It’s Thursday, December 12. And yes, as you’ve probably noticed, we’ve had a bit of a glow-up. But don’t worry, you’re in exactly the right place. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Coming up: Angela Merkel’s legacy, what “sex work” really means, and much more.
But first, meet Kemi Badenoch—the new leader of Britain’s Tories.
“I like fixing things that are broken,” says Kemi Badenoch in her interview with Bari on the latest episode of Honestly. Badenoch, 44, was elected as the new leader of the UK’s Conservatives last month. And luckily for her, there are a lot of things that are broken.
One of them is her party.
In July, after fourteen years in office, the Tories were unceremoniously booted from power. They lost more than 250 of their Members of Parliament in the biggest electoral defeat in the party’s history. On the long road back to power, Badenoch must contend not only with a Labour government with a huge majority in Parliament, but also Nigel Farage—the Brexit-backing populist is on a mission to supplant the Conservative Party as the main alternative to Labour.
If Badenoch somehow manages to fix her party and return to power, she must then figure out a way to fix Britain—a country where wages have stagnated for a generation, public debt has ballooned, and there’s widespread anger at high rates of immigration. As another Brit, Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson, put it recently in these pages: “Lately it seems that mine is a country with a death wish.” (Read his full account of what ails the UK here.)
In other words, Badenoch has a daunting in tray. And yet many—including Niall—are bullish on Badenoch, who he believes could be a “black Thatcher.”
As a woman in charge of the Conservative Party, Badenoch was bound to be compared to the Iron Lady. But in this case there are undeniable parallels. Much like Thatcher, Badenoch mixes steely determination with charm and charisma. She also, like Thatcher, knows what she believes. Her diagnosis of her party’s problems is straightforward: It has strayed too far from the values that have historically made it—and Britain—so successful.
And while Thatcher and Badenoch’s backgrounds are very different—one grew up in provincial England, the other spent most of her childhood in Nigeria—they are both self-made women with an appetite for hard work. Badenoch’s own story, and her family’s, is central to her politics. “I know what it is like to be wealthy and also to be poor,” she says today on Honestly.
There’s one other Badenoch–Thatcher parallel: the circumstances in which they took over their party’s leadership. Thatcher became Tory leader in 1975—then, like today, a malaise had descended over the country, one that would lift during her time in office. These comparisons may be unavoidable, but does Badenoch welcome them? Bari asked her that in their conversation. “She is a heroine of mine. So it’s very flattering,” said Badenoch. “But it’s also quite heavy and she’s a different person. I admire her. But I want people to recognize that I’m not a pastiche of this person, that I am my own person.”
That much you’ll soon realize when you watch or listen to her wide-ranging and illuminating conversation with Bari. To watch, hit the play button below. Or you can listen to their discussion on the Honestly feed wherever you get your podcasts. And if you want to read an edited transcript of the interview, you can do that here.
As Badenoch sees it, she is fighting not just for her party or her country, but for a way of governing and a kind of society that is under threat across the West. “Liberalism has been hacked,” argues Badenoch in a speech of hers we are publishing today.
She describes “classic liberal values—not left-wing progressivism, but the classic liberalism of free markets, free speech, free enterprise, freedom of religion, the presumption of innocence, trusted institutions within the rule of law, and equality under the law” as “a precious inheritance.” And those values, she says, “have been hacked by ideologues operating on the inside. But if we can spot their trick, we can stop them from destroying the freest societies in the history of the world.”
For more on what Badenoch believes, read her full speech: “How Liberalism Got Hacked.”
The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel
This time eight years ago, with the world still in shock after Donald Trump’s victory, many in the West, including many in America, crowned Angela Merkel as the new de facto leader of the free world. “She’s all alone,” lamented Barack Obama after his final meeting with the German chancellor.
Fast-forward eight years, and how things have changed. Trump is riding high and heading back to the White House. Meanwhile, Angela Merkel’s legacy lies in tatters. Far from being the savior of the West, Merkel has become an emblem of its failure. Whether it’s the migrant crisis, or energy dependence on Moscow, or economic dependence on China, the German leader sowed the seeds of her country’s—and Europe’s—present drift.
