
Kemi's incompetence no surprise to Spectator staff
Confronted with a poll of party members on grassroots Tory website ConservativeHome showing a majority think she is failing to deliver any actual policies the electorate can get get behind, Badenoch responded with her usual barrage of bluster, bombast and baloney: 'We are working on the plans! We have policies when we need them! I won't be rushed!'
For staff at the Spectator long in the tooth enough crossed paths with Kemi Badenoch – the magazine's head of digital from 2015 to 2016 – this morning's Radio 4 Today interview with Amol Rajan was shudderingly familiar.
The motormouth rhetoric coupled with a complete absence of any concrete strategy for containing the rising threat of Nigel Farage's Reform party came as no surprise to those who endured similar spiels in her brief tenure at the right wing magazine.
'She was unbelievably crap,' one Spectator insider told magazine The Fence in 2022. Badenoch operated a 'kiss up, kick down' policy – brown-nosing editor at the time Fraser Nelson and chairman Andrew Neil while being rude and difficult to junior staff.
'She would come to meetings and blether on and on about her long term strategy for success,' another co-worker at the time told Rats in a Sack. 'The trouble is, nothing ever actually happened. She was just a major league jazz hands merchant and utterly hopeless at getting stuff done. None of us could understand why she was in the job.'
In a brief post describing her time at the Spectator and its sister magazine Apollo, Badenoch claimed: 'I redesigned and delivered the digital strategy for these two publications.'
'Typical Kemi,' her former colleague told Rats. 'What does it actually mean? And what did she actually achieve? The answer to both questions is: nothing.'
Badenoch has been lead of the opposition for six months. Whether she lasts longer in this job than she did at the Speccie remains to be seen.

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The Independent
18 minutes ago
- The Independent
What would a Tory spending review look like? With Badenoch, nobody knows
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This might be termed the 'blame the voters' approach; while some buyer's remorse may have set in, it's rather futile to attack the electorate. Alternatively, a party can admit mistakes as a means of resetting voter appeal, but that means upsetting former colleagues and handing your enemies an easy win. What are the Conservatives doing about it? Making speeches, for now, rather than policy… and trying to plot a path to redemption. Last week, perhaps in response to internal concerns, shadow chancellor Mel Stride came as close as possible to apologising for the Liz Truss mini-Budget without actually saying 'sorry'. 'Contrition' is the preferred term. Truss has proved to be a potent political weapon, but for the Labour Party, scarcely a day goes by without Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves making a scathing reference to that disaster. Stride was critical of it at the time, having left the government and as chair of the Treasury select committee; his apology-adjacent speech won't stop Labour deploying Agent Truss (and she keeps popping up, unhelpfully) but it might blunt the attacks somewhat. What are the Tories saying about the rest of their record? Still fairly proud of it. Badenoch says the Tories made 'a lot of good things happen', such as reforms to social security, plus 'near full employment' and raising school standards. 'But people remember the most recent period … and I think the most recent period was the most difficult,' she concedes. So it is Rishi Suank's fault for 'talking right, governing left' as she has put it. So Badenoch is sorry-not-sorry? The Tory mistakes she points to, such as on Brexit and net zero, actually come from the right, not the centre, and don't necessarily chime with public opinion. A passionate and now obdurate Eurosceptic, she seems to want more Brexit at a time when the voters have concluded it was a flop; as the years go on, she'll need to say if she would reverse Starmer's 'Brexit reset' that builds closer, easier relations with the EU. She will also be asked if she would scrap planning reforms that boost growth, stop skilled migration, bring back zero-hours contracts, reduce VAT on private school fees, and so on. She will also need to eat many of her own words as a minister on climate change and green growth, now she's a 'net zero sceptic'. She may hope to win back some Reform voters by tacking to the right, but she can never out-Farage Farage. Indeed, she's ridiculed him for promising economic fantasies, so how can she now embrace them and return to Boris Johnson-era cakeism? Where are the Tories with winter fuel payments for pensioners? They are demanding an apology from Labour. 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Stride may be doing his best, but Badenoch seems more interested in 'culture wars' than macroeconomics, which is a problem. Her shadow frontbench team is surprisingly lacking in talent and Labour ministers, despite their relative inexperience, mostly run rings around their opponents. Can the Conservatives forge the 'Right Approach' again? In truth, the Tories are on a long march back to the centre and sooner or later will have to accept climate change and exorcise the ghosts of Truss and Johnson. They need to show themselves trustworthy and realistic, and willing to compromise with their lost voters. These are the kinds of radical, symbolic 'unthinkable' things Tony Blair had to do to make Labour electable in the 1990s, and Starmer did afresh in recent years. Only then will voters lend their ears. Badenoch isn't the leader for that task.

The National
an hour ago
- The National
A centrist position can only be justified after equality is achieved
Inequality isn't neutral, it's a tilted seesaw. It pushes the poorest further down while boosting the wealth realisation and accumulation of the richest. To stand atop that imbalance and declare yourself 'perfectly balanced' is at best disingenuously counterproductive, and at worst outright delusional. What's needed is not performative equilibrium, but structural redress. Redistribution of wealth, regulation of exploitative advantage, restoration of public infrastructure, and creation of genuine opportunity – these are the conditions that lift people out of inequality. Only then, once the seesaw is levelled, can a centrist stance become viable. Balance must be built, not assumed. The centre can only hold if the extremes are held in fair tension. Labour offer nothing to correct the imbalance. Kemi Badenoch blames those weighing the seesaw down, as though the gravity of individual circumstances were a moral failing. Reform UK want to demolish the entire playground because it's 'too expensive', with no coherent plan to rebuild – just the fantasy that further disruption equals progress. The SNP, in government, have at least tried to steady the seesaw – tried to share the swings, repair the climbing frame, and offer fairer play. But they don't own the playground. They're fenced into Westminster's turf, and Keir Starmer seems determined to keep the gates locked. Ron Lumiere via email THE lesson from the Hamilton by-election result for the SNP is to let Labour and the Tories fight it out with Reform UK to represent the dwindling number of myopically indoctrinated supporters of the Union and focus on the critical argument that only independence can bring about a radical 'change in direction' for the UK through the constitutional change necessary to seriously address the fundamental problems confronting 'broken Brexit Britain'. 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I speak for myself and for the majority of my co-activists in Alba when I say that a reunification process involving at the very least a common electoral strategy is an increasingly urgent necessity not only for an independence super-majority next year but equally in order to restore the 'brotherly love' that will silence the peals of laughter that have been echoing in the the corridors and bars of Westminster for too long. The Alba 'schism', I think most of you recognise now, was based on fundamental concerns relating to the priorities of the SNP leadership at that time in civic, judicial and civic matters. Many supporters no doubt shared some of those concerns but chose to bravely fight on within the ranks, hoping to maintain the post-2014 momentum generated by all of us. Those days, and the resentments and misunderstandings that proceeded from them, are past now and in the 'past they must remain' if we are to deliver a nation fit for our children and grandchildren. 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Daily Mirror
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