A Monday placeholder featuring the bromancer in little England with Kemi ...

 

Bemusing juxtapositions, take 1. Seen inJane Martinson's ‘We’re clearly heading towards collapse’: why the Murdoch empire is about to go bang

In 2000, when he had just joined the family firm, I interviewed him for the Guardian in New York. There was a poster of Chairman Mao and an icon of Jesus above a framed picture of James with Rupert behind his desk. “My father’s politics and mine, which I think I understand better than many do, are probably reasonably close,” he said. “I think he is vastly misunderstood politically.”

And then:

In court, amid a welter of evidence that at one point saw James weep in the witness box, it emerged that he had not talked to his father for years. 

Is there a Freudian in the house, or at least Robert Mitchum in The Night the Hunter ...

This is a travel day for the pond, and so this is a placeholder ...

By the time this hits the full to overflowing intertubes, the pond will be past Goulburn, a town as lively and as energetic as Tamworth, the busy streets full to overflowing with life night and day...

Soon enough the pond will be walking amongst terrifying people, commies, pinkos, preverts, socialists, unionists, people who wear black, or when they're feeling happy, a very discreet shade of grey. The kind the lizard Oz warns the pond about on a daily basis ..

The chance of running into a Comrade Dan is remote, but still frightening ...

As a result, the pond can't look at the Caterist or other Monday regulars, but rather than offer a void, the pond thought it might call up a second eleven reptile to fill the space.

Oh dear, that means an even bigger void than the void ...

Never mind, come on down bromancer, sock the pond with 11 minutes of English ecstasy ... add to the pond's compleat coverage of the ARC affair ...

Make Britain confident again: manifesto for a woman of firsts, After the 2024 poll trouncing and under pressure by Reform, Kemi Badenoch aims to show Brits the Tories ‘are under new leadership’

Start with an elegantly moving image, thrusting your subject into the foreground ...

Why it's art, sublime art ...

Kemi Badenoch has the toughest job in British politics. She is the leader of the British Conservative party and therefore of His Majesty’s Opposition. This week Donald Trump, apparently the progenitor of a centre-right resurgence around the West, made her life harder.
Trump grotesquely labelled Ukrainian leader Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator and claimed Zelensky had started the war with Russia and had only a 4 per cent approval rating. All of these claims are manifestly untrue.

Not King Donald ...

Badenoch had been basking in an associated glow from the Trump victory. Trump seemed to energise all centre-right forces and Badenoch was happy to claim her share of that. But now she was forced into direct repudiation of Trump.
“President Zelensky is not a dictator,” Badenoch posted on X.
She went on: “He is the democratically elected leader of Ukraine who bravely stood up to Putin’s illegal invasion. Under my leadership, and under successive Conservative prime ministers, we have and always will stand with Ukraine.”

Oh dear, what a tragedy ... but the bro tells us she's in jolly good company.

Badenoch is in good company. British Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer issued a similar statement. So did a lot of politicians who have been Trump backers or inclined to think Trump more good than bad. Former British prime minister Boris Johnson said Trump’s statements were untrue. Former Australian prime minister Tony Abbott, a friend of Badenoch, said Trump was “living in a fantasyland”.

Now please, begin the hagiography ...

Badenoch became leader of the devastated Conservatives in November 2024 after they were crushed in the general election in July. She comes from the party’s Right, she was known for having tough ideological fights, she campaigned for Britain to leave Europe via Brexit before she became an MP, she represents a new generation of Conservative leadership.

Muh lud, if the pond could just make a note here ... you see, the pond's reality field keeps getting distorted by the cracking Crace ...

Monday
For a long time I’ve found myself baffled by Kemi Badenoch’s performances at prime minister’s questions. To put it bluntly, she’s just not very good. Borderline hopeless. She seems to have put in little or no preparation and has made what should be an awkward session for Keir Starmer into one of his most enjoyable moments of the week.
Now senior Conservatives have started to say much the same thing and are openly wondering if they might have elected the wrong leader. Some are even suggesting Kemi may need to be replaced in the not so distant future. This would be unlikely: forcing Badenoch out would be an even worse look for the Tories. But what is really causing them angst is that Kemi doesn’t seem to be improving. We are living in serious times and she gives the impression of being a deeply unserious politician.
Today was a case in point. There is a real war going on in Ukraine, and the US and Russia are trying to broker a deal without the Ukrainians. This is a critical moment for the west. And what was Kemi doing? Speaking at the “alt-right” Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference about how the real danger the west was facing was the culture wars. “I am saying the unsayable,” she said. She was unaware that no one was stopping her saying anything. Everyone at the conference was free to say whatever nonsense they wanted.

