Churn Over?

"That boy should be getting us coffee," said Bill Clinton to Ted Kennedy of Barack Obama. Donald Trump did not invent birtherism. That was the Clintons. Bill's remarks in Muskegon, Michigan prove that he has not changed a bit. Yet while echoing those sentiments to the point of making Priti Patel Shadow Foreign Secretary, our own dear Conservative Party now seems to operate a kind of birtherism in reverse, according to which someone born in London has to affect to be a first generation immigrant in order to become Leader.

Kemi Badenoch not only thinks that partygate was "overblown", but also that the regulations breached should never have been imposed, in spite of which Boris Johnson was somehow "a great Prime Minister". Johnson, by the way, really was born abroad, and not even in the Commonwealth. But the point here is that Badenoch would be offering none of the cross-party support that Keir Starmer did when Starmer acted against both resurgent Covid-19 and what we must now call Mpox. To whom was "monkeypox" offensive? Anyway, Badenoch has given notice that she would not support any such invocation of Margaret Thatcher's Public Health (Control of Disease) Act 1984. But from Rishi Sunak down, what of the veterans of the last Conservative Government who had left the frontbench? What of the third of Conservative MPs who had voted for James Cleverly?