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Labour has to stand up to toxic Tory posturing, or it will be pulled in the same direction as Jenrick and Badenoch
Last Wednesday, the announcement that Conservative MPs had decided on a conclusive leadership battle between Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick was greeted in non-Tory circles by an outpouring of mirth. One Labour parliamentarian texted the Guardian’s political editor to jokily wonder whether the result needed to be declared as yet another gift. Rumours that the shock outcome was the consequence of James Cleverly’s supporters assuming he had an unassailable lead and cynically backing Robert Jenrick as his most beatable opponent were the clincher: here was yet another instalment of the Tory pantomime that has now been running for nearly a decade. “A lot of very serious analysis awaits,” said the LBC presenter James O’Brien, “but this is all objectively hilarious.”
In so far as Badenoch and Jenrick seemingly have no interest in the reasons why their party so comprehensively lost the election, all the amusement is understandable. Talk of whoever wins perhaps lasting only a couple of years only increases the sense of hilarity. But it is surely not that difficult to take a slightly different view, and look at the future of Tory politics with more than a pang of anxiety.
Donald Trump vowed to “rescue” the Denver suburb of Aurora, Colorado, from the rapists, “blood thirsty criminals,” and “most violent people on earth” he insists are ruining the “fabric” of the country and its culture: immigrants.
Trump’s message in Aurora, a city that has become a central part of his campaign speeches in the final stretch to Election Day, marks another example of how the former president has escalated his xenophobic and racist rhetoric against migrants and minority groups he says are genetically predisposed to commit crimes. The supposed threat migrants pose is the core part of the former president’s closing argument, as he promises his base that he’s the one who can save the country from a group of people he calls “animals,” “stone cold killers,” the “worst people,” and the “enemy from within.”
He is no longer just talking about keeping immigrants out of the country, building a wall and banning Muslims from entering the United States. Trump now warns that migrants have already invaded, destroying the country from inside its borders, which he uses as a means to justify a second-term policy agenda that includes building massive detention camps and conducting mass deportations.
In his lengthy speech Friday, Trump delivered a broadside against the thousands of Venezuelan migrants in Aurora. And he declared that he would use the Alien Enemies Act, which allows a president to authorize rounding up or removing people who are from enemy countries in times of war, to pursue migrant gangs and criminal networks.
“Kamala [Harris] has imported an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world … from prisons and jails and insane asylums and mental institutions, and she has had them resettled beautifully into your community to prey upon innocent American citizens,” he said.
His rhetoric has veered more than ever into conspiracy theories and rumors, like when he amplified false claims about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pets. And Trump has demonized minority groups and used increasingly dark, graphic imagery to talk about migrants in every one of his speeches since the Sept. 10 presidential debate, according to a POLITICO review of more than 20 campaign events. It’s a stark escalation over the last month of what some experts in political rhetoric, fascism, and immigration say is a strong echo of authoritarians and Nazi ideology.
“He’s been taking Americans and his followers on a journey since really 2015 conditioning them … step by step instilling hatred in a group, and then escalating,” said Ruth Ben-Ghiat, a history professor at New York University who writes about authoritarianism and fascism and has been outspoken about the dangers of a second Trump administration.
“So immigrants are crime. Immigrants are anarchy. They’re taking their jobs, but now they’re also animals who are going to kill us or eat our pets or eat us,” she continued. “That’s how you get people to feel that whatever is done to them, as in mass deportation, rounding them up, putting them in camps, is OK.”
The Trump campaign said while the “media obsesses over rhetoric,” the former president is responding to voters’ concerns.
“The American people care about results that impact their lives. President Trump will take action to deport Kamala’s illegal immigrants and secure the border on day one. That’s what Americans want to hear,” Trump press secretary Karoline Leavitt said in a statement to POLITICO.
