Best Of

Morning all

I may be in a minority of one on here but I think Kemi Badenoch is growing into the role a little and her poor start has been replaced by a more competent performance of late.

Unfortunately, the inepititude and incompetence of the last Conservative Government is as several millstones round her neck and as Thursday's by-election results showed, the challenge of Reform has left her party looking out of touch, out of date and out of time with such activists as remain demoralised. Look at the numbers from Woking and Wealden - two areas which were strongly Conservative not too long ago.

She is further hampered by having been part of the problem and it's hard when you've been part of the problem to be part of the solution. It took the election of David Cameron for the Conservative Party to escape the shadow of what had gone before.

As others have said, there's a space for a party to be honest with the electorate about the public finances but that honesty has to start with a substantial mea culpa regarding how we got into this mess and that includes the Covid response from Sunak and Hunt's pre-election NI cuts. Acknowledging you got things wrong is the first stage toward getting things right but Stride has to explain, if we are to balance the books, how this will happen, what will be cut, which taxes will be raised, the future of the Triple Lock, commitments on defence expenditure etc and that will involve saying a lot of things people don't want to hear now.

Hunt’s NI cuts were the most egregious piece of governmental electioneering since ... the previous piece of governmental electioneering.

But they do significantly damage Conservative claims to be the party of fiscal discipline: What fiscal discipline exactly?

Labour should have called the NI shit out on day one and reversed it there and then. That was their first test and they blew it.