Kemi Badenoch’s Speech: The Last Act of an Unfunny Farce

Kemi Badenoch stood before the remaining faithful in Manchester on 8 October 2025 to deliver her first conference speech as Leader of what still calls itself the Conservative Party. It may be that the best response to this performance is contemptuous silence. The prose bordered on illiteracy—half of it verbless, all of it brainless. It was not a speech but a noise: a heap of slogans about “freedom,” “strength,” and “family,” delivered by a woman who helped preside over the most authoritarian and incompetent government in modern British history.

I say that the best response to the speech should perhaps be contemptuous silence. I certainly do not think a normal sarcastic review is in order. Ordinarily, I would take sentences from the speech and respond as follows:

“Only the Conservative Party can deliver a stronger economy and stronger borders.”

They said the same thing in 2010, and again in 2019. The “stronger economy” meant record taxation and record borrowing, plus record inflation. The “stronger borders” meant four million new arrivals—mostly unskilled, mostly dependent—ushered in to suppress wages and inflate housing costs. The economy now runs on imported labour and public debt, the whole racket lubricated by propaganda. The borders are theoretical. If this is Conservative strength, one dreads to see their weakness.

But a review of this kind would fail to explain the enormity of what happened between 2010 and 2024. At least since 1945, Conservative Governments have always betrayed their voters. They promise low taxes and limited government in opposition. In government, they do little but advance the managerial police state. Back in opposition, their speechwriters dust off their Friedman and Hayek, hoping that a few lines about liberty will erase memory of what went before. The cycle has been as steady as movements in the economy. It has enabled Conservative politicians to have their own fair turn of collecting the financial and sexual bribes that are the main incentive in a modern democracy for going into politics.

But, between 2010 and 2024—certainly after 2019—the Conservatives crossed a final red line. They did not simply fail. They did not simply sell out their voters. They committed actual treason. They provided the state machinery needed to abolish all freedom of speech.

The Online Safety Act—the most comprehensively totalitarian piece of legislation ever enacted in this country—was conceived and drafted, then forced through Parliament by a Conservative Government. Labour now enforces it with the enthusiasm we might expect, but the Conservatives built it knowingly and deliberately. They had watched the growth of the digital world and realised that it had escaped the control of the established order. Social media had broken the monopoly of official opinion. A few individuals with a microphone and a modest following could now speak truth to the managed consensus of Westminster and the BBC. That could not be tolerated.

The Act pretends to protect “users” from “harm.” But its purpose was not to protect children from pornography or fraud; these are the excuses of the authoritarian. Its purpose was to recreate the censorship of the pre-internet age. It compels all major platforms to act as arms of the state—to detect, remove, and report anything that may cause “distress,” “offence,” or “disinformation.” No definition of these terms is given, because definition would limit their scope.

The Act allows the Home Secretary and Ofcom to issue secret directions to companies. It enables bureaucrats to block entire sites without trial, to fine non-compliant platforms into extinction, and to require pre-emptive “content moderation.” In effect, every post, every video, every private message in Britain is now subject to state inspection. The government that passed this law created an infrastructure of digital despotism. It made every British citizen a provisional speaker, allowed to express himself only so long as no algorithm or official finds offence.

The Conservatives did this in full knowledge of how it would be applied. They saw the arrests for “hate incidents,” the police visits for wrongthink, the banking blacklists against political dissidents—and instead of repealing the laws that enabled these outrages, they deepened them. They had read the warnings. They were told, repeatedly, that they were empowering a censorship regime that no future government could be trusted to restrain. They nodded and smiled. They pressed on.

They had already criminalised liberty under the Health Protection Regulations of 2020 and 2021. They had already normalised surveillance, speech-policing, and social ostracism. The Online Safety Act was not an accident or an oversight. It was the logical culmination of a decade of managerial tyranny—a blueprint for the total control of speech and association.

For this alone—and there is much else I could mention—the Conservatives crossed that final red line. Not only should we not trust themnow: we should not even listen to them.

Their speeches about “freedom,” “enterprise,” and “British values” are now offensive in themselves. The party that censored its people now demands the right to speak again on their behalf. It is no longer a political party but a crime scene—a carcass animated by habit and funded by inertia.

We should instead look forward to the time when Mrs Badenoch and all her colleagues will take their own place in some great impeachment of traitors—not as witnesses, but as defendants. The destruction of free speech is not a policy error. It is the gravest betrayal of public trust in our history. The Conservative Party deserves to vanish as completely as the liberties it abolished.

And while we are waiting, we should keep a running score of those rats now deserting the sinking ship and being welcomed aboard the Reform Party. Every one of them who is accepted makes that party less worth voting for. A traitor who changes flag remains a traitor. There is no reform possible for those who have already reformed the country into ruin.

Let the Conservatives collapse without without nostalgia, without survivors. The British people owe them nothing—except remembrance of how thoroughly a party can destroy its nation while talking of saving it.