The race to become leader of Britain’s Conservatives

Kemi Badenoch has a reputation for pugnacity, which is why many Tories think she should succeed Rishi Sunak as the party’s leader. But when addressing Angela Rayner, Labour’s new deputy prime minister, in the House of Commons on July 19th Ms Badenoch sounded jaded. Ms Rayner’s hope of pepping up housing construction was doomed, she said. There would be a deluge of angry emails; Labour’s new MPs would revolt.

“We have been there. We know; you don’t,” she told Labour. “I want to reassure the right honourable lady that I will be here to say, ‘I told you so’ when these targets are missed.” It was a strikingly defeatist account of the power of government—or, as John F. Kennedy didn’t say: “We choose not to go to the moon, or do the other things, because they are hard.”