White Moves First?
The Tories May Have a New Black Queen

Kemi Badenoch

2,023 words

This year’s run-up to the British General Election is reminiscent of 1997, when Tony Blair was so spooked by the enthusiastic backing he was getting from the media that he warned his party about “triumphalism” in the weeks leading up to the ballot. That election was a forgone conclusion, and this year’s looks much the same. The Tories were out in ‘97 after 18 years, and Anthony Charles Linton Blair — Tony to you, my old mate — was about to transform the country; and not, as the young people say, in a nice way. Now the Tories have been ruling under false pretenses for 13 years, and they are not feeling lucky.

The 1997 election led to the defenestration of defeated Prime Minister (PM) John Major, who had spent four years looking vaguely surprised that he had the job in the first place. Major was flown in during the anyone-but-Thatcher detoxification era for the Tories, and was so lacking in charisma, even for a British politician, that the satirical puppet show Spitting Image portrayed him as being entirely grey.

The expected heavy defeat this time around for the blue parts of the country (I still have to adjust when looking at an American voting map, as in Britain the Tories are traditionally blue, and Labour red) will certainly lead to Rishi Sunak’s resignation. Sunak is an odd character, so lacking in charisma himself he makes the aforementioned John Major look like Jim Carrey. No one voted him in, either from the electorate or within the Tory party itself, but this Hindu ex-banker suddenly found himself with one of the world’s big gigs. He looks and feels like someone trying out a pricey new car but who is not really interested in buying it. He is also apparently uncaring about presiding over a nominally Conservative government which is, in terms of both policy and policy by omission, Social Democrat. It is certainly not conservative. By their works shall ye know them.

The most puzzling thing about British politics is why there are so few genuine conservatives. The British people tend towards conservatism far more readily than they do socialism and, as both Orwell and Wodehouse point out satirically, the Brits have never really taken fascism of any stripe seriously. There have been a few meek protestations of old-school conservativism from the current crew, and there will be more as the election looms, but the surprise is not just that there are no conservatives, but that no one even pretends to be one. It’s working for Richard Tice’s Reform Party, if polls are not deceptive.

The British politician, like those the world over, have as their working principle an adaptation of the famous first line of the Hippocratic Oath: First do no harm. For the political class this is tweaked, and becomes “first do no harm to my career.” The corollary of this is that the same politician strives to do what is best for his career (at least they share something natural with the rest of us). This is best effected by seizing opportunities for advancement, so taking up the mantle of conservatism would surely strike a chord with the voters, and a glittering career would beckon that could take this new Conservative all the way to Number 10, Downing Street. Perhaps this is the vision of Olukemi Olufunto Adegoke, better known as Kemi Badenoch.

Ms. Badenoch is a Conservative Member of Parliament (MP) and currently Secretary of State for Business and Trade, quite a thorny portfolio given the current global food supply crises. Badenoch recently won a leadership poll run by Conservative Home, which is widely seen as the unofficial selection process for a new leader should the Tories collapse, as is feared and expected. One line from the Yahoo! News report on the vote is worth noting, as it is exemplary of the British media’s utter misreading of the current Conservative Party: “It comes as a new study found that a landslide Labour victory could push the Tory Party even further to the right.”

Even further? Say it ain’t so. Even the British mainstream media are starting to understand that, with no actual conservatives in the party that bears the name, railing against Conservative austerity — or “Tory cuts” as they are traditionally known — is hunting a paper tiger. They want Oswald Mosley, and they have got a Tory Party in which, in the words of one commentator, “Almost half the Conservative Party’s back-bench MPs [Note: Non-cabinet MPs of lesser Parliamentary standing] in the British Parliament belong to a caucus promoting extreme net-zero ideas that is funded by a small group of green billionaire foundations.” Westminster is not really the Reichstag.

Badenoch has just turned 44 and was born in that most English of spots, Wimbledon in south London. Her parents are Nigerian, a general practitioner and a physiology professor, and Badenoch grew up in Lagos, returning to the United Kingdom aged 16, via a spell in the United States. The political situation in Nigeria was collapsing, and Badenoch would later say that European colonialists in Africa had served only to put “a different bunch of winners and losers” in place. Badenoch has been an MP since 2017, and was and is a supporter of Brexit. She established her credentials through various governmental posts, and despite failed bids for the London Mayoralty and the leadership of the party itself after Boris Johnson’s fall from grace, is well positioned for a tilt at the premiership should the electoral race follow form.

Badenoch can already play Westminster chess. Fearing that Labour would appoint a trade union baron as the new “low-pay czar,” she appointed Baroness Phillippa Stroud, who is prominent on the right of the Conservative Party, to oversee the minimum wage. What is it with czars, by the way? Traffic czars. Drug czars. Industry czars. I’m sure actual czars wouldn’t have spent their time arseing about with trading standards or knife crime. There are too many, and we need a czar czar. Would that Zsa Zsa Gabor were still with us!

