DAILY MAIL COMMENT: Kemi has led a remarkable rejuvenation in the Tories...but she MUST be ready to fight an election

Published: 00:59 BST, 5 October 2026 | Updated: 01:28 BST, 5 October 2026

Not even the most hardened sceptics can deny the Conservatives' renewed sense of purpose.

Less than two years after taking over a party still reeling from crushing electoral defeat, Kemi Badenoch has led a remarkable rejuvenation. That she consistently ran rings around Sir Keir Starmer in the Commons was a major factor in initially boosting Tory morale.

But the fact that she has quickly got the measure of his successor has driven the dynamic onwards. In the eleven weeks since Andy Burnham became PM, Mrs Badenoch has unpicked his threadbare policies and empty rhetoric to devastating effect.

The commitments announced by the Conservatives spell out the essentials for running the country. Although it appears to have escaped Mr Burnham and his Left-wing acolytes, these basics - which include lower taxes, safer streets and an end to the benefits culture - have the clear backing of the industrious taxpayers who keep our economy ticking along.

It will be music to their ears to hear the Tory leader sum up her political philosophy under the 'common sense' principle of 'people working hard and being rewarded for that effort'. In broader strategic moves, she has consigned so-called 'wets' to the parliamentary margins and replaced them with individuals more attuned to her vision of a stronger Britain.

Yet even though some recent opinion polls have shown the Tories nosing ahead of Reform UK, there is no denying the scale of the challenge. Not only does Mrs Badenoch have a mountain to climb in terms of increasing the Conservative vote, she also needs to find a way of uniting the Right.

Kemi Badenoch pictured on Sunday 

Nor is there necessarily much time to play with. For all Mr Burnham's insistence that he won't force the country to the polls before 2029, the mood music is increasingly suggesting there will be an election long before then.

The Tories need to be ready for a fight that could decide the nation's future for decades to come. Should they lose to a hardline socialist coalition headed by Labour, it would be a disaster. Not just for their party, but for Britain.

Grotesque Greens

Even by the egregious standards we have come to expect under Zack Polanski's leadership, events at the Green Party conference in Brighton were shocking in the extreme.

Anyone who doubted that this organisation was steeped in anti-Semitic bile and pro-Gaza fanaticism has now got their answer.

That officials were forced to organise a 'safe room' for Jewish delegates who felt threatened by pro-Palestinian elements was already appalling. It is even more disturbing that a mainstream political party yesterday voted through a motion equating Zionism with racism.

Yet alarming though all this is, it isn't surprising. There have been so many incidents of Green activists stirring up anti-Semitic hate that it is almost impossible to keep count.

Conveniently, the party leader - a candidate in this week's Holborn and St Pancras by-election - was out on the campaign trail yesterday as fellow party members voted on the motion.

By missing the ballot, Mr Polanski - who pointedly refused to say on Friday whether Israel had a right to exist - is unlikely to have fooled Jewish Greens about where his sympathies lie. Nor, we can only hope, will he succeed in pulling the wool over the by-election voters' eyes.