who seek refuge for themselves or their money in the UK.” The best interests of her host nation—the very thing Lord Moore praises Badenoch for cherishing—appear to have been remote from her mind.
Needless to say, this is indistinguishable from the shameless ethno-politics played by the Democrat Party’s Ilhan Omar on behalf of her native Somalia or Labour’s Naz Shah on behalf of her Pakistani heritage. By any definition, including Badenoch’s own more recently expressed standards, the promise to agitate on behalf of Nigerian interests also constitutes foreign subversion of our national politics. Are we supposed to relax our rules if the immigrant in question dons a blue rosette?
Simon Heffer, also endorsing Badenoch in the Telegraph, makes the obligatory comparison to the Iron Lady. “Mrs Badenoch is the politician who most reminds me of Mrs Thatcher since I last saw Mrs Thatcher.” She is then showered with the sort of epithets that, to anyone fond of rigour, should not so much clinch the deal as arouse immediate suspicion: “hard-minded” and “deeply principled.”
I will confess to caring very little for what I have seen of these principles—of which more later. But one of them, it would appear, is an attachment to a peculiar form of anti-white bigotry. Badenoch is on record describing her own university peers as “stupid lefty white kids.” It was no singular indiscretion. True to such form, when attacked by the actor David Tennant for her gender-critical public stances, she responded by zoning in on perhaps the one unobjectionable thing about this otherwise irredeemable luvvie: his white skin.
In an interview with my friend Steven Edginton, Jacob Rees-Mogg tried to downplay the significance of Badenoch’s having used whiteness as a pejorative, arguing that since she also called Tennant “rich” and conservatives naturally approve of wealth-creation, she cannot have meant “white” as an insult. I would dearly love to watch Rees-Mogg attempt the same disingenuous get-out if the celebrity in question had been David Baddiel and Kemi Badenoch had shot back writing him off as a “rich male Jew.”
One struggles to avoid the supposition, given the weakness of the arguments made by these two otherwise insightful gentlemen, that the likes of Moore and Heffer feel an exhilarating quality at endorsing a black immigrant ‘boss-girl.’ Such weak-kneed sentimentality is no doubt helped along by the concomitant hope that it will assist them in their quest to duck the other side’s constant accusations of racism.
Even if, as is highly doubtful, this latter calculation is true, to win on the terms of one’s adversaries is to lose monumentally. Just as it would be a huge victory for the Right to get leftists embracing demographic realism, so in actual fact it represents an immense victory for the Left that it has managed to get conservatives celebrating diversity and treating straight white men, particularly under David Cameron’s management, as the effective political equivalents of lepers. It does conservatism no long-term favours to treat bitter race communists as the rightful arbiters of moral authority in Britain.
It is a tall order to imagine a more impoverished concept than ‘woke Right.’ Effortlessly dismantled here by my friend Connor Tomlinson, the term is best thought of as a rhetorical club with which ‘free-thinking’ liberals, exiled for insufficient enthusiasm by a fanatically strident Left, now hope to police the boundaries of permissible thought among their sudden conservative bedfellows. Set aside the conceptual promiscuity involved in stretching the meaning of ‘woke’ to describe more or less anything one finds undesirable; for strategic reasons alone, we should refuse to be schoolmarmed by people who, if they even identify as right-wing at all, only joined the ranks ten minutes ago.
In any case, a much stronger definition of ‘woke Right’—though it is pointless to try and redeem the term at this stage—would be one that identifies and calls out supposedly right-wing figures who, in the course of fighting woke activists, manage themselves to draw inspiration from the woke moral universe. As we have already glimpsed, both Badenoch and her cheerleaders fit this mould.
“A black African woman leading the oldest political party in the world would be a sight for sore eyes,” writes Moore in his Telegraph tribute. Implying that diversity is a good in itself, this is a spineless surrender to the assumption—far more beneficial to left-wing onslaughts than conservative politics—that the British people are not properly ‘anti-racist’ unless they consent to be governed by a foreigner. Would Moore wish to see the Israelis browbeaten into accepting for themselves a similar standard: namely, that a non-Jewish prime minister must be installed to appease the cries of racist wickedness that Israel receives every day? Would a Palestinian Arab lady leading the party of Menachem Begin be “a sight for sore eyes” or an unmistakable sign that the Israeli Right had lost confidence in its own people?