Trump has long deployed racist attacks for political gain, including spreading conspiracy theories about whether former President Barack Obama, the nation’s first Black president, was born in the United States. And when he launched his first campaign in 2015, Trump said Mexico was “not sending its best,” calling immigrants from the country “rapists” who are bringing in crime and drugs. He also promised that day to build a “great big wall.”
But times have changed, and so has he.
The country has moved to the right on immigration — including the Democratic Party and Trump’s opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris, the daughter of Jamaican and Indian immigrants. Trump repeatedly bashed Harris as “dumb,” questioned her racial identity and has called her a “DEI” candidate — perpetuating the idea that women and people of color can only be in positions of power because of quotas and preferential treatment.
Harris has touted her record prosecuting transnational gangs, drug cartels and human traffickers and has promised strict enforcement at the Southern border — an effort to appease Americans’ concern about illegal migration. The vice president has vowed to go even further than the Biden administration’s crackdown on asylum.
As the political conversation around immigration has shifted, Trump has not only intensified his rhetoric, but his policy plans.
He has increasingly targeted specific communities, including Springfield, Ohio, Charleroi, Pennsylvania and Aurora, arguing that immigrants are destroying American towns and cities across the country and using those examples to call for large-scale federal response. Trump has spent the last month on the trail elevating the claims about those communities — even as local officials have been denying these allegations and asking the Republican nominee to stand down.
Trump on Friday used false stories about gang takeovers in Aurora as he announced he would remove migrants connected to gangs under an “Operation Aurora” based on presidential wartime powers under the Alien Enemies Act. (While police in Aurora have encountered some gang activity tied to a Venezuelan group, there has been no gang takeover in Colorado.)
“Efforts to blame outsiders, a politically voiceless group, which Trump is an expert at doing, has led to atrocities in the United States — everything from Japanese internment to Operation Wetback,” said Ediberto Román, a Florida International University law professor who studies xenophobia and immigration.
Vivid imagery, such as telling crowds of rally attendees that migrants will “cut your throat,” are now a staple of Trump’s speeches. He cites cases of U.S. womenand girls allegedly murdered by immigrants in the country illegally, even as studies have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than U.S.-born Americans.
But Trump says they are — because they are inherently worse people. He’s told nearly all-white crowds in the past that they have “good genes,” even before his explicit suggestion this week that non-white immigrants are genetically inferior — when he told conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt that migrants have “bad genes.”
“What is so jarring to me is these are not just Nazi-like statements. These are actual Nazi sentiments,” said Robert Jones, founder of the Public Religion Research Institute, the author of “The Hidden Roots of White Supremacy” and a vocal critic of Trump’s rhetoric. “Hitler used the word vermin and rats multiple times in Mein Kampf to talk about Jews. These are not accidental or coincidental references. We have clear, 20th century historical precedent with this kind of political language, and we see where it leads.”
In a ruthless reordering of his No 10 inner circle, Sue Gray has been ditched as the prime minister’s chief of staff. Morgan McSweeney, the political strategist who masterminded Labour’s election victory, replaces her.
Gray, Downing Street announced on Sunday, has taken on an advisory role as Starmer’s envoy for nations and regions. No one really knows what this position entails, other than it reflects a bruising demotion for the former civil servant and “Partygate” sleuth. (Some have suggested “nations and regions” is the Westminster equivalent of Siberia: i.e. Soviet-esque political exile).
Certainly, Gray’s time as a prominent figure in the Labour hierarchy has come to a close. It’s a tragic and dramatic decline for the individual once heralded as Starmer’s lead fixer. Whatever happened to the “cult of Sue Gray” and its loyal subjects?
One way of viewing Gray’s resignation is the climax of a venomous power struggle between the PM’s onetime closest confidant and her successor. Reports of tension between McSweeney and Gray had proved a recurring theme since Labour’s return to government in July. No longer. Starmer has seen to that.
Another non-mutually exclusive view argues Gray’s demise reflects an admission that Labour has made political missteps since entering government — and that McSweeney, the party’s savviest strategic mind, is the individual best placed to right them.
