The Conservatives are embarking on another purge

With the Conservatives languishing at 19 per cent in the latest YouGov poll, Kemi Badenoch has decided she knows what her party's problem is. It's appeal is too broad.

So, according to both Conservative Home and the Spectator, a new purge of its membership and elected representatives is underway. 

Oliver Dean writes on Conservative Home:

In a move which properly began last Friday, Badenoch announced that only those who back the Conservatives’ commitment to scrapping net zero and leaving the ECHR will be approved as parliamentary candidates. Anyone who won’t fall in line will be blocked, or have the whip removed altogether.

And he has worked out why those 14 years of Conservative government were such a disaster. It was because of Liberal Democrat infiltration:

One of the most enduring puzzles of the 14 years of Conservative rule was that, too often, it would talk right but govern left. It would big itself up, but falter at close to every opportunity. 

The gap was not an accident. It was the product of a parliamentary party which had, over the years, taken in a number of MPs that were too wet for their own good. That had adopted their Liberal Democrat values and changed the colour of their rosettes to sky blue. 

It became so persistent a problem that one can only label them as an infestation amongst the Conservative benches.

"Infestation"? I think we're getting a glimpse into the seething darkness of the writer's unconscious there.

Meanwhile Steerpike in the Specatator is troubled that:

the likes of Amber Rudd, former Scottish Tory leader Ruth Davidson and former West Midlands mayor Andy Street remain in the party.

 I have lived to see the Conservative Party - the Conservative Party - putting ideological purity before the ability to win elections.

All this, of course, is good news for the Liberal Democrats, who gained dozens of seats from the Conservatives at the last election because people had come to see them as too extreme. Becoming more extreme isn't going to help the Tories fight back there.

Let's leave the final word to Adam Bienkov:

The thing about Kemi Badenoch's purge of any Conservative member to the left of Enoch Powell is that she's so close to a Tory revival if she only realised it. All she needs to do is to lead a party that is not obviously mad and wait for Reform to crumble, but she can't even manage that

— Adam Bienkov (@adambienkov.bsky.social) 14 July 2026 at 09:44

A reminder of Amber Rudd's chequered business career

Embed from Getty Images

With Theresa May revealed as a weak and wobbly leader, the Conservatives are keeping her out of Wednesday's leaders debate on BBC television.

Instead Amber Rudd, now seen as a safer pair of hands, will take part.

Which makes this Daily Mirror story from October 2016 interesting all over again:

The Daily Mirror has examined Mrs Rudd’s record before she entered politics in 2005. 

We found she was the director of a city firm which went bust in 1992, owing £537,581 – including £67,977 to the Inland Revenue. 

Mrs Rudd was also a "corporate advisor" at a biodegradable plastics firm during a failed "major expansion" that was later criticised as being “too swift”. That firm went into liquidation owing £4.8million, mostly to shareholders. 

And she also set up a financial services company which was shut down in the High Court over its £1.2million debts, including to the taxman.

At about the same time the Guardian was reporting that:

Amber Rudd is facing growing calls to clarify the extent of her involvement in tax havens following the Guardian’s disclosure that she had been a director of two companies in the Bahamas.

Explaining the internet to Amber Rudd

With thanks to Louis Barfe on Twitter.

Neal Ascherson: Theresa May's government is ramming through a damaging policy it doesn't believe in

Neal Ascherson is always worth reading. Here he is in the London Review of Books on the sorry spectacle that is Theresa May's government:

Nothing in British history resembles this spectacle of men and women ramming through policies everyone knows they don’t believe in. 

Never mind the few genuine Brexiteers. Amber Rudd, Philip Hammond and Theresa May – among others in government – all tried to keep the UK in the European Union. Now they are trying to take it out again, apparently on the terms that will do their country most damage. 

There’s a kind explanation, a white-coated one and a coarse one. The kind account says that they feel democratically obliged to carry out the wishes of the English people, whatever their private opinions. (A variant suggests that they think themselves duty-bound to save the country from the worst consequences of a disastrous decision, but their recklessness over Brexit doesn’t support that.) 

The white-coated shrink account is that they are pathologically over-compensating out of guilt for backing the wrong side. And the coarse explanation is that they just want to stay in power.

Six of the Best 633

"This is not only yet another misguided and myopic attack on overseas students, it is also an insult to the rich diversity of universities on display within UK higher education. Because the fact is, universities excel in different academic areas." Johanna Waters has no time for Amber Rudd's plans for a new student immigration regime.

Steven Duckworth offers a strategy for Labour moderates following the re-election of Jeremy Corbyn.

"Jura was everything that was threatened in Nineteen Eighty-Four; it offered an abundance of wild natural beauty, and required a visceral physicality of its inhabitants. Orwell understood these qualities to be among the precious constituents of human freedom." Madeleine Bunting argues that the Hebrides have shaped British culture.

Wolfgane Suschitzky, photographer and cinematographer, died this week at the age of 104. The Daily Telegraph obituary tells you about his remarkable career..

Francis Thackeray on a new twist in the Piltdown Man hoax.

Line by line, Football 365 takes apart Robbie Savage's argument that Ryan Giggs should have been appointed manager of Swansea City.

House Points: The new Minister for Fish

Fish-related humour makes a comeback in my House Points column from this week's Liberal Democrat News.

Danny's Day

House Points has long taken an interest in the Minister for Fish. Who could forget the years Ben Bradshaw spent in the post? His plan for a Europe-wide database that would trace fish "from the moment they are caught to when they are served on a customer's plate" serves as a damp and salty metaphor for the Labour years.

Later there was Hugh Irranca-Davies, whose efforts in the role won him the sobriquet “The Haddock’s Friend”.

At environment questions last Thursday we saw who the first Minister for Fish in the coalition government is. And in a bitter blow to the Liberal Democrats he turned out not to be one of us. Instead Richard Benyon, Conservative MP for Newbury, sat on the front bench.

For some unaccountable reason, Hansard called him the Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, but we all know what that means.

Benyon’s first fish-related question came from his fellow Tory Amber Rudd. She was concerned about the “under-10-metre community”. You might think that includes everyone, with the possible exception of a few basketball professionals, but it turned out to mean the inshore fishermen of her Hasting and Rye constituency.

The answer was all about quota swaps and reforming the Common Fisheries Policy, but wait a minute... Isn’t an Amber Rudd a kind of fish?

******

On Monday night a star was born. Over the past few weeks, as the coalition’s honeymoon has dwindled, David Laws has become a giant simply by not being in the House. In the same period, Joe Cole has cemented his reputation by sitting out most of several dismal England performances.

But in closing the debate on the budget, Danny Alexander emerged from David Laws’ shadow.
Biff! Liam Byrne was swatted away with a reference to his “I’m afraid to tell you there is no money” letter.

Zap! Danny described the rise in VAT as “a Labour inheritance tax”.

Pow! He put down Yvette Cooper’s intervention with “I thought that the right hon. Lady was going to do better than that.”

Behind those owlish spectacles there lurks a considerable politician.

******

Meanwhile In the upper reaches of the Thames, high above Westminster, an amber rudd turns against the current and begins to feed.