With the elimination from the contest of Kemi Badenoch, the once great Conservative Party of Great Britain, the Party of Peel and Disraeli, of Churchill and Thatcher, has decided to continue not being a conservative Party.

Badenoch was not just presentable, she was the real deal. A truth teller. A freedom champion. A culture warrior. Astonishingly, for these British times, she is actually a conservative!

SUCCESS

One wise observer stated that Badenoch had “saved the Tories”, by showing them a future path to success in elections and to governing wisely and well.

Lately they have achieved the former only. Imagine what Badenoch might have achieved if they had actually elected her as prime minister.

Naturally, as an insurgent candidate, an outsider, a conviction politician, a real leader-in-waiting, Kemi Badenoch was shown the door.

The voting Tory parliamentarians feared that if Badenoch made the final two, and was presented to the broader Party membership for the ultimate vote, she just might win. Better to shaft her early.

(As an aside, one might wonder why the membership only gets to vote for the choices put before them by the MPs, and not for someone that they actually want themselves.)

Earlier still, the only other conservative contender, Suella Braverman, was eliminated. About the only thing that can be said, to date, is that no one can accuse the Tories of being either sexist or racist.

Very, very few pale, stale males to be seen anywhere. Unfortunately, very few of those on display are remotely conservative. Or leaderly. And doesn’t that tell a tale about the priorities of modern, corporatist political Parties?

The last three candidates consisted of a billionaire/big government globalist, a super-woke reality TV star who liked to appear in her swimmers on the tele, and a Remainer non-entity most often referred to as the “least worst” of the three establishment candidates (respectively, Rishi Sunak, Penny Mordaunt and Liz Truss).

Mercifully, now Mordaunt has gone. That she lasted so long in a field of a dozen tells all you need to know about the quality of the modern Tory politician.

Let us summarise what it might take to be a real (British) conservative in these times.

First, finish Brexit, most of which is already done.

Second, cancel – and I do mean cancel – net-zero and all the associated renewables fantasies built on climate lies.

CRUCIFIED

Third, apologise for COVID fascism, call a royal commission, promise that there will never again be a lockdown or anything approaching a vaccine mandate, and promise to punish the guilty and compensate the crucified.

Fourth, cancel all support for one side in a (relatively) far-off foreign civil war between two corrupt ex-communist States. (Couldn’t they both lose?)

Fifth, explicitly state that you will never, ever use the phrase “build back better”. Or attend a Davos event.

Sixth, explicitly and forcibly renounce each and every last one of the items on the woke agenda. Keep the statues, indeed defend them. State that marriage is between a man and a woman, and define “woman” clearly. Quote Martin Luther King, often, in relation to the colour of skin and the content of character. Defend life, from its beginning to its natural end.

Seventh, re-commit to fiscal continence. Explain this to voters. We have run out of your money, and we are not going to spend any more of it. Apologise for the out-of-control fiscal State.

Have any of the Tory contenders even approached ticking these boxes?

Well, two (Braverman and Badenoch) came close-ish, as noted above. They are now both gone from the race.

Margaret Thatcher would, surely, be rolling in her grave at the offerings and skill-sets of those who remain.

Leaders face the problems in front of them. How they rise to the challenge of these problems is how we should judge them.

Modern Tory leaders (from David Cameron onwards) do not even seem to know what their problems are. Let alone how to address them.

What of the others? Here is one view of the favourite, “Fishy Rishi” Sunak (as he is called by the great Dan Wootton of GB News), from one of TCW’s star writers, Niall McCrae: “Sunak – spendthrift, green, globalist and dangerous.”

Sounds like just the ticket! The World Economic Forum’s candidate. Fiscally incontinent, accumulating a £500 billion COVID debt, and brushing it all aside as if of no consequence. High taxing. Like all current Western leaders you continue to see in those ghastly photos at G7 and G 20 summits. Part of the Club of Rome mindset. Save the planet with the magic money tree.

