David Farrar: Kemi wins

Kemi Badenoch has been elected the 19th leader of the UK Conservative Party. She is the 4th woman and 2nd non-white to lead the party, while UK Labour have had 19 white male leaders in a row. This of course has not stopped a Labour MP calling her a white supremacist in blackface!

Here’s some facts on Badenoch:

Melanie Phillips: Stranded on the political zip-wire

BoJo isn’t why the Conservative party’s in trouble. He became PM because it already was - first published Dec 20.

Boris Johnson’s current multi-pronged political crisis is consuming Britain’s media. It’s not just that journalists detect an imminent prime ministerial fall from the dizzy heights (although Boris has escaped tight spots before now on the zip-wire of his career). It’s also because, with many journalists riven with jealousy or dislike of their former comrade-in-ink, they would like nothing better than to see him brought down.

However, Boris Johnson is not the real story. Despite the often foul-mouthed apoplexy of Conservative MPs who blame him for behaving exactly as anyone who knew him could have predicted he would behave (and many did indeed so predict from the start) Johnson is not the reason the Conservative party is in trouble. The reason it elected him party leader was because it was already in trouble.

Melanie Phillips: The Vanishing Conservative Party

You really do have to feel for Theresa May over her catastrophic party conference speech. With a heckler who got far too close, a prolonged coughing fit and a visibly disintegrating party slogan backdrop, this concatenation of calamities would have shaken the hardiest of performers. Someone reportedly as shy as Mrs May must be in agony over the whole thing.

Cruelly, the debacle is being portrayed as a metaphor for Mrs May’s premiership. Her grip on power is supposedly melting away, just as her speech evaporated under the merciless heat of exposure. Accordingly, it is being widely reported that she is now done for and this weekend the plotters will seize their opportunity finally to lever her out of office.