Earlier this year, Kemi Badenoch wrote a piece on The Telegraph entitled 'This Z-list Labour Parliament is everything that’s wrong with British politics' setting out the next stage of changing the Conservative Party: recruiting serious people with real-world experience to fix a country Labour has made poorer and more divided.
Commenting on the article, Richard Fuller MP said:
From my point of view, there are two excellent passages from this article by Kemi Badenoch.
Firstly she has the courage to call out “professional politicians”. For many years my Labour opponents attacked me for seeing my role as MP as one of using the judgement I learned from my career BEFORE politics, rather than see being an MP as an extension of a political career.
Mrs Badenoch wrote: “Ideally, Parliament should be a spell of public service to put what someone has learnt elsewhere into fixing their country. Serious people who don’t want to destroy our institutions but have the technical brilliance to fix them.”
But she also highlighted the crucial value of a “critical friend” in Parliament. A phalanx of MPs not interested in “climbing the greasy pole” but on using their life experience to critique and improve what ministers propose.
Mrs Badenoch wrote: “ We are recruiting real legislators. Not just those who want to be ministers, but those who want to hold ministers to account and stop bad decisions and bad laws from being made – including when it is your own side making them.”
Mrs Badenoch is on the right track here and our country will be all the better for her leadership.
Kemi argues that Britain does not lack talent, it lacks a politics that draws that talent into public life. Labour entered Government without a plan, without MPs from a private sector background and without economic literacy - with 90 per cent coming from a trade union, charity or public sector background and without a team able to grip the problems facing the country.
The Conservative Party under Kemi Badenoch is changing. The Party has dumped the net zero targets bankrupting Britain, it has pledged to leave the ECHR to deport those who come here illegally, scrap stamp duty, cut business rates and recruit candidates with the five Cs: clever, charismatic, good communicators, with conviction and Conservative.
The full article can be read at:
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/05/30/this-z-list-parliament-is-everything-wrong-with-britain/
