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4 hours ago
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You have to hand it to Kemi Badenoch. She doesn’t take any prisoners. While the rest of us have been trying to survive a heatwave and are wondering if air-con may be needed for future summers, the Tory leader has taken a more hardline approach to climate change. Call it Schrödinger’s climate change. It’s both happening and not happening at the same time.
Kemi is just about sane enough not to be an out-and-out denier. She leaves that to Reform. Mind you, no one would put it past her to suggest the scientists have got it wrong if the temperature drops for a few days. But her view is that while climate change may be real, there’s no point in trying to do anything about it.
Why bother trying to save the planet for our children and grandchildren when no one else is interested in doing so? As long as other countries are burning fossil fuels, then we should too. A race to the bottom. Who cares if the Earth dies a few years before it otherwise might have done? Drill, baby, drill. There are no prizes on offer for trying to set an example.
So as of last week, Kemi has put anyone who believes the UK should be meeting its net zero targets by 2050 on the proscribed list for prospective candidates for the Conservative party. Former Tory MPs with dangerously woke views like … er … thinking that it might already be too late to combat climate change are no longer welcome. And the same thing applies to any Conservative who still believes the UK should be signed up to the European court of human rights. From now on, anyone who falls into either of these camps is dead to Kemi.
And on Tuesday we had the first casualty. Gavin Barwell, the former Tory MP and chief of staff for Theresa May turned Tory peer, had the whip removed in the Lords.
This is presumably only the start. Next there will have to be a purge of sitting Tory MPs. Because there are still some of them who do believe in net zero targets and the ECHR. Hell, only a few years ago the shadow energy and net zero secretary, Claire Coutinho, also believed in these things. But she was placed in a rapid re-education programme before being readmitted into the shadow cabinet.
The sensible wing of the Tory party is to be written out of history. You can tell which ones they are. They are the ones who have said little and done less over the course of the past two years. If you live in a Tory constituency and are wondering why your MP almost never shows his or her face in the Commons and never makes news, it’s because they are trying to slip under Kemi’s radar.
Their goal in life is to make no waves. To hope that they can go unnoticed for long enough, until such time as the Kemi Revolution is over and the old-fashioned Tory party can re-emerge out of the ashes. But their days are numbered. Kemi has it in for them. They are all on a watch list.
You would have imagined a party that was only polling at about 19% would want to appeal to as wide a range of voters as possible. But Kemi is a purist. She only wants the ideologically sound. Or rather, think the same as her. From now on, the Tories will employ outriders at every polling station to tear up the ballot papers of anyone who has voted for them whom they suspect of harbouring feelings for the dangerous principles of net zero and international law. Kemi won’t be happy until the party is down to single figures. We happy few.
Bizarrely, Kemi has also made it clear she has no interest in winning back those who have already defected to Reform. Even though they would be more than happy to sign up to any insanity Kemi demanded of them. So there is no place in the modern Tory party for a repentant Robert Jenrick.
There again there is no sign of Honest Bob changing his ways on anything. It turns out that Monday’s Commons session in which MPs could pay tribute to Ann Widdecombe and debate their own security had all been a mirage. Clearly, Reform had decided that being reasonable was just not their style after all. For having spoken so movingly about Widdecombe the day before, Dicky Tice and Honest Bob chose to revert to their default attack mode.
They had thought long and hard about what Ann would have wanted and decided that what she would really have wanted was for them to use her murder to deflect attention away from Nigel Farage’s unusual financial arrangements and accuse the media and the government of trying to get them all killed. On the Today programme, Honest Bob was outraged when Nick Robinson dared to challenge him on any of this.
Not least the idea that Nige had once said the £5m windfall was for his security. It was pointed out to Honest Bob that Farage had been offered the same level of protection as the leader of the opposition. But this hadn’t been nearly good enough, said Jenrick. Nige needed a greater level of security than the king. Nige was the eternal sun god for whom no expense was too much. Nothing could shake his belief that the establishment wanted Farage dead. But at least we weren’t talking about Reform’s finance, so that was OK then.
Meanwhile, Keir was busy securing his legacy. First by telling Scotland and Wales they should support England in the World Cup. That won’t go down well with either the Scots or the Welsh. Or the Northern Irish who had been left out. Has Keir learned nothing in his two years in office? And in the evening he was to be found in the Commons – along with Andy Burnham making his first speech since his re-election – trying to take credit for the Hillsborough law he had tried to amend.
Still, all that will be forgotten if England can win their next two games. Win us the World Cup and Keir’s legacy will be secure.
