- The Knowledge
- Posts
- Why Labour should fear Badenoch
Why Labour should fear Badenoch
đ Classy cars | âď¸ Peerless posties | đŞMagic roundabout
In the headlines
Keir Starmer has pledged to ârip up the bureaucracy that blocks investmentâ at a major business summit in London this morning. P&O owner DP World has confirmed that its ÂŁ1bn expansion of the London Gateway port will go ahead, after Downing Street distanced itself from transport secretary Louise Haighâs comments encouraging people to boycott the business. Joe Biden has announced that up to 100 US troops will be sent to Israel to defend the country against Iran. The soldiers will operate a ground-based interceptor system designed to shoot down ballistic missiles. Tehran says the US is âputting the lives of its troops at riskâ by deploying them in the region. SpaceX has successfully âcaughtâ a booster from one of its Starship rockets for the first time. Having depleted its fuel and detached from the main body of the rocket, the booster returned to the launchpad and was plucked out of the air by a set of giant mechanical âchopsticksâ.
Comment
Justin Tallis/AFP/Getty
Why Labour should fear Badenoch
News that the final two in the Conservative leadership contest are right-wingers Kemi Badenoch and Robert Jenrick prompted âgleeâ among Labour, says Sonia Sodha in The Observer. As one MP joked: âDoes the Tory leadership result need to be declared as a gift?â This confidence is wildly misplaced. Badenoch, the bookiesâ favourite, regularly âwipes the floor with her opponentsâ in debate. She loves a culture war scrap and on fraught issues like sex and gender her stance is closer to the publicâs than that of Keir Starmer, who for years displayed âbewildering levels of prevaricationâ. There is also a dodgy tendency on the left to view right-wing politicians of colour as a single, evil blob, wrongly lumping the nuanced thinking of Badenoch with the more cartoonish kookiness of Suella Braverman or Priti Patel.
Badenoch is âhead and shoulders above the restâ, says Matthew Parris in The Times. Sheâs âinteresting, original and intellectually braveâ. In an age of frightened politicians her philosophical courage is thrilling. Jenrick, on the other hand, is a âsmooth-tongued salesmanâ with all the attributes of a crowd-pleaser âexcept the ability to please a crowdâ. Like the word âBlackpoolâ imprinted through a stick of rock, âAmbitionâ is âstamped through Jenrickâs coreâ. Hence his mind-boggling changes of heart. Gone is the âmildly centristâ Cameron Remainer. âRobâ, as he is apparently to be known, now claims to back Donald Trump in the US election and wants to âout-Farage Farageâ, promising to blackball from the shadow cabinet anyone who doesnât share his aim of taking Britain out of the ECHR. âVenomous yet at the same time colourlessâ, this man has a craving for office that would âpoison the Conservative Partyâs bloodstreamâ.
Design
Robb Reportâs list of the 50 greatest sports cars includes some surprisingly attractive models. In top spot is the Mercedes-Benz 300 SL, the fastest production car of its day and progenitor of the fancy gullwing door. Other magnificent motors include: the McLaren F1, the âmost fastidiously engineered car of the 20th centuryâ; the Jaguar E-type, which even Enzo Ferrari couldnât resist calling âthe most beautiful car in the worldâ; and the Aston Martin DB5, likely historyâs âmost famous carâ thanks to it being James Bondâs vehicle of choice in Goldfinger. See the rest here.
Inside politics
A Conservative Party campaign poster from 2015
Alex Salmond, who died on Saturday aged 69, has rightly been hailed as a âgiant of British politicsâ, says Simon Nixon on Substack. What few people appreciate is that he was really âthe godfather of Brexitâ. The Scottish nationalism stirred up by the 2014 referendum provoked âan equally powerful English nationalist backlashâ. In the following yearâs general election, the Conservatives played on fears that a hung parliament would leave Ed Miliband in Salmondâs pocket, making him vulnerable to SNP demands for a new referendum. That campaign proved âso successfulâ in England that the Tories won an unexpected majority â obliging David Cameron to follow through on his ârecklessâ promise to hold an EU referendum.
Advertisement
Our instantly recognisable Fair Isle jumpers are made from pure lambswool and feature intricate, traditional patterns that will liven up your seasonal festivities.
For a limited time, we are offering 50% off Fair Isle knitwear plus free UK delivery to readers of The Knowledge. Use code MATKN02 at the checkout.
Offer ends 21.10.24.
