Kemi Badenoch wants to drag the Tories further right. That is a huge mistake | Simon Jenkins

What voters want is a display of reliability and competence – but the current favourite for next leader has other ideas

Politics never ends. Today the selection begins of the leader of the opposition and thus possibly the next British prime minister. The pollsters’ current favourite is Kemi Badenoch. She is intelligent and clearly popular with her party’s grassroots. But the supposedly rightwing stall set out in her manifesto, published in the Times, raises more doubts than it offers answers.

If the Tories’ secret weapon is supposedly loyalty, Badenoch shows no trace. The true reason for her party’s recent defeat is clear and not discreditable. It is that 14 years was long enough and voters wanted a change. Yet Badenoch prefers to rubbish her colleagues as “deserving to lose”, for twisting and turning, “unsure of who we were”. The party should renew itself, she says, by returning to its core values, apparently a belief in capitalism and the nation state, whatever that means.

Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist

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