Kemi Badenoch told the BBC she leads a party full of new people. Grant Shapps, who has been in Parliament since 2005, was not invited. The irony is so thick you could spread it on toast.
Shapps got rejected as a Conservative candidate—a stunning development that required exactly zero investigation, since he had already announced he was leaving. Badenoch seized the moment to rebrand her operation as something fresh and untainted. The new party is full of new people, she said, apparently counting MPs who have been recycling the same policy briefs since the 2010s as “new.”
This is what passes for political innovation in 2026: reject someone who already quit, then declare victory over the old guard. Shapps, a man whose political career has survived multiple scandals and rebrandings of his own, must be impressed by the sheer audacity of the move.
The real comedy is the timing. Rather than build something genuinely novel, Badenoch simply waited for a convenient villain to eject, then announced that removing a man who was already leaving constituted proof of her party’s revolutionary credentials. It’s the political equivalent of taking credit for someone else’s resignation.
New party, old playbook. The faces change names but not their address in Parliament.