But whatever your chosen interpretation, Starmer’s No 10 operation looks strikingly different to that which entered government, to much fanfare, on 5 July.
Labour’s lowest moment since entering government on 5 July came when Keir Starmer was forced to insist, mere months into his new role, that he was “completely in control” of No 10 Downing Street — contrary to popular and media opinion.
The claim followed reports that Sue Gray, his chief of staff, was being paid £3,000 more than Starmer after a post-election pay rise.
This story, in the end, was less significant for the pecuniary sum involved than the vituperative briefing that accompanied its revelation. The anonymous rants — borne of dispossession, spite or genuine righteousness — were coruscating.
“It was suggested that [Gray] might want to go for a few thousand pounds less than the prime minister to avoid this very story”, one source told BBC Newsacidly. “She declined.”
“If you ever see any evidence of our preparations for government, please let me know”, another adviser scathed.
But the magnum opus of Labour’s acerbic anti-Gray leaks, which reached their peak just before Labour conference, was pinged to The Sunday Times’ Gabriel Pogrund. “Sue Gray is the only pensioner better off under Labour”, it read.
Briefing of this intensity, suffice it to say, reflected not just anger within No 10 — but a broader recognition that Labour was struggling. In a standard “honeymoon” period, it’s unlikely resentful advisers would get much of a hearing from journalists; their dispossessed wails just wouldn’t fit the prevailing narrative. And yet here they were, being reported by the national broadcaster and rabidly followed up by the rest of the press gallery.
The briefings also, it should be stressed, filled a political vacuum.
During Labour’s time in opposition, Gray was reportedly been charged with setting the “grid” — or media agenda — for Labour’s first 100 days in government. But as this politically and psychologically significant milestone approaches, it’s still not clear what Starmer’s “mission” in government is.
Of course, what did exist of No 10’s chosen agenda was crowded out by stories surrounding Starmer’s ever-conspicuous chief of staff. It was an untenable situation.
But still, Gray’s departure on Sunday was announced far sooner than Westminster had collectively expected. It is easy to lampoon a government as maladroit and dithering when it comes to the deposition of problem individuals. (By which I mean figures who become net drags on the party operation). But many still expected Gray to survive until Christmas — paving the way for a more totemic New Year reset. Moreover, in acting ahead of expectations, Starmer risks broadcasting the view that Gray’s ouster reflects even deeper problems in No 10.
But decisive action has always been a feature of the Starmer project when it is operating at its best.
Nor is such “ruthlessness” a given in modern politics. It is, for instance, the opposite of Boris Johnson’s style, whose loyal sentimentality (usually in a quid pro quo sense) saw many ministers — and one notable adviser — last far beyond their time. The months wasted before Rishi Sunak sacked Suella Braverman as home secretary only strengthened criticism of him as weak.
Ruthlessness has been Starmer’s primary calling card since becoming Labour leader in 2020 — and Gray’s departure is a timely manifestation. Crises and setbacks are inevitable as a leader; the test is to find the kernel of opportunity shrouded within.
But there are still broader issues for Starmer to reckon with. Gray’s steady descent from media darling — star raised by fawning hagiographies — to erstwhile political boogeywoman is, in many senses, the story of this government. This view rather helps explain why Gray’s profile has captured so much (arguably outsized) attention over recent months.
The court intrigue stories fed into the prevailing narrative — in lieu of any compelling Labour tale — of the government’s decline from its post-election peak. The resultant difficult headlines prompted further internal derision and bellicose briefing. It was an unsustainable doom loop that Starmer felt compelled to break.
As such, Gray’s ejection won’t in and of itself correct Labour’s early missteps. But it was surely necessary to create some space so a new, more overtly political, operation might.
‘It is a day of deep reflection and pain thinking about October 7, the worst attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust’
— Foreign secretary David Lammy says the anniversary of the 7 October attacks on Israel is “a day of deep reflection and pain”.
