If Kemi Badenoch makes a speech during a war with Iran, does anyone hear it? Following the Gorton and Denton by-election – but seemingly before President Trump had decided to set fire to the Middle East – the Conservative leader had intuited that it was time to outline her party’s new approach to our fraught multi-racial democracy.

For now it is all buzzwords and no bite

For now it is all buzzwords and no bite

Emphasis on multi-racial, not multicultural. Badenoch said she had seen what a true multicultural society looked like while growing up in Nigeria: a country divided, despite a shared skin colour, by religion, culture and priorities. A country that she had left to come to a Britain defined by fairness, the rule of law and a tolerance for minorities, especially Jews. Any past references to her ‘ethnic enemies’ suddenly seemed strangely far away.

Badenoch framed her speech in contrast to Keir Starmer’s ‘weak’ response to the Iran crisis, especially in hesitating before allowing the US to use British airbases to attack Iran. Starmer’s problem, she argued, was that he was hamstrung by Labour voters whose beliefs about Middle Eastern affairs ‘do not align’ with Britain’s best interests. International law is but ‘a fig leaf’; Labour are hobbled by ‘pure political calculation’ and ‘decades of failed integration policy’.  

Handwringing about ‘family voting’ is a distraction. It’s unlikely that the Muslim wives of Gorton and Denton were raving Matt Goodwin fans, forced into voting for the Greens by their husbands. The bigger problem, she suggested, is a........

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