George Trefgarne: Time for critics to stop tilting at Tory windmills – Badenoch understands conservatism
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
George Trefgarne is the former Economics Editor, and Comment Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
The defection of Robert Jenrick has exposed an entire class of online political activists on the Right who have been turning their fire on Kemi Badenoch. What they have in common is that they are tilting at windmills inside their own heads. They are tilting at a notion of Kemi Badenoch or conservatism which does not, in fact, exist.
Contrary to what some of them say, Kemi is her own person, a classic market-oriented conservative. From a British perspective, she had an unusual upbringing in Nigeria as it descended into socialism. She moved to this country 16 years later and via a combination of patriotic affection and hard work adopted it as her own because Nigeria was falling apart. Understanding her childhood and early adulthood is important. Putting her leadership into a stereotypical lexicon of “culture warrior” or “a Wet takeover” or “surrounded by Lib Dems” or “embodies the centrist graveyard” as some do, defies empirical observation.
I put this misreading of Kemi Conservatism down to the trauma of the last decade.
As a nation, a majority of voters conjured up Brexit as a force for national renewal, only for it to result in the opposite: the degradation of our culture and institutions, out-of-control migration, rising taxes and public expenditure, and the highest energy prices in the world. All culminating in a crushing, deserved Conservative defeat at the 2024 General Election. Lord Frost’s Brexit agreement is fine, but the Brexit settlement, the policy choices which followed next, was disastrous. People think she agrees with this settlement, when emphatically she does not and has said so repeatedly.
Ministers and their advisers of that era may enter substantial pleas in mitigation, such as Covid, or its predecessor, the ‘Woke Mind Virus’, or the Ukraine war, but fundamentally this was a failure of strategy, of philosophy and practice.
So let us think rationally, starting with observation and then the application of first principles.
Kemi Badenoch is currently on track to be the most popular politician in Britain, in the sense of being the most approved of. Get used to it. The Times average approval rating poll shows a clear trend that she has recently overtaken Nigel Farage and is now at minus 9 per cent, compared to his minus 15 per cent. Zack Polanski and Ed Davey are only narrowly ahead at minus 8 per cent. But her trajectory is upwards from minus 26 per cent six months ago.
In other words, actual voters are starting, hesitantly, to like her as she learns on her feet. Millions of them. What they do have is a problem with the Conservative Party and its legacy, hence the understandable attraction of Reform. Reform is right to draw attention to …
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
George Trefgarne is the former Economics Editor, and Comment Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
The defection of Robert Jenrick has exposed an entire class of online political activists on the Right who have been turning their fire on Kemi Badenoch. What they have in common is that they are tilting at windmills inside their own heads. They are tilting at a notion of Kemi Badenoch or conservatism which does not, in fact, exist.
Contrary to what some of them say, Kemi is her own person, a classic market-oriented conservative. From a British perspective, she had an unusual upbringing in Nigeria as it descended into socialism. She moved to this country 16 years later and via a combination of patriotic affection and hard work adopted it as her own because Nigeria was falling apart. Understanding her childhood and early adulthood is important. Putting her leadership into a stereotypical lexicon of “culture warrior” or “a Wet takeover” or “surrounded by Lib Dems” or “embodies the centrist graveyard” as some do, defies empirical observation.
I put this misreading of Kemi Conservatism down to the trauma of the last decade.
As a nation, a majority of voters conjured up Brexit as a force for national renewal, only for it to result in the opposite: the degradation of our culture and institutions, out-of-control migration, rising taxes and public expenditure, and the highest energy prices in the world. All culminating in a crushing, deserved Conservative defeat at the 2024 General Election. Lord Frost’s Brexit agreement is fine, but the Brexit settlement, the policy choices which followed next, was disastrous. People think she agrees with this settlement, when emphatically she does not and has said so repeatedly.
Ministers and their advisers of that era may enter substantial pleas in mitigation, such as Covid, or its predecessor, the ‘Woke Mind Virus’, or the Ukraine war, but fundamentally this was a failure of strategy, of philosophy and practice.
So let us think rationally, starting with observation and then the application of first principles.
Kemi Badenoch is currently on track to be the most popular politician in Britain, in the sense of being the most approved of. Get used to it. The Times average approval rating poll shows a clear trend that she has recently overtaken Nigel Farage and is now at minus 9 per cent, compared to his minus 15 per cent. Zack Polanski and Ed Davey are only narrowly ahead at minus 8 per cent. But her trajectory is upwards from minus 26 per cent six months ago.
In other words, actual voters are starting, hesitantly, to like her as she learns on her feet. Millions of them. What they do have is a problem with the Conservative Party and its legacy, hence the understandable attraction of Reform. Reform is right to draw attention to …
George Trefgarne: Time for critics to stop tilting at Tory windmills – Badenoch understands conservatism
Transparency shouldn't be controversial.
George Trefgarne is the former Economics Editor, and Comment Editor of the Daily Telegraph.
The defection of Robert Jenrick has exposed an entire class of online political activists on the Right who have been turning their fire on Kemi Badenoch. What they have in common is that they are tilting at windmills inside their own heads. They are tilting at a notion of Kemi Badenoch or conservatism which does not, in fact, exist.
Contrary to what some of them say, Kemi is her own person, a classic market-oriented conservative. From a British perspective, she had an unusual upbringing in Nigeria as it descended into socialism. She moved to this country 16 years later and via a combination of patriotic affection and hard work adopted it as her own because Nigeria was falling apart. Understanding her childhood and early adulthood is important. Putting her leadership into a stereotypical lexicon of “culture warrior” or “a Wet takeover” or “surrounded by Lib Dems” or “embodies the centrist graveyard” as some do, defies empirical observation.
I put this misreading of Kemi Conservatism down to the trauma of the last decade.
As a nation, a majority of voters conjured up Brexit as a force for national renewal, only for it to result in the opposite: the degradation of our culture and institutions, out-of-control migration, rising taxes and public expenditure, and the highest energy prices in the world. All culminating in a crushing, deserved Conservative defeat at the 2024 General Election. Lord Frost’s Brexit agreement is fine, but the Brexit settlement, the policy choices which followed next, was disastrous. People think she agrees with this settlement, when emphatically she does not and has said so repeatedly.
Ministers and their advisers of that era may enter substantial pleas in mitigation, such as Covid, or its predecessor, the ‘Woke Mind Virus’, or the Ukraine war, but fundamentally this was a failure of strategy, of philosophy and practice.
So let us think rationally, starting with observation and then the application of first principles.
Kemi Badenoch is currently on track to be the most popular politician in Britain, in the sense of being the most approved of. Get used to it. The Times average approval rating poll shows a clear trend that she has recently overtaken Nigel Farage and is now at minus 9 per cent, compared to his minus 15 per cent. Zack Polanski and Ed Davey are only narrowly ahead at minus 8 per cent. But her trajectory is upwards from minus 26 per cent six months ago.
In other words, actual voters are starting, hesitantly, to like her as she learns on her feet. Millions of them. What they do have is a problem with the Conservative Party and its legacy, hence the understandable attraction of Reform. Reform is right to draw attention to …
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