Lammy told reporters at the South Tottenham synagogue this morning: “This is a painful day for the Jewish community across this country and across the diaspora.”
He added: “It is a day of deep reflection and pain thinking about October 7, the worst attack on the Jewish community since the Holocaust. And of course, thinking about the many hostages that are still held in Gaza and their loved ones and their pain.
“And particularly we think of Emily Damari, the British hostage, and her family have no word of her fate or how she is doing.”
Labour’s defeat in the 2021 byelection nearly prompted its leader to quit. Instead, he learned lessons – just as he must now
No prime minister plans to spend the first hundred days in Downing Street learning how not to govern for the next hundred.
The intensity of the job is famously relentless, but it’s also supposed to be exhilarating. The confident stride of a triumphant leader should mask initial missteps. For Keir Starmer to look already winded, however, suggests that something has gone badly wrong. The departure of Sue Gray, his chief of staff, confirms it.
The Conservative Party, fresh from its worst defeat in a century, gathered in Birmingham to choose its sixth leader in eight years: blind men fighting for spectacles.
The question is: do they chase their left wing, which fled to the Europhile Liberal Democrats, or their right, who want to close the borders and dance with Nigel Farage?
The conference center is disorientating, perhaps deliberately. It’s all escalators and stairways which seem, in some awful metaphor, to lead you back to where you began, like an Escher painting.
This leadership election gives conference the appearance of energy: people say the atmosphere is “upbeat,” but that’s Toryism for you. If you want weepers try Labour. Never forget, Britain enjoyed the Blitz.
It’s a feint, a hangover from government; the exhibition area is full because delegates assumed the Tories would be in office until Christmas. There are four candidates, who the parliamentary party — now just 121 strong — will reduce to two next week.
The Tory membership then chooses the winner, who is, by custom, is usually the candidate least likely to win a general election. The Conservative membership is largely white, affluent, and aging, their politics are a protest to a world they no longer understand or recognize. They fall asleep in events, and people wonder if they are dead.
There’s earnest Tom Tugendhat, who talks about being a soldier (a variation on Keir Starmer’s “my father was a toolmaker”) and holds a series of “Tom-versations”. (Part of the Tory problem is they have forgotten how to speak. All politicians have. They say things like: Global Britain). There is handsome James Cleverly, a “Bridgerton” hero, all shoulders and hail-fellow-well-met. (One Cleverly supporter told a journalist she backed him because he’s the only candidate who wouldn’t get attacked in a pub.)
Then there is the right: luminous Kemi Badenoch, who loves a mirror and a fight — increasingly a fight with a mirror. People say Badenoch is too odd to be prime minister, but they said that about Margaret Thatcher. As conference begins, the front-runner is Robert Jenrick, who looks like a minor Dickensian villain.
Candidates are surrounded by acolytes pretending to be the Secret Service — everyone young in British politics has watched “The West Wing.” Jendrick-ites — is that the word? — try to close the bridge from the conference center to the Hyatt Hotel so their candidate can stroll unmolested, but are ignored. This is a TV and X event, and it goes like this: someone says something controversial — Jenrick, for instance, declares British special forces kill people abroad, arresting people is too much paperwork — and the press rush to Tugendhat to hear him tut. A Tugendtut, if you like.
There are political-themed consumer goods: a wallet that says “Lower Taxes” (Cleverly for leader); a baseball cap that says I’m a “Tugend-Hat.” A green apple with a Badenoch sticker.
On Monday the party travels to its wilder shores: to Liz Truss, prime minister for 49 days in 2022. The membership loves Truss, who is a case study in bloody and unbowed: increasingly she looks like a woman who survived a hostage situation and now works for Fox News.
