LONDON: 16/04/2025
The Cumbria Chronic again features our new contributor, Gunter S. Gonson, who is covering national Politics and global affairs for us in the anti-establishment style of ‘Gonzo journalist’ Hunter S. Thompson.
The Strange Case of Kemi Badenoch: A Tory Comedown in Three Acts
By Gunter S. Gonson: Dispatches from the deserted ruins of CCHQ
The Conservatives stagger into the May council elections with all the energy of twitching roadkill amid the stench of terminal decline across the Britain that they helped destroy.
Kemi Badenoch was, after all, supposed to be “the one”.
Emblematic of multi-cultural Conservative Britain. A political upstart with only eight years experience as an MP leading the world’s most successful political party.
Enter Kemi Badass. The young, steel-eyed crusader of the New Right.
A culture warrior in a black denim shirt dress dropping truth bombs all over X and eating Starmer for brunch.
Or so they said.
Westminster would be set ablaze with her acerbic tongue and Iron Lady cosplay, spluttered GB News.
Yet the Party finds itself going down in flames in the wreckage of another of its failed ideological moonshots.
Kemi’s half-hearted policy efforts – if you can find them – smell suspiciously like Johnson-era equivocation or reheated austerity.
She is surely for the axe if things tank the way they are expected next month.
Make no mistake, Badenoch looked the part.
Righteous, articulate, and telegenic in that “New tech CEO meets school disciplinarian” way.
The right-wing media tributes poured in like gin & tonic at a party fundraiser.
“The Future of Conservatism,” they called her. “A breath of fresh rage.”
But when the dust settled, what did they actually get?
Another dull technocrat masquerading as a revolutionary who swapped policy ideas for social media engagement and podcast appearances.
Her political instincts were all killer, no follow-through — she could gut a broadcast journalist on Newsnight — but couldn’t breathe life or energy into a single meaningful policy that struck a chord.
Her brand — hyper-rational, anti-Woke, unrepentantly neoliberal — has flopped like an underdone pancake.
The voters didn’t want another Thatcher reboot or to be dragged back to the 1980s.
They wanted an end to reckless uncontrolled immigration and someone to regularly rout Starmer at PMQs and expose him for the weak-kneed HR administrator that he really is.
They got neither.
Her allies were even worse: servile think tank ghouls and crypto-libertarian fanboys jostling for relevance in a party that’s been eating its own entrails since Brexit.
Kemi didn’t fail because she was too radical — she’s failed because the Tory machine blew all of its circuits during 14 years of mismanagement.
And by the time she and they realised it, the electorate had moved its votes to Reform.
In the end, Badenoch’s greatest enemy was these times — and the contradictory British instinct to recoil from anyone who is either not doing enough or trying too hard.
This would-be Conservative saviour will be ushered out soon – maybe after the May election results – as the party becomes engulfed by the apocalypse shaking British politics.
The Tories failed to find an answer and the membership now wants its money back.
***
© Gunter S. Gonson
thecumbriachronic.co.uk 
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