At what point do the Tories think about ditching Badenoch? – politicalbetting.com
At what point do the Tories think about ditching Badenoch? – politicalbetting.com
If I were Robert Jenrick I would be sharing this finding from JL Partners to my colleagues pointing out the public see Kemi Badenoch as useless as the left hand side of the Countdown clock.
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The map shows how crap a lot of our voters are. Farage would be a terrible PM, not that Starmer is much of an alternative. Farage would be so bloody useless it would have us pining for the Halcyon days of the Johnson government.
@Big_G_NorthWales, how many times did you take part in the survey? 😀
The Tories have for some time now had a bad habit of promoting people to the leadership role who aren’t particularly good leaders. Badenoch, on paper, does have some areas that should be strengths - but these have been completely MIA since she became leader. She is too tentative, scripted and inexact.
https://x.com/OwenWntr/status/1901664915292590483
When they have meaningful answers to these questions they can start to address whether Kemi is the right solution. But until they do its just ferrets in a sack.
But the idea that she says the things she says because after they've been through a scriptwriter... Blimey. What would happen if she improvised?
(The "rubbish scriptwriter" thing would be a problem for any Conservative leader. The party is broke, Civil Service support has been turned off, and why should any bright young thing sign up to write Conservative speeches for buttons?)
Perhaps at this point we have to accept that for the majority of the electorate it's just name recognition... "He's on TV a lot, he'll do"
We need a pollster prepared to spice it up, throw in Linneker. Micah Richards, Holly Willoughby, Vernon Kay, Janet SP, Hitler and Stalin as options and expose the public.
Had to move twice in the last few months, mind.
Anyhow, what's wrong with people in north Wales?
Given the circumstances - Labour's large majority, the length of time till the GE, the need for development of ideas & policies, and a host of other factors, maybe the best way forward is for the Conservatives to identify the number of people who'd like to try being LotO and the number of weeks of the parliament left, and arrange a rota so that everybody gets a chance to try. It would give them all their chance, avoid the expense and infighting of continual elections, and crucially avoid the bad publicity, perhaps gaining some good publicity instead.
Edit, apologies, I see I am a day behind.
Of course people want Farage as PM. They recognise him from the telly. They hate the existing politicians, who have dismally failed to make them personally rich, so they would quite naturally prefer someone they can actually recognise and think might at least be a bit of fun.
Perhaps we should try it. It pretty much what they have done in the USA,
Apart from the people.
@BorisJohnson
What a surprise - Putin rejects an unconditional ceasefire. He wants to keep bombing and killing innocent Ukrainians. He wants Ukraine disarmed. He wants Ukraine neutralised. He wants to make Ukraine a vassal state of Russia. He isn’t negotiating. He’s laughing at us.
BoZo, before the call
@BorisJohnson
I trust and believe Trump will hit Putin with every shot in his locker - he can't let the world think he's lost to a cowardly mass murderer
Ummmmmmmmmm
As it is they’ve ended up with Badenoch who is likely to come under a lot of pressure after the local elections .
It’s irrelevant whether the seats being fought were from that high watermark in 2021. If you’re the official opposition you should be doing well against an unpopular government. I think the Tories are in denial over Badenoch . She’s just not up to it .
The response seems to have been very good, and it opens up a fruitful avenue of opposition as Labour begins to inflict increasing hardship to meet the Net Zero target.
I didn't but also I do not see replacing Kemi is the answer
Starmer and Farage lead all the headlines which I expect to continue, and as has been said the conservatives were thrown out less than 9 months ago and need a few years to redefine their offer
I may be rare but I do support Kemi and certainly if Jenrick is in line to succeed her
Indeed, as I said a few days ago, apart from Reform who I totally oppose I am just watching with utter dismay at the Trump shambles which frankly terrifies me not least for our grandchildren and I am not actually listening to much anyone but the government says and does
It was illegal to fire all transgender military personnel
At least we would know where we stand there
And those numbers are too dismal to pass off with such an easy explanation. You'd expect them to be poor, as you say, but they're a lot worse than poor.
Just staggering levels of stupidity to be honest.
We have learnt nothing from America's fall.
This is a fast moving story and if the courts do not start to assert themselves immediately it will simply be too late.
Two articles; two faces ...
It felt somewhat strange that the reporters/editors of Today think that people who listen to their programme need to have the BoB explained to them.
Her 15 minutes of fame might be interesting.
Can you drop Marf a line please. She's has a cartoon for you and is trying to reach you but thinks the address she is using may be out of date.
Thanks
PtP
Battle of Britain is no longer the piece of universal popular culture that it was a generation back.
https://bsky.app/profile/northeastbylines.co.uk/post/3lklqeravn22g
I have the awful feeling that we are going to need that lesson again.
Massachusetts has the option to select an increased rate of tax when you submit your online tax return.
https://x.com/michaelFhurley/status/1902170263095038375
You're too hard on them.
