British Conservatives Defecting to Reform Hate Badenoch Far More than They Like Farage

Kemi Badenoch, the opposition Conservative Party leader, made quite a show last week of sacking shadow minister Robert Jenrick. He was reportedly scheming to become the latest rat to jump her sinking Conservative ship and join Reform UK. But her response, calling him a liar and daring him to trigger a by-election, was so unmoored that it made Jenrick’s cowardice look pragmatic.

But this wasn’t just another episode of As the Conservatives Turn. Because it betrayed the unsettling fact that Conservative MPs would rather run to Nigel Farage, the natural heir to Oswald Mosley’s brand of fascist politics, than stand with Badenoch, the ironic heir to Margaret Thatcher’s brand of conservative politics. And, pray tell, what the devil would make them do that?

Well, Reform UK is polling within striking distance of the Conservative Party. So these defections are partly about survival. But they’re partly confession, too. The Conservatives elected Badenoch as party leader on November 2, 2024, just three days before America was set to elect Kamala Harris as its first Black woman president. That timing was no accident. They wanted a virtue-signaling mascot more than a leader. The optics were irresistible. The calculation was cynical.

Incidentally, think of Reform UK as what a MAGA party formally split off from the Republican Party would look like in America: unburdened by governing responsibility, fueled by grievance and nostalgia, and free to say aloud what establishment conservatives prefer to signal with a wink.

I argued from the outset that Conservatives knew Badenoch had no prayer of becoming prime minister. Like MAGA Republicans, they were content to deploy a Black face for their elitist, nativist, racist policies. But I also predicted that if polls ever suggested they might actually defeat Labour, they would dump her like a hot potato for a “more suitable” leader. And yes, they would spin the usual gaslighting palaver about how Black Badenoch would fare even worse than Asian Sunak did. For what it’s worth, England today looks at least as ready to elect Black Badenoch as America was to elect Black Obama in 2008.

Even so, there’s no denying Badenoch’s political vulnerability. And we didn’t need Jenrick’s backstabbing to see it. She revealed herself long ago as a self-hating Black woman with a messiah complex. Indeed, just as Thatcher’s contempt for feminism made it easy for her to serve as the token woman in her all-male Cabinet, Badenoch’s contempt for DEI makes it easy for her to serve as the token Black in her all-white shadow Cabinet. Exhibit A is that her “family photo” made a mockery of representation, featuring her not just as leader, but as token Black.

Still, I cannot stress enough how much Badenoch dazzled Conservatives with her Churchillian charisma and Thatcherite rhetoric during the party leadership race. But she’s acting now like a self-righteous, officious schoolmarm who thinks the whole country is her private academy, subject to her lectures and discipline.

That alone explains the indignation she unleashed when she couldn’t get her shadow cabinet to agree that Britain was “not broken.” Farage is emulating Trump by campaigning on anger, grievance, and national decline. And that reflects the mood in Britain today, just as it did in America in 2024, when it reelected Trump. In other words, Badenoch is as tone deaf as the octogenarian “Sleepy Joe,” whose refusal to pass the torch in a timely manner helped Trump win that fateful presidential election. Simply put, Farage is the skilled, nimble politician Tories actually admire. Badenoch is becoming the liability they merely tolerate.

Alas, the Conservative Party has found in Kemi Badenoch what Republicans found in Clarence Thomas: a Black figure willing to spew racist, homophobic, reactionary rhetoric with more conviction than many white politicians could, or would. It’s a perverse phenomenon with ample historical precedent. Recall that no Americans championed more “principled” opposition to gay rights than closeted gay Republicans. The usefulness of such figures lies in their willingness to provide moral, political, and racial cover for policies that would otherwise look exactly like what they are. I fear that is the full extent of Badenoch’s usefulness in British politics.

Now shameless Conservatives are showing their true colors. And it speaks volumes that they’re abandoning long-held political principles to play sycophants to a white, racist, antisemitic buffoon cosplaying as the UK Trump. That’s why these defections are fundamentally about racial identity politics. In Farage, for all his crassness, they see something they will never see in Badenoch: whiteness.

The irony cuts deep. Badenoch rose in right-wing politics by acting like a white supremacist, much as Jewish Stephen Miller acts like a MAGA Nazi. Yet if she were white, politicians and pundits alike would be hailing her as the best thing to happen to England since Churchill. Instead, Conservatives are abandoning her not despite her talents, but because of her race.

Their leader-election remorse is palpable. Their general-election dread is mounting. And the racial subtext has become text. Calling this spade a spade, Conservatives elected Badenoch for diversity. Now they are abandoning her for it, too.