Sunak’s wife runs a tech company called Infosys. Here is McCrae: “Infosys is a technology partner of the World Economic Forum, which described the company as a ‘global leader in next-generation digital services and consulting’. A key product is Finacle, a digital banking platform. Sunak is an enthusiast for central bank digital coupons (CBDC) and has been collaborating with the Bank of England to float the idea of ‘Britcoin’, an innovation that would threaten all our personal freedoms. Such currency would give unprecedented power to the State and global banks. Infosys president Mohit Joshi, in an article for the WEF in August 2020, promoted CBDC as the future for all spending in society (he also warned that ‘paper money can transmit the virus’).

“So, social credit system, here we come. The State, as administrator of the ‘rules-based international order’, could use a wholly digital currency as carrot and stick, rewarding compliance such as vaccination and punishing dissidents by surcharges or barring travel or other purchases. It’s already happening in China.”

SAVED

On this view, the Brits and the rest of the Anglosphere should be very worried, indeed, by the prospect of a Sunak premiership. He claims now to have “saved” Britain from lockdown. Really, they will say anything.

What about Sunak’s opponent? One unkind observer called Liz Truss “a Margaret Thatcher tribute act”. Another sees her as an “out and out careerist”. A Remainer, as noted.

She is up for net-zero by 2050. A greenie, then. An apologist for the renewables scam. As Foreign Secretary, Britain’s cheer leader for arming Ukraine to fight a hopeless, proxy war.

At worst, the outcome of this adventurism could be a thermonuclear conflict. Nuclear weapons. Remember them? Boris waged a war and was brought down by the Tories’ groper-in-chief, Chris Pincher (by name and by nature).

Truss was a Boris loyalist. So, no taste, then. She talks tax cuts.  But who doesn’t when you are not actually in a position to enact them? In any case, given what else the encroaching surveillance State has taken from us and promises for the future, a few pounds in tax cuts are of marginal consequence.

Tax policy is yesterday’s conservatism. And Truss is an establishment figure. She has been backed by the nominally conservative but deeply COVID-disappointing Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nadine Dorries.

(She did give Tony Abbott a job. But that was because he was an Australian, and, it was thought, might help fashion a free trade agreement between the two countries, not because he was a conservative).

People ask, what is Boris’s legacy going to be?

Well, at this point, it appears that his legacy will be Rishi as prime minister then Sir Keir Starmer and Labour.

With the Tories having contributed almost nothing in over a decade of government other than Brexit.

But Brexit was a result achieved by the people of Britain, not the Tories, most of whom didn’t want it anyway.

Possibly including Boris, who came on board mainly to ride the electoral wave to the beach of victory and the premiership he so craved but did not ultimately respect.

(Does achieving nothing in a decade of office then meekly ceding power to the marginally-worse socialists sound a bit familiar, Aussies?)

JUDGEMENT

That corporatist political Parties have now chosen to deny voters the opportunity to use general elections to pronounce judgement on governments and prime ministers (or premiers) seems a fait accompli, across Western jurisdictions. Most leadership changes in major Parties now occur between elections, not immediately following them.

So, Boris waddles off into the sunset, hair tousled suitably for the cameras and his twenty-years-plus younger wife and toddlers in tow. Wondering what on earth he has achieved, given that he spent most of his amoral, dishevelled life prepping for his moment in the political sun.

There is absolutely nothing to show. And to come? As Nigel Farage has stated, merely “more of the same”.

And the once great British Conservative Party slithers off into its own philosophical sunset. What would the late Sir Roger Scruton, the doyen of modern British conservative thinkers, say, I wonder?

Post-Thatcher, the Tories have spent much of their time trying to apologise for their supposedly “toxic” near-past.

A “toxic” past of sound ideas, clear intent and competent management, with a government that defended freedom and sought to make Britain economically great and liberally democratic.

Well, the latter day non-toxic Tories treatment of a minor Chinese virus destroyed all of that heritage, almost in an instant.

What they have delivered is something far more toxic, and Boris Johnson was the absolute nadir of toxicity.