It's not just the cracking Crace... she seems an easy target for everyone to take pot shots at ...

 

There seems to be some canker at the core ... but the bro was understanding and caring ...

Well, finally. Only eight years on from kneecapping the economy and crowing “you lost, get over it” at anyone impertinent enough to notice, a Conservative party leader has tacitly admitted the painfully obvious: Brexit was an act of wilful negligence by a government that dragged Britain out of its most important trading relationship “before we had a plan for growth outside the EU”. There wasn’t a considered Plan B, just a government frantically trying to catch itself up as it went along. And that’s only the start of it, Kemi Badenoch argued this week, in the first interesting thing the Conservative party has had to say to the nation since its bone-crushing defeat.
Successive Conservative governments dating back to David Cameron’s had promised to get immigration down but hadn’t thought through how to do that either, she pointed out, and consequently achieved the opposite. (You may well think the country would be even worse off had they succeeded but, either way, whipping up public anger against something and then blithely delivering more of it is the height of irresponsibility.) They bound themselves in law to achieving net zero by 2050 but only worried afterwards about how exactly they might do it. Each time, she conceded, Conservative governments told voters what they wanted to hear and gambled on working it all out later.
Though she has made similar criticisms before, drawing them together this punchily illustrates both Badenoch’s biggest strength as a politician – that she is an original, capable of saying what nobody else would – and her greatest weakness, which is that ironically she doesn’t always seem to think things though first either. Well, maybe it takes one to know one.
Keir Starmer will be gleefully mining this speech for ammunition to use against her, as will Nigel Farage: these are the arguments he’s been weaponising against the Tories for months. And she may just live to regret trashing all her predecessors back to Cameron, including those in whose governments she served.
But the perennially impatient Badenoch has at least skipped the traditional five opposition years of refusing to face up to why they actually lost. The Conservatives were pulverised last July less because their agenda was too unpopular – everyone wants a livable planet, a narrow majority famously wanted the Brexit they were sold if not the one actually delivered, and like it or not, 70% of Britons currently think levels of immigration are too high, according to YouGov – but because they didn’t actually do it. That failure poisoned the well for conventional politics in general, reinforcing a belief many people (however unfairly) already held that you can’t believe a word politicians say, and fanning a populist wildfire that now threatens to burn the Tory house down.
Brutal honesty, Badenoch has concluded, is the only way out. The emperor herself will just admit to the regrettable past absence of clothes, and hope that knocks the wind out of the little kids laughing and pointing.

The pond knows the bromancer won't be laughing or pointing, he's used to dressing out emperors sans clothes in lots of verbal finery ...

I sat down with Badenoch during the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London for her first extensive interview with a foreign newspaper.
She represents a lot of firsts for her party. At 45, she’s young. She’s the first woman to lead the Conservatives in opposition since Margaret Thatcher in the 1970s. She’s the first leader of African background. She was born in London but raised by her African parents in Lagos, Nigeria, until she was 16. She first emerged as an unlikely leadership contender, though with a lot of support, in the wake of Johnson’s ouster.

The bro was hard at it, with pen and paper, like a hack out of an Evelyn Waugh novel, Foreign editor Greg Sheridan interviews British Conservative party leader Kemi Badenoch in London this week.

Not for him a recorder or any of that other newfangled technology. Just lead in the pencil and lead between the ears, and presumably a way with shorthand ...

In the Conservative party leadership contest in 2024 she convincingly beat her nearest rival, Robert Jenrick. She won a big majority with Conservative party rank-and-file members. They are disproportionately white, male and older. That a young black woman won them so convincingly says something good about her and something good about them.
It’s worth pausing to note the contrast with Labour. Though supporting identity politics, Starmer eagerly taking a knee in the Black Lives Matter movement though it had nothing to do with Britain, allegedly championing the position of racial minorities, including all sorts of affirmative action, British Labour has had exclusively white male leaders.
The allegedly reactionary Conservatives, pictured on every TV political drama as harbouring all sorts of prejudices, have had four female leaders (Thatcher, Theresa May, Liz Truss and Badenoch) including three female prime ministers. They’ve had a Hindu Indian background leader and prime minister in Rishi Sunak and now an African background leader. Diversity is, surely, as diversity does.