Two years after she fell, Liz Truss’ unease has metamorphosed into a carapace. | Christopher Furlong/Getty Images
Delegates queue for an hour to see her; a hundred are turned away. Two years after she fell, Truss’ unease has metamorphosed into a carapace. She speaks for Donald Trump, the inciter of the Capitol riots — his winning would cheer her up, she says — and berates journalists.
If the Tory Party is not yet ready to take responsibility for its failures, Truss is its purest avatar. I don’t think she knows it has failed. She says she would have performed better than Rishi Sunak in the general election when, rather, he lost the general election so badly due to her.
Wiser heads wish she had not come. But the membership loves her, because they confuse intransigence with strength. There was no one to do makeup and hair in Downing Street, she complains. It is meaningless.
There is a séance for Margaret Thatcher; an event called, “What would Maggie do?” The panelists sit beside a life-size cardboard of Thatcher.
John Redwood, her chief policy adviser, acts as medium: “She’d be appalled by so many things,” he says. “She’d be appalled by the level of state debt, she’d be appalled by the extent of the deficit. She would understand this is monumental waste, incompetence, malevolence, even.
“You need focus,” he shouts, “you need clarity, you need management, you need vision! And the government today has none of these things! It doesn’t matter who the politicians are at the top. It is dire, it is dreadful, it is unacceptable!”
The right settles around a narrative: though the Tories ruled for 14 years, the Blairites never left power, and we live in the ash of woke Marxism.
I finally find a reasoned voice, Rachel Wolf, who co-authored the winning 2019 Conservative manifesto. “I think Thatcher would be serious,” she says quietly. At a hustings the day before, she says, the candidates gave one minute speeches. “This is totally ludicrous. What are we doing? We are still a serious country. Let’s allow our candidates to be serious in turn.”
Then she says: “We are simultaneously bemoaning the size of the state and berating Labour for their decision on the [now pared-back state benefit] winter fuel. Governing is hard. I don’t think she [Thatcher] would have a lot of time for that kind of surface speak.” But Wolf is an outlier. For most, it is about emotion. They can afford it.
New generation?
I tour the party shop, always a fair barometer of the Conservative soul. There is no Boris Johnson or David Cameron merch, though both won general elections: it is high-viz jackets (why?) and raincoats, and Churchill and Thatcher still. “I don’t think the next Tory prime minister is here,” a member tells me. Another says, “I don’t know where the new generation of Tory philosophers are.”
There is a Brexit event, asking: what happened to the benefits? Ah, yes. Speakers said they expected Brexit to be, “swifter, smoother, and softer.” We are, “in the worst possible situation.” “We walked out and sat on the doorstep and copied everything.” “We wasted those years.” “Brexit is like Bertha Mason in the attic [in Jane Eyre.] No one wants to talk about it.”
Kemi Badenoch, in Thatcher blue. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
Another ghost is Boris Johnson, the hope that died. The candidates are too frightened to damn him for lying to parliament, destroying the 2019 victory, and mandate. Tugendhat is asked: would you let him back? He dodges it: it’s up to him, he says, and up to you.
Badenoch, the most relaxed orator — Tugendhat and Jenrick feel forced — makes the most mistakes, because she follows her own path. She is rude about foreign carers, she doubts maternity pay, but she emits, perhaps obliviously, a truth about modern politics, and herself.
“I don’t see anything in my Twitter feed now that doesn’t have my name in it,” she says at a social justice event of all places. “Because, clearly, I’ve been clicking on things that are mentioning me and Twitter has worked out that this person likes reading about Kemi Badenoch: and that is all that is coming to me.”
One member calls the leadership race “mad political bingo.” He thinks the candidates vie to say the wildest things: for attention; for X; for themselves.
The right candidates get more bullish. Badenoch says five to 10 percent of civil servants should be in prison; a prelude to her own stab-in-the-back myth? Jenrick says he named his daughter “Thatcher,” but misremembered the year Thatcher won the leadership. He was exposed as, potentially, a sham Thatcherite. This matters here, and only here.
