Can anyone stop Kemi Badenoch?

Kemi Badenoch has become the sixth – and potentially last – candidate to enter the Conservative leadership race. In an op-ed for the Times published in the last hour, the Tory frontrunner launched her campaign with a promise to ‘renew by starting from first principles’.

‘We can’t control immigration until we re-confirm our belief in the nation state and the sovereign duty it has, above all else, to serve its own citizens,’ she writes. She also suggests hers will be a small state approach – arguing ‘our public services will never fully recover from the pandemic until we remember that government should do some things well, not everything badly’. Badenoch writes.Badenoch talks about 2030 as the point the Tories could return to government:

‘If I have the privilege to serve, we will speak the truth again. That is why today my campaign is launching with an explicit focus on renewing our party for 2030 – the first full year we can be back in Government and the first year of a new decade.