Is Kemi Badenoch about to strip yet more Tories of the whip?

The Conservatives are flying high – if being a comfortable second in the polls is what counts as flying high for Kemi Badenoch’s party these days – so what better time to start an internal battle about stripping the whip from some of its peers?

Voices are growing in the party for Sandip Verma, a businesswoman elevated to the Upper House by David Cameron in 2006, to lose the Tory whip over her membership of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for Afrikan Reparations, an informal, cross-party group of parliamentarians formed to examine issues related to reparations (not a spelling mistake, by the way – it uses K as a “deliberate political and cultural act of decolonisation”).

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The group put a petition before Parliament earlier this year calling on the government to issue a “full and meaningful apology” for Britain’s role in slavery and colonialism and to establish a Commission of Inquiry for Truth and Reparatory Justice – grist to Badenoch, who has said Britain should not apologise for its role “because it is a lever to wedge open the door to ask for cash”.

But the Tories have also clocked that stripping Verma of the whip would collapse the group entirely. Under parliamentary rules, APPGs can only exist if at least one member of the main opposition party serves as an officer. Were Verma to no longer be a Conservative, the group, otherwise dominated by the likes of Jeremy Corbyn and Zarah Sultana, would be forced to fold.

The move to take the whip off Verma is being led by Andrew Gilligan, the former Boris Johnson advisor who has called her a “useful idiot” and accused her of lending “crucial legitimacy in this way to rotten causes, profoundly opposed by the Conservative Party, giving them the plausibility of ‘cross-party’ endorsement and the media oxygen of a Westminster platform”.