Now Merkel has published, in English, her memoir, titled Freedom. How does she justify the decisions that proved so disastrous? And just how bad are things in Germany? Yascha Mounk tackles these questions in his essay for The Free Press today.
Read Yascha on “The Not-So-Marvelous Mrs. Merkel.”
What Does Sleeping with 100 Men in One Day Do to the Soul?
For a recent publicity stunt, an OnlyFans model slept with one hundred men in one day. A new documentary captures the before and after of this extreme act. River Page reports that the inadvertently harrowing film undermines the glib, sloganized idea that “sex work is work,” and “interrogates sex work to a devastating conclusion. . . that selling the body means leaving it, if you want to survive.”
Read River Page’s full column: “What Does Sleeping with 100 Men in One Day Do to the Soul?”
The Outrageous Adoration of Luigi Mangione
Yesterday, River Page summarized the strange case of Luigi Mangione—including the weird hero worship of an alleged killer by so many Americans. On the latest Free Press Live, Michael Moynihan and Batya Ungar-Sargon went deeper on this disturbing trend in a conversation you won’t want to miss. Watch them on the outrageous adoration of Luigi Mangione below:
Mystery drones flying over New Jersey are from Iran and being launched by a “mothership” off the East Coast, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-NJ) speculated on Fox News yesterday. Van Drew, who sits on the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, did not say where he got his information but said this was “the real deal” and from “very high sources.” It comes after days of reports of strange sightings over New Jersey. But the Pentagon denies Van Drew’s claims. “There is no Iranian ship off the coast of the United States, and there’s no so-called ‘mothership’ launching drones toward the United States,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Sabrina Singh.
In other, less serious Garden State news—in fact, maybe the most New Jersey news of all time—Democratic gubernatorial candidate Josh Gottheimer has been caught doctoring his Spotify Wrapped list to seem like a bigger fan of Bruce Springsteen than is really the case.
A pro tip for anyone in public life: Don’t follow denunciations of murder with a “but.” The latest person to ignore this advice is Democratic senator Elizabeth Warren, who said in relation to the killing of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson that “Violence is never the answer, but people can be pushed only so far. This is a warning that if you push people hard enough, they lose faith in the ability of their government to make change, lose faith in the ability of the people who are providing the healthcare to make change, and start to take matters into their own hands in ways that will ultimately be a threat to everyone.” This is nothing short of a rationalization of murder by a U.S. senator. Remember when everyone got mad because Trump warned of a “bloodbath” for the auto industry?
Just two in ten Americans approve of Joe Biden’s decision to pardon his son, Hunter. A plurality (38 percent) of Democrats approve of the move. Speaking of the perks of having a president for a father, we couldn’t help but notice that Don Jr. stepped out in Palm Beach with his new squeeze the same day Don Sr. announced Kimberly Guilfoyle—to whom Don Jr. has been engaged since 2020—as his pick to be the ambassador to Greece. Coincidence, or responsible dynasty management?
Biden is poised to block the acquisition by Nippon Steel, a Japanese company, of the once mighty, Pittsburgh-based U.S. Steel. Steelworkers themselves are divided on the acquisition—some say it would save thousands of union jobs in the Rust Belt. But the deal is a rare point of agreement between Trump and Biden. Last week Trump said he intends to block the deal.
Donald Trump is set to recognize the new nation of Somaliland, a self-governing and strategically vital northern region of Somalia. Establishing Somaliland’s sovereignty could pave the way for U.S. intelligence operations in the historically unstable area. It would enable the U.S. to monitor weapons and commercial movement through the Gulf of Aden and keep track of China’s growing influence in East Africa. Sounds like the beginning of a beautiful friendship. While we’re on the subject of Somaliland, read Armin Rosen’s 2021 dispatch for Tablet: “An Almost-Country in the Desert That Doesn’t Care About Your Understanding of Politics.”
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Oliver Wiseman is an editor and writer at The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
My father and other people who fought and lived through WWII were most upset when Germany reunited. They believed a united Germany would once again be the downfall of Europe. I thought they were being overly dramatic. Ah, youth!
Every hundred years or so, British politics produces a potential Tory leader that may pull it from the brink. Kemi may just be the Churchill of this era.