Badenoch’s suicide note

If you'd asked me last week I'd have said, objectively but reluctantly, that the Tories are the least worst option for the sole reason that they are capable of forming a halfway functioning interim government until such a time as there is a viable alternative. There is talent in the Tory party, and some fairly respectable MPs. But this latest reshuffle is a suicide note.

A party with Tom Tugendhat as shadow foreign secretary is nothing I want any part of - and is continuity uniparty in the worst possible way. He believes in fighting the Ukraine war to the last Ukrainian - without any doubt or scepticism - and zero thought to Britain's direct national interest. He is evangelical about it.

Just lately, certain events have re-awakened my interest in the Great War. I've always been more fascinated by WW2, with a more patchy understanding of WW1, so I've set about correcting that. It is still massively relevant to the world we live in today in terms of geopolitics, technological change and warfare in general.

As a foundation course I've just finished watching the 26 part 1964 BBC series (which feels about as long as the war itself). All the way through I kept wondering to myself how any side could bear witness to such wholesale slaughter and be unable and unwilling to stop it. It basically only came to a conclusion because both sides were running out of men. We destroyed an entire generation in the process - and it solved very little because soon after we were back at it - and never fully recovered.

This, especially, is why I'm not taken with centre right politicians who are just itching for a showdown with Russia. When our own government is waging a demographic war on the people of Britain, nobody should be in a rush to send British men to die over a scrap of Eastern European rust belt.

I'm not one who says Russia does not present a threat, but it is a threat that can be contained, and one that needs to be managed with great care. What we do not need is a warmongering zealot converting a regional border skirmish into a full blown proxy war without debate or scrutiny. This is something Peter Hitchens is absolutely right about.

There are those who have called for unity on the right in order to defeat Labour, but there is no point in that if that means a continuation of the same basic foreign policy posture. If that is the moral mission of the Tory party, ahead of safeguarding Britain's longer term interests and ensuring the survival of its people, then it must be kept out of power. We are done with the narcissism of liberal internationalism, and their corrupted idea of "western democratic values".

The further dimension to this is that defence policy is downstream of foreign policy. With Tugendhat steering foreign policy, it means an equally disjointed and wasteful defence policy. This does not end well.

This is where the zoomer nationalists are entirely correct. There is certainly nothing in it for them to die in a muddy ditch on the Eastern flanks - and if it is such an immediate problem for European security, it's for Germany to finally pay its colossal debt in blood - not us. As such, as ridiculous as the alternative right wing parties are, if they can knock a Tory MP out of the game, fill your boots. A pox on them.