This article is taken from the June 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £25.
When would be the time to panic? At the time of writing, the Tories are fourth in the polls and fifth in predicted seats. But by her friends’ telling, Kemi is John Frost’s 2iC at Arnhem replying to the Nazis surrounding the overwhelmed Paras: “We’d love to accept your surrender, but we haven’t the proper facilities to take you all prisoner! Sorry!”
To Team Kemi, she is laconic, unfussed, eyes on the prize and undistracted by unhelpful and frankly malign noises off. Yet I know who I feel most sorry for: it’s the ocean of Tory ambition with nowhere left to go other than professing ever more loyalty to this shitshow.
Take Sebastian Payne. In The Times on 15 May, after the Tory local election thrashing, he wrote:
As Rishi Sunak discovered to his great electoral cost, these challenges [to stopping illegal immigration] run straight into the UK’s adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights … It should not be provocative to say that what worked in 1950 might not be suitable for 2025 … Starmer’s response is, in typical fashion, to fiddle at the edges … Over the past few weeks, I’ve been struck by the number of moderate Tories and senior mandarins who have told me they have changed their minds on the issue … And I have come to agree with them … Reform is naturally in favour of leaving and naturally has no answers about how to do it. And here is where Kemi Badenoch comes in.
Earlier, on 17 April, before the thrashing, Payne had said on Newsnight:
Nigel Farage has been out and about on the campaign trail and he’s got a very clear, but I would say simplistic, solution. Which is to say, “We’ll leave the ECHR and that will solve everything!” And I think that’s such a white elephant to look at that approach because the fact is it may be that we need to look at elements of the ECHR and how it applied to illegal migration. But saying “Do this and the problem will go away” is factually wrong. I think what [Kemi Badenoch] needs to do is focus on a serious plan and to have some details about what an alternative would look like.
One never wants to be unkind, but life is provocative, and this sort of thing is now just too common for it to retain comic value.
I wish Payne all the best the next time he stands for election for, I assume, the Conservative Party. Like swans, I should hope the pair have mated for life. However, who is fooled by any of this? I don’t know Payne, but I like to think he’s not.
Can people who have actually been employed by the Party deceive themselves? Consider this tweet: “deport all illegal immigrants”, the party of shadow Home Secretary Priti Patel, and Boris Johnson’s actual-factual Home Secretary, tells us. Jovially, with a pleasing touch of early-century Word document graphics being enthusiastically played around with by a socially disadvantaged 12-year-old who has come along wonderfully since he was taken out of care.
I ask again, who does the party think it’s fooling with this sort of thing? What demographic? Which lost voters? Relatedly, how? How does it think they’re being fooled, whoever it is they think’s being fooled? Which leads us on to … why do the Tories think they’re fooling anyone? What feedback loop has suggested to them that this might be the case, now or in the hours to come? Or is this savage irony or performance art?
Speaking of which, Boris Johnson. ITMA. Maybe he’s going to come back? Cripes, corr, gosh! I can see why people who want the party to survive think Johnson would be less bad than Badenoch: he would be.
But he’d still be Boris. He’d still lie, let down his stooges, serve himself, not care and not do anything worthy of the chance. Like last time. And all the times before that. It is not a coincidence that the most successful political party in history is in ruins after it let this rogue lead it.
It’s with a heavy heart that I recall what those of us who, time after time, told Theresa May’s Number 10: “Do this/don’t do that, or you’ll get Boris”. This was meant to appeal to their self-interest and reputed prudence. But so fanatically determined were they that even this prospect slouching towards them served as no sort of threat.
Something Boris said which I do agree with is that there’s no point in having a cake unless you eat it too. Which brings me to this month’s leading article.
The Critic is perhaps a surprisingly democratic outfit and the view corporately expressed isn’t mine. I just don’t think the country is in quite the dark place so many other people on the right seem to have concluded. But if they’re correct, I’m at a loss to see what they’re going to do: emigrate, legally or otherwise?
To be cheaper still, I’m not even disputing the “doomed! we’re all doomed!” analyses, I’m just bewildered as to what they think can be done. I should have insights here, after all, as Great Britain supposedly follows Northern Ireland into sectarian politics. Though the real “Ulsterisation of mainland politics” wouldn’t be dividing along communal lines, it would be voters bearing grudges.
The distinctive thing about England is that the English don’t remember. This ability to forget, born indisputably out of comfort and ease, is a true civilisational boon. And it explains why more committed partisans have always been disappointed by politics here.
The experience of everyone reading this is that no one cares enough to remember what Seb Payne said, let alone punish him and the causes he’s supporting at any given time for what he claimed at any point in the past.
So has this changed? Has the elasticity of forgetting snapped and the voters are going to stand athwart politics keen-eyed, endlessly punishing the men and women who let them down so sorely?
Maybe. And perhaps Farage is to be their instrument. Possibly he’s what Kissinger said of Trump: “[He] may be one of those figures in history who appears from time to time to mark the end of an era and to force it to give up its old pretences”.
Then again, he may just be a day-boy Boris.
