Shadow justice secretary told students ‘life becomes a lot harder’ if ‘the right is not united’, according to Sky
Good morning. Keir Starmer faces Kemi Badenoch at PMQs today and, given her enthusiasm for talking about trans issues – her Commons performance on this yesterday got rave reviews in rightwing circles – it is hard to imagine that she won’t want to revist this at noon today. As the Today programme’s interview with Green co-leader Adrian Ramsay showed this morning, UK politics is still stuck with the ‘can a woman have a penis?’ question. (More on that later.) But there is another question on the table this morning about whether two binary opposites are compatible. Can you be a Conservative if you’ve got a Nigel Farage?
This has revived as an issue as a result of a good scoop by Sam Coates at Sky News. He has obtained a recording of Robert Jenrick, the shadow justice secretary and runner-up in the last Tory leadership contest, saying that, if the Conservative party has not seen off the threat from Reform UK by the time of the next election, “one way or another” the two parties will have to form some sort of electoral coalition.
[Reform UK] continues to do well in the polls. And my worry is that they become a kind of permanent or semi-permanent fixture on the British political scene. And if that is the case – and I say, I am trying to do everything I can to stop that being the case – then life becomes a lot harder for us, because the right is not united.
And then you head towards the general election, where the nightmare scenario is that Keir Starmer sails in through the middle as a result of the two parties being disunited. I don’t know about you, but I’m not prepared for that to happen.
Kemi Badenoch needs to urgently come clean as to whether she backs her shadow justice secretary in doing grubby deals with Reform behind the electorate’s back or if she will rule it out.
If she disagrees with Robert Jenrick, how can her leadership have any credibility whilst he remains in her shadow cabinet?
The cat is out of the bag, senior Conservatives are plotting a grubby election deal with Nigel Farage.
Kemi Badenoch should sack Robert Jenrick now if she’s serious about ruling out a pact with Reform. Anything less would show she’s either too weak to sack him or that she agrees.