Cecil Rhodes once said that he would “annex the planets if he could”, in the days when the power of Britain extended to the far ends of the globe. These days our horizons have diminished considerably, but the torch of cosmic ambition has not gone out, at least not in the heart of the leader of the Conservative Party, Kemi Badenoch. Instead of reaching for the stars, modern British conservatives have turned to new frontiers in the exciting emerging field of isolationism. Whilst some pedestrian souls were contented with mere Brexit, Kemi has a grander vision: Wexit — world exit.
We had been summoned to witness the launch of the first imaginative rocket to blast off into this final frontier of Toryism. But where was it going? Ahead of the speech, she announced on Twitter that “if treaties get in the way, we’ll leave them”. Not just the ECHR was on the table, but other international treaties too.
Outside of the small bubble of light and warmth that is the rules-based international order lies a very different world. There is a great void, just out of reach, in which the gravity of international treaties exerts no force, and deportation orders can accelerate to the speed of light, rocketing asylum seekers off to strange new worlds like Rwanda and Albania. In this higher, more reactionary sphere, vibrating with Scutonian energies and emitting exotic Oakeshottian particles, ambitious conservative policies can be built on a scale unimaginable in the terrestrial world of political centrism.
We were all keyed up for Kemi to leap into the cockpit and slip the surly bonds of human rights law
As our imaginations took wing, tension built in the room. A Tory staffer doing a sound check stood in for the NASA scientist counting down to blast off. Would Kemi the conservonaut keep us waiting? Would we reach escape velocity and escape the blob, or would her speech implode like the Challenger shuttle?
Running a mere 2 minutes behind time, Kemi strode to the launch site. She had been “haunted” by the issue of grooming gangs. She lamented that “foreign criminals convicted of horrific abuse could not be deported”. The villain? Article 8 of the ECHR. Vast engines were surging to life, the rocket was ready to depart.
But we were kept idling for rather too long, and the hum of the engines was dwindling to a murmur. Badenoch started to lecture us, in some forensic detail, about the problems of the ECHR, the efforts to challenge it afoot in Europe, and the disputes with the court. It was interesting enough stuff, and there was little to disagree with, but as so often with Conservative politicians, one felt that you were hearing a Telegraph article being read aloud, not a political speech designed to electrify the nation.
There were some attempted jabs at Labour too, with a lot of talking around the elephant in the room that was Labour’s new White Paper on immigration, which promised tough new measures on migration and visas. The claim by Badenoch that Labour has “no interest in reforming the ECHR” was at best a half-truth, given that the government has committed to drawing up a new more restrictive legal framework for applying Article 8.
For all that Kemi was presenting the Tories as pioneers on this issue, she couldn’t really get away from the fact that migration is now a highly competitive space race, with Reform, Labour and the Tories going after the same voters, promising different mixes of legal changes, labour market reform, and policing to get down the numbers.
A storm of soundbites followed, with admittedly hard to dispute claims that Britain has become “the world’s softest touch” under the leadership of a “human rights lawyer” who had handed over the Chagos Islands and paid for the privilege. Nevertheless it was not new, or what anyone had come to hear.
The sense of wandering off track only deepened as the speech wore on. A punchy section on lawfare was suddenly flailing about proclaiming that “Britain has the best legal system in the world” and that our judges were good chaps who had lost their way a bit. Kemi genuinely cannot seem to make her mind up about if Britain is being hijacked by a dangerous cabal of lefty lawyers, or if it is basically fine. And this inability to stick to a single message would prove a dangerous sign. All was not right with the launch.
We were all keyed up for Kemi to leap into the cockpit and slip the surly bonds of human rights law. But instead Lord Wolfson and “some of the sharpest legal minds in the country” were to be set to looking into this ECHR business — you’ve got to trust the experts on this stuff, after all. With a dawning sense of horror, we started to realise that this was the announcement, and the rocket was not going to take off. The commission would “report back” in October at the next party conference, at which time the party might, or might not, decide it wants to take Britain out of the ECHR.
Astonishingly, madly, delusionally, the leader of the opposition thinks we will all wait for months with bated breath for her to (possibly) announce a policy that Reform has already committed to do on “day one”. The press were merciless in the subsequent questions, but it hardly mattered. The rocket had exploded before take-off, and we were just picking through the smouldering remains of Kemi Badenoch’s political reputation.