Hang on, hang on, the pond has spent months learning to hate DEI hires ... what's changed?

You can't let this sponger, bludger mentality get out of control, or who knows where it will end ...

Blissfully, the bromancer didn't care, he was in raptures at the cheer and the charm ...

But the happy story ends there, for Badenoch’s task ahead is mountainous. She made her name as a right-wing warrior, especially in the culture wars, and had a reputation for being a bit spikey, never one to walk away from a fight over policy or philosophy.
I find her an engaging, cheerful and charming woman, well aware of the colossal challenges ahead.

Time now for a happy snap, Badenoch and her husband Hamish after she won the Conservative leadership contest in November. Picture: Getty

Time then for the bromancer to crank up the adoration ...

The Conservatives have only 121 MPs out of 650 in the House of Commons, not much more than perennial minor party the Liberal Democrats, who have 72. The last election was the worst defeat in the history of the modern Conservative party. After 14 years in office, its final years were a shambles, with Johnson replaced as prime minister by Truss, who was replaced by Sunak, who lost in a devastating landslide victory to Labour’s Starmer.
Centre-right parties are doing well all over the Western world, except in Britain, where the electoral cycle caught up with the Conservatives in the worst way. Not only that, Nigel Farage’s Reform UK party, which espouses many traditional conservative values but is not tainted by a long period of ineffective government, recently displaced the Conservatives in the polls, pushing them into third place behind Reform and Labour.
“My party’s just been kicked out in a heavy defeat,” Badencoch says. “I need to show we are under new leadership, and that the new leadership is very different from the people who went before.
“We can see that the left-wing Labour government obviously has no answers. There’s also a new challenge on the right (Farage) from people who say they can do it, but they’ve got no experience, they’re completely untested.”
Badenoch puts her campaigns into a global context. She told the ARC conference that Western civilisation was in existential crisis, threatened within and without.
I ask her to nominate Britain’s biggest problem today: “We’ve lost confidence as a country. But this is the worst possible time to be demonstrating weakness.
“That loss of confidence manifests itself in a fear of policing properly, in not spending on defence, in too many people deciding they’re not going to work as the state can take care of them, in allowing the degradation of virtues and morality in public life because anything goes.

“It manifests itself in extreme gender ideology where at one point rapists were being put in women’s prisons.
“Things that even 10 years ago would have seemed absurd are being accepted because of the fear of (political) conflict. That is at the heart of both the cultural and the economic malaise.”

Ah, trans people, ruining everything. 

By golly they might be small in number ...

The overall proportion of trans people in England and Wales gleaned from the census (0.55%) is in the same ballpark as the 0.44% for Scotland. Statisticians north of the border posed a clearer question in their 2022 census: “Do you consider yourself to be trans, or have a trans history?” (Graudian)

... but they're the heart of darkness, at the heart of the cultural and economic malaise ...

Why, Brexit is nothing up against the way this axis of weevils ruins everything, though strangely Badenoch doesn't seem to have a policy ready to wipe them from the land and so make everything right in a trice ...

Badenoch says she will not rush into declaring specific policies this early in the political cycle. But she has a raft of strong positions already.

Ah, a raft of positions on other matters ...

She’s not a climate change sceptic, she says, but she is a strong sceptic of net-zero targets. 

Now that's just downright weird, unless you think the point is to accept the science, and then do SFA about it ...

As for other strategies, she wants to stop people like her coming to the country ...

She wants a big reduction in immigration to Britain, which she believes has got out of control. 

First in, best dressed ...

Olukemi (later shortened to Kemi) Olufunto Adegoke was born on 2 January 1980 in Wimbledon, London. Her mother had travelled from Nigeria to the UK to give birth in St Teresa's private hospital before the British Nationality Act 1981 abolished automatic birthright citizenship for those born in the United Kingdom, and then returned to Nigeria shortly after Badenoch was born. In later interviews, Badenoch denied claims she was an "anchor baby" and asserted that her family did not know she was in fact eligible for a British passport until she was a teenager. She is one of three children born to Nigerian Yoruba parents. (wiki)

Sure, sure, just make sure nobody else can make the cut ...

