Replacing Kemi would be as useful as rearranging chairs on the Titanic
In characteristically no-nonsense fashion, former Number 10 aide Dominic Cummings has declared that Tory leader Kemi Badenoch is a 'goner' and that she is likely to be deposed within a year.
In a wide-ranging interview with Sky News, Cummings also referred to the Conservative Party's existential crisis, suggesting the party has 'crossed the event horizon and actually aren't salvageable'.
Cummings, in all likelihood, is right on both fronts. In the last parliamentary term, Badenoch's political stock rose a great deal – and deservedly so. During the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement in the UK following the police killing of George Floyd, Badenoch courageously defended the UK's record on racial equality and challenged divisive notions of 'white privilege'.
Indeed, she went as far as saying that Britain is the best place in the world to be black. Few could argue that black people would find a better package of political freedoms, economic opportunities, social stability, and legal protections anywhere else in the world.
Badenoch reinforced her credentials as an anti-woke trailblazer by resisting the forces of radical transgenderism and protecting the integrity of female-only spaces. The symbolism of a confident black woman taking to task these toxic forms of racial and gender identity politics was powerful.
But regrettably, Badenoch's period as party leader has been underwhelming – and the warning signs were there during her leadership campaign. This included claiming to have become 'working class' when she started working at McDonald's at the age of 16 – despite hailing from a middle-class family where her father was a general practitioner who later established a publishing company, with her mother being an academic lecturer.
Badenoch herself attended the private International School Lagos (ISL). Her remarks exposed a complete lack of understanding of the stubbornly rigid nature of Britain's class system, perhaps due to the fact that she spent much of her childhood outside of the UK.
Furthermore, in a more recent interview on Sky News with Trevor Phillips, Badenoch provided a verbal rags-to-riches autobiography which simply didn't come across as relatable at all.
Badenoch's leadership has been unquestionably underwhelming and her instinctively free-market beliefs are a world away from the experience of many British voters who live in left-behind communities which have been battered by the harsh economic and cultural winds of globalisation.
But truthfully, she is the leader of a party which is dying. The last parliamentary term of Conservative government was defined by numerous policy failures over issues such as immigration and asylum, bitter in-fighting, and all-round chaotic governance. Liz Truss's treatment of Britain as some kind of laboratory for her reckless ASI-IEA experiment was beyond destructive for the Conservative Party's historic reputation for economic competence.
The traditional Tory vote is being cannibalised by Reform UK – with Farage so confident that he is already the leading figure of the British political Right, he is now focused on parking his turquoise tanks on Labour's red lawns.
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