LEAVE the Conservative Party and save your country!

I think if, say, Tony Blair, had said that Scottish Catholics were his ethnic enemies and that's why he didn't like to be called Scottish, and was glad to escape to England, you'd be somewhat critical.

Not to mention that he also became Catholic.

I think we're struggling to find easy equivalents that we can relate to because there aren't any.

A more relevant example might be Greek and Turkish Cypriots. A few years back a British/Greek Cypriot friend invited us to her daughter's christening. At the meal afterwards, her father, after a couple of drinks launched into a bit of a rant about exactly what he thought of the Turks (from experience). Those aren't views that my friend shares (at least not as openly) but 'ethnic enemies' would still be a pretty accurate description albeit in a historic sense. I think that's the sense in which Badenoch used that phrase, but I might be wrong.

You can argue that people should speak more carefully in public, and in general I'd agree, but I think there's also a tendency for people to go looking for the worst possible interpretation.

If we're putting together a list of people who should be careful when speaking in public, leader of the opposition is right up there surely?

Nobody was saying it didn't exist.

They're different people though. The small group who find her language offensive in this example is enough to create a twitter storm and a few Guardian opinion pieces. I suspect there is a much larger group who actually like her bluntness.

That said, "historic rivals" might have been a better description.

She's got foot in mouth disease, that's the issue, and she will continue to blunderingly offend people. Hard to tell if she means it or not, but past a certain point it won't matter.

Harsh on Ian Duncan Smith that.

He at least lost an election.

She's obviously a follower of @surrey_commuter, but I suspect she's not got to the bit where there are no exemptions or dodges, so 20% means 20% on everything. In essence, it sounds like Trump's massive give-away to the already richest.

It is a superficially appealing concept I've heard before. The only way to make it work would be to set the flat rate at 35% or something like that, which would not really fix much of the tax evasion issue at the top end (because it's still a lot) and would massively increase the tax burden for the majority of earners.

To fix that, you could have lower rates for lower earners, and higher rates... Oh.

Now she's come up with a new idea that's already been tried and failed before, can we go back to the discussion about whether it is nice for elected leaders to be intelligent?

What is your name?

What is your favourite colour?

What is the average weight of an African swallow?

I was thinking more about the size of the coconuts.

To be fair, the headline is doing that poll thing where they assume 'don't know' answers go into one of the other two categories. After a few more months they may all fall into the category of thinking they / she are ready. It's a bit of a pet hate of mine with polls (the same when people assign those that didn't vote into one camp or the other).

Thing is that no matter how silly his "justifications" are, at least one other person had to say "Yeah, okay.".