She champions much greater defence expenditure and says that in cabinet she argued for defence spending of 3 per cent of GNP (it is now about 2.3 per cent).

That'll teach Vlad the sociopath a lesson.

For some peculiar reason, the reptiles decided to repeat that line about being a sceptic, this time with a snap, Badenoch is not a climate change sceptic, she says, but she is a strong sceptic of net-zero targets. Picture: AFP

Regrets? She's had a few ...

She repudiates many of the mistakes of the past Conservative governments, famously saying they “talked right but governed left”. And she wants to reform and reduce the welfare state. Her stated principles include sound money and fiscal prudence.
These positions are all strong in themselves, enjoy widespread support from Conservative voters, are certainly capable of being sold to the British public and make up the bare bones of a pretty good program. But Badenoch faces two big problems in prosecuting her agenda. The first is that to any policy proposal from the Conservatives at all, a big part of the public reaction is: your party was in office for 14 years, why didn’t you do it then?
And the second is that the public is not really paying attention.
Does she think the public is listening to the Conservatives yet? “Not yet, no,” she answers with disarming honesty.
“I think it takes time. A political analyst told me it takes about two years. I expected the first 18 months of this job to be horrendous. The public are not yet ready to hear they need to go back to the Conservatives. They will give the new government a chance. But they’ve also given us a job – to hold the government to account and to provide an alternative.”
Badenoch’s background naturally arouses a lot of interest. She seems, and describes herself to be, a happy person. She is passionately in love with Britain.
Although she was born in Britain her family took her to Lagos when she was only a few months old and then sent her back to live in Britain when she was 16. As she says, she effectively looks at the UK through the eyes of a first-generation migrant. She loves Britain, she loves the values it’s based on and she loves the Western civilisation of which it is part.

Her journey to conservative conviction may seem singular, but it’s not at all uncommon for first-generation migrants to be conserva­tive, often more conservative than the society they join. Witness Trump’s success with Hispanic voters.

Yes, he's currently a great success ...

Don't get the pond started on all the successes ...

So many leopards, so much FAFO, and so time for another snap, Badenoch had been basking in an associated glow from the Trump victory. Picture: Getty

Ah, the basking, associated glow ...

An oldie but a goodie, the pond loves the glow, the killing of journalists, the dumping of Ukraine, and the conversion of Gaza to a new Riviera ... what a glow.

Back to Badenoch ...

So when did Badenoch fall in love with Britain, and why?
“Probably before I was 16. Many people don’t understand what living in a former colony was like. Everything we watched was BBC. I was imbibing so much British culture and thinking: what a wonderful place.
“Arriving here, the sentiment I felt more than anything was freedom. I lived in a place (Nigeria) that was so restrictive. You can’t do this, you can’t say that, girls are not supposed to do this. There was so much control. I laugh when I hear people talk about the patriarchy of the West. They don’t understand what a real patriarchy looks like. And just being here, the freedom, the opportunity, you can go where you like, you’re not going to get into trouble for the things you say.
“The love (for Britain) was there before I came back. When I got back, I was home.”
Her journey to active political conservatism also owes something to Nigeria: “I recognised things from when I was growing up creeping into Britain.
“Cancel culture reminds me of mobs. Only I saw real mobs, lynch mobs, come out of nowhere and take people down, whether they were innocent or not. The presumption of innocence is very important to me. It’s a value that’s very rare and very precious.”

Strange, the mobs we find here tend to be of a different kind ... the sort that like to cancel any cancellers in the vicinity.

Are there real mobs out and about?

Why yes, despite the very best attempts to cancel them, how they flourish in Faux Noise land ...

Sociopathic ...  perhaps on the basis that a hacking hand is as good as a hawk to a handsaw...

It must be identity politics that causes it, brings out the inner Texas Chain Saw Massacre ...

She joined the Conservative party for many different reasons. She was looking to do something more with her life than just work, not that there’s anything wrong with work. And she thought she might make a few new friends – in fact she met her husband in the Conservative party.
“I knew I was definitely not Labour. And those Lib Dems are very silly people. My work colleagues told me: ‘You’re very right-wing.’ I had also bought into the myth that being right-wing was a bad thing. It’s not of course.
“I was reading Thomas Sowell and (Friedrich) Hayek. And I thought, you know what, I am right-wing. I was 25 when I joined the Conservative party.”
Was she accepted there for who she was and what she could contribute?
“Yes. Much more so than I was in Nigeria. People don’t realise that multiculturalism and multiracialism are very different things. In Nigeria we were all one race but lots and lots of different cultures. I was often somebody who didn’t fit in there. Here I felt more accepted.
“I wouldn’t be able to stand for election as easily in Nigeria as I can here, not just because I’m a woman. They have very, very strict rules about blood lines in Nigeria. I couldn’t have stood in Lagos. I’d have to trace my ancestry back to inland Nigeria.”
That sounds a lot like contemporary Western identity politics.