Heffer again: “she [Badenoch] is an outspoken enemy of the insidious ideology of woke, which does so much harm to our liberties, our identity as Britons, and our idea of ourselves.” Presumably, Heffer concludes this on the basis of the smattering of impassioned speeches Badenoch made against trans ideology at the despatch box during her time as minister for equalities. It may be more educational to look at her policy record.
Of course, the first and last item of business for any truly anti-woke firebrand who rose to become the minister for equalities would be to liquidate such a sinister neo-Jacobin post altogether. The driving purpose of DEI is to pounce upon tribal grievances and treat different groups unequally in order to make them equal. Badenoch not only refused to disband her department for its inherently left-wing character, but made sure to continue and even escalate the entire grift.
In 2022, Badenoch won much praise in the Tory media for her response to the Sewell Commission’s report on ethnic disparities, summarised in a paper she wrote and defended in parliament, Inclusive Britain: An Action Plan. She was hailed as an anti-woke warrior for her pugnacious style and uncompromising delivery, but James McSweeney points out in The Critic how few people must have actually read it. Anyone who bothered to do so cannot have been encouraged by Action 17:
As McSweeney reports, the plan also included loans awarded on the basis of race and a crackdown on ‘hate speech’ in private messages. Would Governor Ron DeSantis, apparently enamoured of Badenoch, tolerate any of this in the state of Florida? The DEI agenda continues to infect just about every organ of Britain’s body politic. Heffer is a hopeless judge if he sets greater stock in the odd bit of suggestive rhetoric than he does in the demonstrable fact that Badenoch not only allowed “the insidious ideology of woke” to become more triumphant than ever, but helped to consolidate its power.
“Modern Conservatism,” Moore insists, “should have no 39 Articles to which supporters must swear allegiance.” 39 may be a little exacting, but we could do with a few cast-iron principles. After decades of betrayal at the hands of successive Tory governments, some small set of bare minimum standards, if not quite as many as Cranmer had in mind for the Church of England, would enable us to draw a line between solid political allies and untrustworthy chancers. Whatever standards we might prioritise, there can be little doubt that Badenoch falls short on more or less all of them.
In addition to everything recounted above, Badenoch has also boasted about giving money to race communist NGOs and lobbied for fewer checks on legal immigration, even going so far as to imply that such is her duty as a first-generation immigrant. For a guest in a new country to identify more with the general pool of prospective immigrants than with the consistently expressed desires of the people hosting her to see immigration drastically reduced reveals a staggering ingratitude. It is certainly not the hallmark of assimilation.
While both Badenoch and Robert Jenrick, her last standing rival in the Tory leadership race, have their flaws, hers are a special case. The uniquely dreadful thing about Badenoch is that, despite every imaginable ground for knowing better, she is still widely perceived as something of a right-wing saviour in the making. A Badenoch victory would thus be particularly insidious, for it would encourage a complacent sense among conservatives that all is right with the world again—or at least will be soon. We do not have time for this.
Jenrick’s sincerity as “a late convert to the blindingly obvious,” as Connor Tomlinson likes to put it, is a debatable question. If it is a genuine Damascus moment, it would make him not only less bad than Badenoch, but essentially good. That said, even if we still regard him as untrustworthy, at the very least with his commitment to leaving the ECHR and his talk of not just halting but reversing much of the damage done by mass immigration, Jenrick is putting pressure on Nigel Farage to be more politically ambitious. This is vital at a time when, on mass deportations and much else, Reform’s rhetoric has been softening.
A scenario in which both Farage and Jenrick feel moved to outbid each other from the Right in order to win and maintain our affections could set in motion a very agreeable conservative arms’ race. For this reason alone, a Jenrick win would be considerably more useful to those of us intent on seeing our inheritance restored and the spite with which we were cheated out of it avenged.
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