On the final day the candidates speak to conference in front of a sign announcing “Review and Rebuild.” They each have an alarming promo video. The party chair introduces them, happy that members are “back at the heart” of our conference. And what damage will they do? An activist is given a bell in thanks for service: ask not for whom it tolls, etcetera.
Tugendhat begins and does worst. It’s the wrong kind of reasonableness, and, if he is frightening enough to be sanctioned by Russia, China and Iran, it doesn’t show. He can feel the hope, he says. We must do better, he says. It’s sane patriotism from a good soldier — a pale soldier — and that is not for the Tory members, who elected a woman (Truss) who said she wasn’t sure if France was really an ally. We are one nation, he says, to a conference that is happier when it feels under threat.
Cleverly’s promo video sounds wind-buffeted — is this metaphor? — but, when he says: “Let’s do this!” at the end of it, conference ignites. He should’ve winked. “What’s the purpose of our party?” he asked, and the room stills. Then he actually says, “Sorry.”
Maybe it’s a safe gambit from a man so boosterish, who looks like he could out-drink the fictional Boris Johnson the party loved. ( Johnson was not the man they thought he was). He ruins it by announcing: “The British people are never wrong” — they often are, but as a gaffe it less egregious than name searches on Twitter and biographical Thatcher slips.
He could have sat this out, he says, and preens: he could have spent more time with his Warhammer figurines. He praises Ronald Reagan and the NHS and Benjamin Disraeli. The jokes are good. He knows how to pause. He tells conference: “Let’s be more normal!” He won’t dream of yesterday: “Our best days are ahead.”
Blue lulls the crowd
After bonhomie, fear. Jenrick is all forced gestures and repressed intensity, a man inhabiting a self that is not his. He does not know how to pause, and he makes English sound like an alien tongue. In his promo video he interviews a man who looks like a wizard. He speaks to the bleak, and gauchely: borders must be maintained, foreign aid cut. Growing up in Wolverhampton gets a laugh; it shouldn’t have.
There is a bleached quality to his prose: “There was a woman as strong as the iron cast in my dad’s foundry: Margaret Thatcher!” “Starmer took the knee, but he will never take a stand.” He uses Yoda-isms, because that is how non-intellectuals summon gravity: “Together we will build.” When he says, “I loathe empty rhetoric” journalists laugh.
As conference begins, the front-runner is Robert Jenrick, who looks like a minor Dickensian villain. | Henry Nicholls/AFP via Getty Images
Finally, Badenoch, in Thatcher blue. Red suits her better, but blue lulls the crowd. “It is time to tell the truth,” she says. Her truth is Truss-esque: the system is broken, and not by Tories. “You can be in government, and not have power.” She attacks identity politics, university lecturers marking down Conservatives, and other Tory terrors. She says Toryism is not a clique. Isn’t it?
Now the question is — will the Conservatives embark on their own Corbynite experiment with Robert Jenrick, and throw themselves into the abyss? You can never rule that out. Cleverly could be a plausible one nation leader, ever in danger of doing the finger guns at voters, some of whom might do them back.
Badenoch glows with her own force— “I’m not afraid,” was her best line, because most of us are — but she is odd, and angry.
Now the MPs choose the final two: Jenrick is ahead with them. The second candidate should be Badenoch or Cleverly, but with such a miniscule electorate, the margins are tight. Then it goes to the members who will — as they accuse the left of doing — vote with their feelings on the day.
The best analysis I heard at conference was this: “I think it’s time to let Thatcher die.” For now, they can’t, and that is a measure of their failure. For as long as they cherish Thatcher — and only Thatcher — taking the ax to bloated enemies, they will do the same to themselves, and the future is already behind them.
Trademark royalties is one way to force support of open source, we guess
Updated WordPress developer Automattic on Wednesday published details of its efforts to pressure rival WP Engine to sign a trademark license agreement costing millions of dollars.…
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