She took over a party that was polling in the mid to high 20s and occasionally flirting with first place in the polls, to one that is in the mid to high 10s and flirts with third, and has suffered what may be irrevocable damage to its reputation as 'the anti-Labour alternative'!
Her leadership had in some ways been impressive - since Cameron ive consistently thought that for each leader “they’ve hit the nadir now” yet she’s somehow blown that out the water
In addition, she has done significant damage to the wider health of British politics by absolutely refusing to have any kind of red line about what the Tory party will permit. Under her leadership, the Conservatives have had the embarrassment of unreciprocated flirtation with *Rupert Lowe*.
She is simply completing the reverse takeover of the Tories by Farage - began with Cameron's Brexit and is ending here. I think it was Churchill who warned against feeding buns to the crocodile to appease it.....
Her first major policy decision was to pursue a line of attack over grooming gangs that a) was visibly cobbled together in four hours b) was essentially an attack against *her own party as much if not more than the government* and c) to reiterate, was incredibly half-arsed!
There are clear Very Online culture war defaults through everything she comes up with. I think even Not Very Online people have been exposed to it enough for it to be obvious and unlikeable.
And also, a big chunk of (d) she thought there would somehow be the possibility to outflank the *former director of public prosecutions* on this. You would have to be incredibly online to think that this was going to be space to move into. He didn’t appoint a wet liberal to the home office.
(The Labour Party never particularly went broke going authoritarian, which is why it always surprises me when people are surprised by them doing so)
Well, it's not like it doesn't always happen!
See David Blunkett
See practically every Labour Home Secretary with the exception of Roy Jenkins!
I mean admittedly there’s not a huge sample size outside of 97-00, but still.
Prevention of Terrorism (Temporary Provisions) Act 1974 was who? You can see where Yvette gets it from ... Hopefully PA will reform as "Yvette Cooper".
People forget that
Please, my nutribullet, it is very sick!
I mean tbf if the nutribulletting does happen now it will be a comeback for the ages and he can dine out forever on his own prescience
That’s a lot of weight resting on the word “if”, admittedly. The kind of load bearing word you could rest a cathedral on.
You what??🤔
On top of all this she is a truly abysmal constituency MP who hates the place she represents despite it being rather nice.
That last point is such a good one. Why the Tory party would even consider touching him with a barge pole when even Farage sussed him out as a wrong ‘un.
Was going to say that Sunder was being optimistic in expecting her to last until Autumn 2026 until I noticed he said ‘by autumn 2026’.
She also doesn’t seem to have made any attempt to think through why the Conservative party were not just beaten but nearly annihilated. They go on about the “loveless landslide”, but that actually makes it even worse: why were people so desperate to see the back of them? No answer for coming yet!
She reminds me of Puyi in the Forbidden City. Amongst the comfortingly green-upholstered benches of the House of Commons chamber, she remains the Leader Of The Opposition. Meanwhile in the Britain beyond the Palace, she’s an irrelevance; Nigel Farage is LOTO now.
It’s not entirely unreciprocated- Lowe said that he was “absolutely delighted to have Susan Hall AM, Leader of the Conservative Group on the London Assembly and the party’s 2024 London mayoral candidate, join our Restore Britain Advisory Board”.
unfortunately the question becomes "who would do better?" Is the damage irrevocable, or would a more traditional Conservative leader be able to put together a more traditional establishment conservative position that would take advantage of people finding Reform unpleasant?
There's a real weirdness of trying to capitalise on the instinctive "revulsion" towards Reform whilst openly allowing your elected officials to publicly embrace a man Reform kicked out for being too unpleasant.
Fundamentally, the more elections they go through with her as leader the harder it becomes for them to come back as their infrastructure of councillors, local associations etc slowly dissolves beneath them, and the alternative starts to professionalise (see Liberals collapsing and ceding to Labour)
Because of her personality and beliefs she’s the ultimate “The Tories get replaced by Reform” leader Because she’s simultaneously making the situation “there’s no point in voting Tory because the offering will be the same as Reform” and “we are totally incompetent”
Kemi “Conquest’s Third Law” Badenoch
Didn’t she once pay tribute to someone from another party and inexplicably say she agreed with Them ?
I don’t agree with him or his politics. But it is hard to argue that Jenrick would’ve fucked it this badly. For one he would’ve actually put a degree of effort in that she seems allergic to.
