Kemi Badenoch Tells Conservative Voters to ‘Get Out of the Way’

To repeat the Conservative Party's leader's favourite phrase, "this isn't serious"

“Get out of the way”. That was the message this week from Conservative Party Leader Kemi Badenoch when asked to respond to those calling for her to move back to the centre ground of British politics.

“People who don’t agree with [my] direction need to get out of the way,” she told a press conference in London.

“We have to be a truly conservative party. So I won’t apologise to those [who] don’t like the new direction. We only want conservatives”.

In reality the demands for a shift in direction had actually come from conservatives. Two senior and respected ones.

Former West Midlands Mayor Andy Street and the party’s former leader in Scotland, Ruth Davidson, both demanded the changes as they launched a new grouping of moderates in the party.

These are serious figures with a serious record of winning actual elections.

Yet when asked directly about their intervention, Badenoch would only say that “I’m the leader of the Conservative Party, not anyone else, and it is what I think needs to happen that they need to support”.

This, to use her own favourite phrase, is simply not serious.