@berlin_bridge
Kremlin sources say the call with Trump went “very well.”
Translation: They played him like a banjo.
https://www.rct.uk/collection/2907468/emmanuel-louis-cartigny-1791-1892-the-last-survivor-of-the-battle-of-trafalgar
That's like me learning about the Boer Wars when I was 10. OK, the BoB is much more important an event than that, but some of my contemporaries' fathers had fought in WW2 and it had finished only 30 years previously, which is like, er, 1995 is now (can't think of anything that happened then)
So while WW2 was an epoch-making event and the ever-present background to the world many of us grew up in, it is now fairly ancient history
If no alternate leader could do better, then the Tories might as well give up.
We can argue about how we get to Net Zero but not about whether we should and Badenoch’s response was more about pandering to the climate change deniers than dealing with the real world.
Conservatives have traditionally been pragmatic types and have adapted to a changing world when required - oddly enough I take the view Conservatives could probably get us to Net Zero quicker and easier than Labour but to pander to those unwilling or unable to accept the world is changing isn’t Conservative at all and is part of the reason why the likes of Badenoch and Jenrick are seen as irrelevant to the current debate.
The lower courts might try and be assertive but the head is rotten.
Incidentally, I had a lecture on the Judicial role in the UK Constitution the other day. It was really great, the lecturer was really warmed up to his theme. He talked about the theory of the Common Law constitution and that at least some former UKSC justices may have been exploring the concept that if an act of Parliament was incompatible with fundamental common law rights, the Courts could, essentially, strike it down. He was actually very persuasive.
The problem is, that the political context in which such a decision occurred would be a full blown constitutional crisis the like we've not seen since the Civil War. What's more, looking to America, where their court actually has this power, they are groping their way into the constitutional abyss regardless.
So sticking with the LDs, unless I am on the IoW by the next GE.
And the real worry is that the new right are now beginning to normalise Nazism. Twitter is increasingly full of very large amounts of normalised, extreme antisemitism, and earlier this week the central Maga figure Tucker Carlson implied it might have been better if Hitler had occupied Europe.
The point is that people want change. They think Farage is change. But when they had opportunities to vote for him they didn’t do so - they finished 3rd in the Fraserburgh council by election last autumn.
Reform are irrelevant in many areas but strong in many others.
As an aside to that, of Reform’s first 50 target seats, 27 are Labour and 23 are Conservative.
If I were American, I would be tooling up, as it looks like it may well come down to that.
That it feels in at least some cases as if our getting here was heavily dependent on specific leader figures rather than being a more purely systems/situation driven development (could anybody else have been as successful as Trump?) is also an echo of the last time around, I think.
The Tories dont need to replace Badenoch, just get behind Starmer.
The new Tory Tony has arrived,
Firstly, that for everything the government does, the opposition response is either that it is too much, or too little or stays the same.
Each of these, WRT long term problems - which is all of them - are different ways of saying that 2010-2024 Tory administrations were not very good.
So the Tories can only make headway by saying 'Now for something completely different' and showing it. Which is hard.
Specially hard because that is where Reform pretends to stand.
So the second dilemma as to where to pitch it: Do you vote Tory to make sure Reform don't get in (thus possibly getting the vote of trad Tories like me); or to make sure Reform and Tory together might get in (thus certainly losing it, again.)
Recently, that metric definitely confirms what you're saying.
For the last generation or so they've tried (as did Blair) to cosplay Thatcherism. It's gotten very old.
https://www.electoralcalculus.co.uk/blogs/ec_lepoll_20250314.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Scottish_Parliament_election
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_Senedd_election
I think the best PM ratings should be of even more concern for Starmer and Labour as Farage leads Starmer as best PM in a majority of seats now. Indeed it may be only the Tories outperforming Badenoch and splitting the vote on the right this time as Reform split the vote last July that prevents Reform winning a majority under FPTP
View of local hill not far from start of famous - or infamous (depending on your political persuasion) - river.
There’s a twin track approach - the day to day opposition and the longer term strategic thinking as to what that Conservative Government elected in 2034 might look like and do and respond to what the world may look like then.
Doing too much of the former and not enough of the latter is what most opposition parties tend to do.
I think the smart thing to do for the Conservatives is to suggest Labour are failing on Net Zero (particularly around EVs) and moan that they aren't making it easy for responsible citizens to make the transition. I would also try to own the non-environmental benefits, like increased energy security, levelling up, cheaper energy etc etc, while leaving the eco-flummery to Labour. A really easy way to do this would be to focus on our electricity imports from France. Let's wean ourselves off European energy.
At the moment, her strategy makes sense if you get all your information from facebook/twitter, which is dominated by Reform types who hyperventilate negativity about everything.
which of the 3 named battles was the most recent and he said laughingly that he had never heard of the Battle of Britain.
Agree about the political ignorance on Pointless.