You can buy Mark Gullick’s novel Cherub Valley here.

The first sign that Badenoch had taken the political temperature of the voting public was her vocal opposition to “woke” policy and practice. Now that the political arena has been swelled by gangs of upstarts yelling about transgender rights and fully expecting their word literally to become law, Badenoch joined the political and social media kill list of the hard Left.

Abstaining on a same-sex marriage vote, opposition to transgender toilets and self-elective gender in a government department, and support for the government’s proposed ban on conversion therapy made her a suitable target for the assassins of the woke militia. They only have one problem.

Badenoch is, as my grandmother would have said and as you will have gathered by now, as black as your hat. Ordinarily, for the Left, the idea of a major party leader — and thus potential Prime Minister — who was not only a woman but a black one to boot would have been a fruit-machine jackpot (although the Left weren’t all that keen on the first British female PM to demolish the glass ceiling). But, as will be familiar to American readers, blacks are supposed to vote for the socialist, not stray off the plantation to work in the house. Badenoch is also dangerously off-piste on the subject of what some still coyly call “race relations.” She also, not to put too fine a point on it, acts white.

The whole business of blacks “acting white,” while sneered at by the usual suspects who make a living from “acting black,” is important to understand. A teacher of my acquaintance confirmed that blacks in the sixth-form college (16-18) at which he taught were fiercely opposed to any blacks who wanted to use their time in education actually to learn something other than rap lyrics, and black culture has an antagonistic attitude hard-wired into it with regard to education, which is seen as bad white man’s magic. Acting white, of course, is about the best way any black can approach employment if they want to be anything other than a short-term menial. And, as for the ongoing racialized grift the UK imported from the US along with Black Lives Matter, Badenoch may sport braided hair, but there is no odor of the race hustler about her.

Badenoch is, in Parliamentary terms, a much-needed reminder that not all blacks in the media spotlight seem to feel the need to remind us both of that fact, and to bray about white culpability for endemic and ongoing black failure. Labour’s black caucus is staggeringly dim. Should Labour win the election as expected, David Lammy and Diane Abbott, both black and thoroughly attuned to the race grift, will undoubtedly be in Sir Keir Starmer’s cabinet. Now, these two are both genuinely stupid and obvious diversity hires (although Abbott has been grifting forever), but they will be in government because they are black and, if they are as stupid as they appear, that will present itself via the performance of their departments in due course, and excuses leading back to white men will duly be made. Abbott could be Foreign Secretary — an extraordinary prospect, although I suppose the world stage needs its clown.

A Badenoch premiership might be troublesome on the dissident Right (a vanishingly small parish in Britain), who rankle to see a black in charge of anything. A successful Badenoch premiership, in Conservative terms, would see a black female Prime Minister rejuvenating a party traditionally that of white men. The question concerning Badenoch is whether she has benefited from affirmative action and diversity hiring, or whether her climb to prominence is a simple reflection of intelligence, charisma, and talent.

Badenoch has steered reasonably clear of the minefield that is Westminster and kept her nose pretty much clean, with the exception of one rather odd misdemeanor. Badenoch, academically speaking, is from an IT background, reading a computing engineering degree at my alma mater, The University of Sussex, although she may have indulged in some extra-curricular studies. Hacktivists were “baffled” when Ms. Badenoch admitted quite casually to hacking Harriet Harman’s website in 2008, Harman being the then-Minister for Women (they need more than a minister), and writing a hoax blogpost. Badenoch countered the predictable outrage by saying coquettishly that it was “the naughtiest thing I’ve ever done.” Perhaps hacking systems is a desirable skill-set for a British PM in today’s world. Badenoch can also handle the hot seat in parliamentary committees, not suffering fools gladly.

I’ve been suckered so many times by politicians I don’t know which way is up anymore. It feels as though politics should be more than semiotics and mass psychology, less of the technocracy and more of the democracy. I bet these guys didn’t have focus groups to fuss about their optics. Great Britain is in a spot of bother just at the moment, and it may be that the forthcoming General Election might not be a bad one to lose. The British populace, as citizenry across the West, have been taught to think in news cycles. If Britain’s decline becomes markedly worse during the next term of office, then Labour will end up holding the baby, and this could be a troubled and troublesome governmental reign with benefits for Ms. Badenoch. The next Tory leader, incidentally, will almost certainly be a woman in any event, with Suella Braverman and Penny Mourdant coming in second and third, respectively, in the Conservative Home poll.

In the meantime, should Kemi Badenoch be promoted to the role of black queen, she just has to wait and watch. Her potential election as Prime Minister in 2028 relies on Labour making a mess of things — a fairly safe bet there — combined with her own attempts to steer the party towards the genuinely conservative Right. It would also shut the yap of the black caucus in Britain, every bit as witless and irritating — and yet unaccountably powerful — as that in the States. The Right will be able to tap the wine-glass, get everyone’s attention, and explain to the race industry shakedown artists the following: You have a black Prime Minister now. See what you can do when you act white?