The pond just knew it, bloody identity politics, ruining everything ...

“It’s Western countries, the UK in particular, that don’t look at your skin colour or where you came from. We shouldn’t throw that away. We shouldn’t let people exploit that. Just because we’re open doesn’t mean anything goes.
Badenoch is reliably anti-woke on pretty well all issues.

Sorry, did someone mention "woke"?

The pond is under a contractual obligation whenever that word appears ...

She utterly scorns the idea that Britain should pay reparations to former colonies, or to societies where people once owned slaves: “I don’t accept the concept of inherited racial guilt. Certainly not after so many generations.”

Indeed, indeed, the whole point of doing a rip off is to get away with it.

Make out like a bandit, and regret nothing, except perhaps the inability to do more looting, and having to put up with those bloody Greeks yammering on endlessly about the Elgin marbles ...

At every level, in her view, it defies not only morality but logic: “There’s an assumption that everyone (in Britain) benefited from these adventures (colonialism). But there was a very big class of poor people who did not enjoy those things that might have been seen by the aristocrats and elites. Why should they pay?

And that's why the pond denounces any notion of returning artworks looted by the Nazis. 

Leave them in the family, they didn't do anything wrong.  Let them focus on the future, and perhaps a nice little earner when they're sent off to auction ...

“The other thing is once you hear people talking about reparations for the past, you know they’re not focused on the future. It’s a belief that there’s nothing more to come. Let’s divide what we have and you owe us. So many of these calculations don’t even make any sense. The very fact that we have a Labour (Party) government that for years conceded those arguments and now finds itself in government not knowing where to turn shows we need strong leaders on these issues.”
On immigration, Badenoch says Britain is seen as a soft touch. She has announced policy on hard caps on overall numbers, on visas and on the peculiarly British system that says that after a certain amount of time people have an “indefinite leave to remain”.

It always amazes the pond when people vote against their best interests, but if you want to kick down, you must make sure you're some way up the ladder.

Speaking of hard touches, the reptiles refrained the line to accompany another snap, On immigration, Badenoch says Britain is seen as a soft touch. Picture: AFP

Guantanamo, that's what they need.

Everyone for themselves and let the rest miss out ...

Say what? The pond should be basking in that glorious Judaeo-Christian foundation the bromancer keeps insisting is being undermined.

Please allow the pond to bask away, keeping the company of strangers ...

When the Son of man shall come in his glory, and all the holy angels with him, then shall he sit upon the throne of his glory:
And before him shall be gathered all nations: and he shall separate them one from another, as a shepherd divideth his sheep from the goats:
And he shall set the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on the left.
Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in:
Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me.
Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink?
When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee?
Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee?
And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.
Then shall he say also unto them on the left hand, Depart from me, ye cursed, into everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels:
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me no meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me no drink:
I was a stranger, and ye took me not in: naked, and ye clothed me not: sick, and in prison, and ye visited me not.
Then shall they also answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, or athirst, or a stranger, or naked, or sick, or in prison, and did not minister unto thee?
Then shall he answer them, saying, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, ye did it not to me.
And these shall go away into everlasting punishment: but the righteous into life eternal.

Don't worry, that's just Judaeo-Christian claptrap. Nobody cares about that shit, least of all those who purport to follow it. 

 So the last shall be first, and the first last: for many be called, but few chosen.

The hell with that nonsense, the hell with western civilisation and all its dressings and grandiosities.

The first shall be first, and the last should bloody well stick with being last ... trust Kemi ...

Millions of people, she says, want to live in the West because of the benefits: “We can’t support all those who want to come here and we have no obligation to do so. The British people must come first.”