Indeed. I think Jenrick's leadership would (will be?) a very bad day for this country and for the Conservative party, but it's crazy to think that 'the leader of the opposition is not visibly lazy' 'the leader of the opposition actually does things' would not have improved their position.
Being too busy to meet JD Vance while he meets everyone else including Jenrick is just the best way to cap it all off. I frankly struggle to see how any new leader can actually rescue them given their start point will be an England-only party after the May elections with even fewer councillors
She wasn’t too busy. She was snubbed.
I doubt it, she and Vance have met on several previous occasions.
Maybe I’m giving her too much credit. She honestly turned down another meeting with the VP today?
JD Vance is not popular in the UK. I don't get why she would want to be associated with him. So I actually think it was a decent decision by her standards to send an underling
Vance is not popular but if, as the leader of the opposition, you don’t make time to speak to him that is dereliction of duty imo.
He won't be there by the time of the next genny
So? Whatever anyone thinks of him he’s the vice president of the United States and if he’s in England you make time to go and see him. Unless you’re an incredibly lazy and useless politician.
She has no such ability to judge - he has forgotten who she is
Maybe he doesn’t need her anymore
I am lowkey obsessed with any story about Kemi claiming to work really hard or be too busy for something. She says it a lot, yet there is absolutely nothing (publicly available at least) that could possibly justify that claim. I really want to know how she squares this circle in her mind
My cat that sleeps all day would have put more effort than Badenoch has And its not just about what looks like laziness, its about how she had to reset Conservatism, and she hasn't even begun to understand that it needed resetting
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, when I’ve got mates in the late 20s who are paying mortgages and you couldn’t pay them enough money to vote conservative the party has a terminal problem with working age people
I think I've said it before, but my wife voted Conservative all her life till the last election She visibly shakes her head now whenever they go on about their reform lite policies I think everyone underestimated just much of a big job it is, and you've still got Philp et al in the cabinet
Comparing with Bobby J is silly too. Sure they are and were bad options. But there were better options. Just not in the final 2
And indeed it's because they were both bad options that Cleverly's backers couldn't decide which one they wanted in the final 2 and fucked it.
Spot on
The problem for the tories is reform are offering to stop immigration and dish out freebies to “indigenous peoples”. Obviously it’s all pie in the sky but the tories cannot get close to that offer.
To attempt a counterpoint: could anyone have done it better? It seems to me that the people capable of turning the party's fortunes around could not make it past the membership and the only people capable of getting the membership vote would be just as disastrous, albeit in different ways.
I genuinely don’t understand why it is people are so keen to ignore all the evidence that the members were going to back Cleverly, and to cast the membership as the core problem here.
I know that's what the MPs hoped for; I don't know if it would have played out that way. In general (i.e. not specifically about Tories), party members tend to be far more extreme that their voters. Cleverly represented a more moderate option than Badenoch or Jenrick so there is cause for doubt.
What the MPs hoped for is neither here nor there and the causation is actually backwards - MPs moved towards him because the membership did.
To all of us hecklers on the outside, the course correction required is obvious but the catch-22 is that such a correction seems antithetical to anything the membership would be willing to back. The only hope for them would be an aspiring leader who can win over the members by force of personality.
Again, it's just frankly people airing their grievances about 'Labour 2010 to 2019' to go 'the issue here is the Tory membership'. The membership has no power and can be cut out at any time, and was, in any case, going to back Cleverly per every scrap of data we had at the time.
I'll take that. I want fully across membership polling. As I said, it was only an attempt at a counterpoint but this is where it falls apart.
Hey that's unfair. They're flirting with fourth place too
I honestly feel their method of decline unfair on the liberal dems, they could at least have finessed it so they are the party that leapfrogged them instead of Reform. A poor show, I feel.
Give it time.
They wish
She offers nothing, but really I believe this isn’t about her, it’s people finally sick to death of snobbery, ignorance, backhanders and downright brutality see below
I’m late to this thread but confident it will be repeated. The Tory Party resembles a series in its fourth season about a third tier prep school with an aging cast.
The ditching of Net Zero was an especially egregious action, running against those well known Deep Staters, Teresa May and Boris Johnson.
Flirts with fourth, surely?
Gah, yes.
> mid to high 10s and flirts with third This is a context where even a small difference in voteshare would be significant ('only a step or two back from the cliff edge').