Can Badenoch's new policy avert local election disaster?

Kemi Badenoch is facing a difficult set of local elections, with Nigel Farage threatening, as the prime minister put it in the Commons yesterday, to “eat the Tory party for breakfast”, and Robert Jenrick, whom she defeated for the leadership last year, making his availability to replace her all too obvious.

- SEAN O'GRADY

Yet she declares that she will take her time to get her Conservative Party’s policies right and won’t be hurried on the detail. Critics say there’s a policy vacuum; she says she’s an engineer who insists on a plan to underpin every policy, and that there is plenty of time to get things right.

Some wonder how long she has got left to do so...

Is there a new policy?

Yes indeed, and it’s a typically “Kemi” signature one, focusing yet again on a “culture wars” issue. Even as the stock markets crash, the dollar slides and the IMF slashes the UK’s growth forecasts, Badenoch wants to end the recording of non-crime hate incidents by police forces in England and Wales, except in a few cases. She says they cause the police to waste time “chasing ideology and grievance instead of justice”.

The government says that the move “would prevent the police monitoring serious antisemitism and other racist incidents”. The previous government, in which Badenoch served, in any case introduced guidelines to prevent trivial and non-intentional incidents from being included. Badenoch says the guidelines are ignored, “so it’s time to get rid of them completely”.

What’s it got to do with the local elections?