As for climate science, there's a mind at work that's up there with Lloydie of the Amazon:

She thinks the net-zero target is completely unachievable: “Why net zero in 2050? Why not 2049? 2051? Does it make sense at all if China is building a coal-fired power station every other week? We’re not doing it the right way for the UK.”
She’s all in favour of looking after the environment, keeping the air clean, but not at the cost of bankrupting England. A giant gas discovery was recently announced in Britain. In echoes of Australia, she thinks gas has to be a big part of Britain’s energy future.

Clean air? That's it?

In short, she really doesn't accept the science. 

Perhaps it's better just to blow things up ...

She’s very positive about AUKUS – which Brit wouldn’t be given the amounts of money involved in nuclear-powered submarines? But she takes it further, saying: “We need to strengthen credible alliances. AUKUS is a force for good in the world. But it certainly requires more spending on defence and security.
“We have to do more on defence. In the Cold War, when we weren’t even fighting, we were spending 4 per cent (of GDP) on defence, now it’s a little over two. Our economy is oriented towards the welfare state rather than an economy that can defend itself. The state is not creating wealth.”

Sigh, already dealt with the bludgers and the spongers, but best do it again ...

She tells me she wants to reduce the welfare state but she understands this will be a huge project requiring complex trade-offs and specific plans. Too much politics on both sides, she says, has been bold announcements with no plans behind them. In a nation such as Britain, when the politicians have no plan the system ends up producing a statist, left-leaning outcome.

Kick 'em out on the streets, and if they cark it, so much the better. It's a noble tradition ...

On the fifth of last November, I, accompanied by a friend well-known to the public, accidentally strayed into Whitechapel. It was a miserable evening; very dark, very muddy, and raining hard.
There are many woful sights in that part of London, and it has been well-known to me in most of its aspects for many years. We had forgotten the mud and rain in slowly walking along and looking about us, when we found ourselves, at eight o’clock, before the Workhouse.
Crouched against the wall of the Workhouse, in the dark street, on the muddy pavement-stones, with the rain raining upon them, were five bundles of rags. They were motionless, and had no resemblance to the human form. Five great beehives, covered with rags— five dead bodies taken out of graves, tied neck and heels, and covered with rags— would have looked like those five bundles upon which the rain rained down in the public street.
“What is this! ” said my companion. “What is this!”
“Some miserable people shut out of the Casual Ward, I think,” said I.
We had stopped before the five ragged mounds, and were quite rooted to the spot by their horrible appearance. Five awful Sphinxes by the wayside, crying to every passer-by, ” Stop and guess! What is to be the end of a state of society that leaves us here!”
As we stood looking at them, a decent working-man, having the appearance of a stone-mason, touched me on the shoulder.
“This is an awful sight, sir,” said he, “in a Christian country!”
“God knows it is, my friend,” said I.
“I have often seen it much worse than this, as I have been going home from my work. I have counted fifteen, twenty, five-and-twenty, many a time. It’s a shocking thing to see.” (Dickens)

That's more like it, keep shocking 'em, return to true British Victorian ways, that'll stick it to woke pussies like Dickens.

There followed a little bummer ...

She has generally been positive about Trump, though we spoke before the US President’s grotesque remarks about Ukraine.

Hey, it's just a piece plan ...

Is that the zillionth piece joke?

Time to celebrate, enjoy the tip of the flank of the round plated for Kemi's gourmet pleasure ...

Badenoch says: “I think what his victory shows is that you don’t have to worry too much about the commentariat class. It has its own narrative and its own agenda.” Instead, Trump shows a political leader can speak directly to the voters.

Racist, bigoted voters yearning for leopards to eat their faces, but hey, it's all good ... and you get what you voted for ...

And so to the wrap-up and the hope ... and lordy lordy, it isn't just "Ned" conjuring up the new vibe.

The bromancer is also down with the 1960s and the Beach Boys' good vibrations...

Whatever happens, Badenoch is going to be a central figure in the future conservative project in Britain, riding the new vibe of the time to re-establish the Conservative party, or on the other hand perhaps losing the party ascendancy to Farage. There is a huge amount riding on her, and while she has not yet set the nation on fire, it’s very early days.
Badenoch describes herself as “a cynical optimist”. The cynicism helps with the politics, the optimism helps with voters, and with life.
The cynicism is well justified. As to optimism, that remains to be seen.

Well played bromancer, as good as your Brexit salad days, a worthy result of a splendid junket ...

Greg Sheridan travelled to London as a guest of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship.

Every day from here on there's going to be a new Xmas in little England and around the world...