An open letter to Kemi Badenoch Kemi, The Conservative Party did not lose millions of voters because people suddenly became unreasonable. You lost them because, after years of promises, people stopped believing you. For years, Conservative governments promised to control our borders. Yet irregular migration continued, thousands of people entered this country without the prior permission required by our immigration system, and the British electorate watched successive governments fail to deliver what they had repeatedly promised. At the same time, families were struggling with the cost of living while your party pursued policies such as net zero and embraced an increasingly intrusive culture of DEI across public life. For many of us, the Conservatives stopped looking like a conservative government at all. But there is a far more serious issue: safeguarding. Women should be able to walk our streets safely. Parents should reasonably expect the state to protect their children. Britain already has more than enough home-grown sexual predators and violent criminals without failures in immigration enforcement creating additional risks that could have been prevented. And then there is child sexual exploitation. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse spent years listening to victims, examining institutional failures and producing recommendations. Yet when the Conservatives left government, major recommendations were still waiting to be fully implemented. Children had already been failed for decades. There was no excuse for further delay. Nor have I forgotten Boris Johnson’s notorious remark about money being “spaffed up the wall” on historic child-abuse investigations. For survivors and families who have spent decades fighting to have these crimes properly investigated, remarks like that told us exactly how seriously some at the top appeared to take the issue. Labour deserves every ounce of scrutiny it receives for its own failures. But Conservatives cannot simply point at Labour and wash their hands of what happened during fourteen years in government. You governed. You had the power. You made the promises. And too often, you failed to deliver. That is why many women like me will not simply come running back because the Conservative Party has suddenly rediscovered tougher language. We remember. We remember the promises on immigration. We remember the failures on safeguarding. We remember the children who were failed. We remember being told, election after election, that this time things would change. They didn’t. So no, Kemi, the Conservative Party will not be getting my vote. You will never see my cross beside a Conservative candidate simply because Labour is worse. But I will happily welcome every former Conservative voter who has reached the same conclusion into Reform. You lost them for a reason. On your bike, Badenoch. Tories Try Tempting ‘Reform Women’ Back order-order.com/2026/10/05/t… via @guidofawkes