Letters
Royal Mail staff have been praised for successfully delivering a letter addressed to âMr James Holland, well known historian, Wiltshireâ. Holland, the co-host of the World War Two podcast We Have Ways of Making You Talk, tweeted a picture of the envelope â to which sorting office workers had added âtry Salisbury SP5â â with the caption: âArenât posties brilliant?â
Comment
Jemal Countess/Getty
Kamala Harris is failing to close the deal
By some measures, Kamala Harris is running a brilliant campaign, says Andrew Sullivan on Substack. She has raised $1bn in less than three months, âroughly what Joe Biden raised in the entirety of 2020â. She had an excellent convention and nailed the TV debate. âYet sheâs obviously struggling to close the sale.â Her national poll lead is just 2.6%, around a quarter of Bidenâs advantage at this point in 2020. Same with the swing states: in all-important Pennsylvania, she is âbarely +1â whereas Biden was +7. So why is Harris coming up short? Simple: she still hasnât given voters any sense of why she wants to be president or how she would change the country.
âThese are not hard questions.â But whenever an interviewer tries to get a direct answer, she responds with some vapid word salad âas if she is revealing some profound and previously unheard-of truthsâ. Hereâs what she said about Israel, for example: âWe are not gonna stop pursuing what is necessary for the United States to be clear about where we stand on the need for this war to end.â Eh? On mass illegal immigration: âItâs a longstanding problem. And solutions are at hand. And from day one, literally, we have been offering solutions.â Sorry, what? This is the problem with Harris. The more you see of her vacuousness, âthe less conceivable she becomes as a presidentâ. Now, I dearly hope she wins because Donald Trump remains unfit for office. But she desperately needs to change the dynamic of this race. âAnd she has around three weeks to do it.â
đ¤đ Elon Musk is throwing himself into the US election âin a manner unparalleled in modern historyâ, says The New York Times. The billionaire talks to Donald Trump âmultiple times a weekâ, and has effectively relocated to the crucial swing state of Pennsylvania. He relentlessly promotes Trumpâs candidacy to his 201 million followers on X. And above all, he is âpersonally steeringâ a fundraising group geared towards turning out the vote for Trump, which he has given tens of millions of dollars. âHe has even proposed taking a campaign bus tour across Pennsylvania and knocking on doors himself.â
Noted
Iâm not quite sure why Keir Starmer is running the country, says Camilla Long in The Sunday Times, âand not Taylor Swiftâs mother, Andreaâ. Back in August, after the pop star cancelled concerts in Austria because of a terrorist threat, Andrea convinced the British government to give her daughter a full police escort for her London tour dates â a ÂŁ150,000 privilege that not even Prince Harry could secure after spending a fortune in lawyersâ fees. Maybe itâs just a coincidence that Home Secretary Yvette Cooper, who apparently âpressedâ for the blue-lights treatment, had received free tickets from Swiftâs record label. Or that Starmer himself had gone to one of her earlier concerts in London â for free, of course â as part of some âdesperate, terminal search for a personalityâ. If the PM can get outmanoeuvred by a pop starâs mum, âhow will he cope with something that really matters?â
Film
Film buffs have long played the âSix Degrees of Kevin Baconâ game, where you have to connect any given actor to the once-ubiquitous Kevin Bacon through a chain of co-stars in no more than six movies. Take Carrie Fisher, for example: she was in Star Wars with Harrison Ford, who was in The Fugitive with Tommy Lee Jones, who was in JFK with Kevin Bacon. But Iâve crunched the data, says Daniel Parris on Substack, and Bacon isnât the ânucleus of Hollywoodâ at all. The actor for whom it would be easiest to play the âX degrees ofâ game is in fact Samuel L Jackson, followed by Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Bruce Willis. Bacon is ranked a lowly 64th.
Snapshot
Snapshot answer
Itâs Cambridgeâs new âmagic roundaboutâ â a simple four-way crossing that locals are calling âBlackpool Illuminationsâ after the council added no fewer than 36 sets of traffic lights. There never used to be queues, says Cambridge resident Laurence Sleator in The Times, but now each approach road hosts a long line of furious drivers. Cyclists have dedicated traffic lights, but the journey is stop-start, so unsurprisingly many swing into the bus lane or mount the kerb. Parents walking their kids to school say they find the crossing easier and safer to navigate. But surely the wages of a humble lollipop lady would be better value than the ÂŁ32m consultants managed to screw out of the taxpayer?
Quoted
âThe length of a film should be directly related to the endurance of the human bladder.â
Alfred Hitchcock