Kemi badenoch

Fresh from chastising Labour for not involving Britain more deeply in another American misadventure in the Middle East, Kemi Badenoch is reportedly planning a ‘root and branch’ shadow cabinet reshuffle. Those most at risk are said to be her top team of Shadow Chancellor Mel Stride, Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel and Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp. For Lam, there are plenty of reasons to defect to Nigel Farage’s party The intention, the Daily Mail suggests, is to promote younger MPs ‘to energise the battered Tory brand’. Stride is said to ‘lack energy’, Patel ‘reminds voters of record levels of migration’, and Philp is believed to ‘no longer [be] fully

Freed from the burden of choosing a prospective government, by-elections are an opportunity for voters to tell the political class how they really feel. It is therefore no great surprise that the people of Gorton and Denton, until now a solid Labour heartland, have called on the uber-left Greens to give the status quo a kicking, with Reform coming in second. For the Conservatives, the more interesting story is not the Greens’ success in outer Manchester, but what the Green surge at the national level says about the voters who have been drifting into Zack Polanski’s orbit. The Greens have previously benefited from the agreeable vagueness of their brand. Green

If Kemi Badenoch makes a speech during a war with Iran, does anyone hear it? Following the Gorton and Denton by-election – but seemingly before President Trump had decided to set fire to the Middle East – the Conservative leader had intuited that it was time to outline her party’s new approach to our fraught multi-racial democracy. For now it is all buzzwords and no bite Emphasis on multi-racial, not multicultural. Badenoch said she had seen what a true multicultural society looked like while growing up in Nigeria: a country divided, despite a shared skin colour, by religion, culture and priorities. A country that she had left to come to

What does a dying government sound like? At 12.08 p.m. on 4 February we got an answer. Keir Starmer admitted to the House of Commons that he knew about Peter Mandelson’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein when he made him ambassador to the US in 2024. There was a sharp intake of breath from the shocked Labour benches. It was the kind of moment that defines a premiership. And it was also testament to an effective Leader of the Opposition. In the drama of Mandelson’s disgrace, the Conservative party played its part well. After besting Starmer at Prime Minister’s Questions, Kemi Badenoch turned to coaching the Labour backbenches. She had put

Much like Alan Partridge, Kemi Badenoch hopes to have bounced back. After an unsure start to her first year as Tory leader – hopeless interviews and PMQs showings, and a local election shellacking – she now seems to be on a roll. Her two recent set piece speeches at conference and responding to the Budget were successes, her parliamentary performances have been more assured, and she can now get through an interview without declaring war on her ethnic enemies. The Conservatives are no longer spiralling towards fourth; her personal ratings have ticked up to the dizzying heights of -14. For the first time since Badenoch became leader, I feel a

On the day of the local elections in May, when the Tories suffered a historic setback, Kemi Badenoch went to the gym and got her hair done. A screenshot of the Tory leader’s diary, leaked by a disgruntled Conservative, shows she planned a Harley Street dental appointment at 9 a.m., followed by 90 minutes at a boutique pilates gym at 11 a.m., followed by an hour-long visit to the hairdresser at 1 p.m. Plenty of politicians take it easy on election day, but the leak is significant because it shows someone still wants to wound her. For her internal enemies, she remains on probation. ‘Thousands of loyal Conservative party activists went out