Like most people of my age – I’m 66 – I grew up in a time when politics was a tribal thing, like supporting a football team. My earliest political memory concerned a local election which took place in the 1960s in my working-class neighbourhood of Bristol South. At break time, there was a group of rough boys swaggering around the playground, grabbing other boys and asking bluntly ‘Sam or Doctor?’ These were, respectively, the Labour and Conservative local election candidates; if you said ‘Sam’ you were released but if you said ‘Doctor’ you were shoved roughly between the boys and proffered a punch for your uppity ways.
There’s so much about Reform I like – and so much about the Tories I loathe
Growing up in such an environment, was it any wonder that, as late as 2013, Toby Young in this magazine was puzzled that, knowing me to be a contrarian ‘I can’t persuade her to throw in her lot with Nigel Farage. ‘I’ve always voted Labour and I always will,’ she says sadly. ‘I’ve got to have one stupid, docile, bovine part of me and that’s the part that votes Labour.’’
I don’t recognise that person now, thank goodness. In 2019, I voted Conservative for the first time, for Boris, and because of Brexit. The morning after, not only did I feel no shame, but I didn’t grow horns, as my father implied might most likely happen if I voted anything but Labour. Since then, with the joyous fall of the Red Wall and in common with millions of my equally amazed compatriots, I’ve gloried in the fact that we don’t have to be counted, corralled and branded like cattle by the two main parties – with the odd rogue bovine straying off to the equally smug and useless Lib-Dems. Thanks largely to the efforts of the aforementioned Nigel Farage, we’re free to choose.
But freedom brings agreeable dilemmas. There’s no doubt now that if one has any belief in freedom of thought and expression, one has to dress to the Right; it’s a cliche, but like a bad relationship, it’s not me, it’s you. I stayed where I was in terms of belief and the Left moved, to create a world in which – in the words of John Lydon – ‘I never thought I’d live to see the day when the Right would become the cool ones giving the finger to the establishment and the Left become the snivelling self-righteous ones going around shaming everybody.’
Living in the Peoples Republic of Brighton and Hove, I can’t vote this time around; when I can, Reform seem the obvious choice for me – if only it wasn’t for Kemi Badenoch. Even typing her name gives me a mild thrill; I’m that keen on her, but may I say not in a carnal way. (Though she is absolutely beautiful.)
In 2024, I wrote an essay here in praise of Kemi; she sent me a pleasant message in return and I got drunk one evening and sent her an admiring poem written by a ChatGPT robot which she handled with her characteristic poise. But never the most loyal of characters, the next year I could be found in the i paper writing of Reform; ‘When I and millions of other former Labour voters choose Reform at the next general election, it’s not because we’re rabid Right-wingers. It’s because we’re done with being lectured by clowns. Keir Starmer gives the impression that he only comes alive in the rarified air of Davos. Ed Davey shows a similar lack of connection, with his numerous conversations about how many women have penises. Kemi Badenoch is likeable but the party she leads spent nearly a decade and a half permitting every source of power from the police to the civil service to be captured and poisoned by anti-democratic, free speech-fearing weirdos’.
There’s no getting around the fact that Mrs B served in the Johnson, Sunak and Truss governments, but her work as Minister for Women and Equalities stands out in this sorry mulch. Then there’s that glorious back-story; doing her homework by candlelight in Nigeria, returning to England alone at 16 to complete her education, flipping burgers to pay her way through school, realising at Sussex University what a bunch of rotters the contemporary Left are, joining the Conservative Party to defy the campus conformity, being elected for her Essex seat at 37, campaigning while pushing her third child in a pushchair. It hasn’t been an easy road for a girl who once asked if you wanted extra fries with that to take on this most formidable of tasks; leading the once-most successful party in history back from the wilderness they willingly trotted into, as captured as an other sleep-walking institution.
Mocked for being quiet for too long, Badenoch has come alive recently; it’s likely that for the first year she was just thinking really hard about the best way to progress, as opposed to the hilariously banana-skin-skidding Starmer government, which knew that it wanted to get into power but had no idea of what to do once it was there, hence the now-comic U-turns.
Her performance at PMQs has brought the dreary snark-fest back to life, revealing Sir Keir in all his emptiness week by week, pulling the veils away to reveal The Man Who Wasn’t There, loitering on the stair. But it was her recent performance in Billericay (the Essex town where I lived during my teenage first marriage, incidentally) which totally convinced me that I want to vote for her – not for Reform.
Leading politicians aren’t as keen on going on ‘the stump’ as they once were, and of course the vile murders of David Amess and Jo Cox has given them an excellent reason not to, but I’ve always thought of it as a mark of sincerity – even if someone’s totally in the wrong, you at least feel like they believe it. I was always impressed by the way John Major used to lug that soapbox around, though I despised his policies; it’s impossible to imagine Keir Starmer doing anything even remotely similar. It’s telling that our glorious leader has basically been warned by his advisors to stay away; he has made around ten appearances while Farage has clocked up around a hundred. Mrs Badenoch likes to get out and about, and was very visible this week. It was friendly stuff – steaming clothes in a charity shop, supping in a pub – and then in Billericay, of all places, a nutter heckled her about the so-called ‘genocide’ in so-called ‘Palestine.’
I’m still attracted by the way Nigel Farage’s gang make politicians of other parties fall upon their fainting couches
‘The people who have died and who have been killed were Jewish people in synagogues…let’s stop pretending that something else is happening…this is how the 1930s started, with people pretending not to see what was in front of them’, she says in her beautiful, equable voice, turning to leave – and then something magical happens. Accused by the heckling nutter of ‘pandering to the Right’ she smiles and says ‘I am the Right! I am standing up for Jewish people – and I will never be intimidated by people like you.’ Like Judge Dredd – ‘I am the Law!’ I can’t think of a more spine-chilling and superb moment in modern politics.
I certainly can’t think of a Farage moment like that. Don’t get me wrong; I really like Farage. He’s a wide boy; it’s part of his charm – a pint, a fag, a nudge, a wink and no questions asked. But do we really want a man like that in charge, right after Sir ‘Recollections-may-vary’ Keir?
I’m still attracted by the way Farage’s gang make politicians of other parties fall upon their fainting couches; the plan to house illegal migrants in Green-voting neighbourhoods is hilarious. But Mrs Badenoch is a different class; she is that oft-referred to but rarely-spotted beast, ‘the better person.’ She’s honourable – but not a prig. Serious – but not a bore. Passionate – but not a pain. Righteous – but not self-righteous. There’s a reason she’s the most popular party leader, even though her party isn’t popular.
There’s so much about Reform I like – and so much about the Tories I loathe. They were lazy, entitled, smug; everything my parents hated them for. But I’m not my parents; the Red Wall is dust, and I’ve witnessed the huge task Mrs Badenoch has performed, the burden she had to contend with and the mess she was left to clean up by the extremely rich and privileged men who just bailed out when times got tough. Mick Jagger once allegedly said ‘My heart is Labour, my head is Liberal but my money is Conservative’; for me, my head is Farage but my heart is Badenoch. Whatever the result of the local elections, when I’m allowed to vote again, I’ll be voting for the party she leads – purely because she’s the one leading it.
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