On Monday 2 March, I attended a keynote address by Kemi Badenoch, the current leader of the Conservative opposition. The speech took place at the Westminster offices of Policy Exchange, one of the UK’s most influential policy institutes.

During her talk, Badenoch set out what she described as a new Conservative approach to integration and national identity. She argued that Britain’s multicultural model has failed, warning of the emergence of “parallel societies” and proposing legal, educational and cultural reforms aimed at rebuilding a shared national identity.

She also criticised the government of Keir Starmer for what she described as a weak response to the crisis involving Iran, suggesting that party politics were influencing Labour’s stance.

The speech itself was interesting. But what really caught my attention was the Q&A session that followed.

There were just four questions. The first three were asked by journalists from three of Britain’s largest broadcast news organisations: BBC News, Sky News and ITV News.

Despite coming from different outlets, the questions shared a strikingly similar framing.

The first question was from Iain Watson of the BBC. Although he briefly referenced asylum seekers later in his question, he began with Iran:

“Obviously there’s a lot in the speech but let me go back to the beginning of it when you were talking about Iran. More generally, is it your position that you would back political assassinations in order to bring about regime change even if you were told this was against international law?”

The second question came from Amanda Akass of Sky News. She also focused on Iran, asking if the Conservatives had “completely given up the principle of international law”:

When the US and Israel launched their attacks on Iran, they hadn’t made an effort to seek UN Security Council approval and the negotiation process was ongoing. In your speech, you talked about international law being a fig leaf, but also praised the UK as somewhere where law was equally applied. Has the Conservative Party completely given up on the principle of international law and the international rules-based order?

The third question was from Harry Horton of ITV News. His was even more aggressive, asking whether Badenoch had failed to “learn the lessons of Iraq”:

“Yesterday, the Prime Minister said that he’d learnt the lessons of the war in Iraq. What would you say to people who hear what you say and your support for the US and say that you haven’t learnt the lessons of Iraq and believe that you’re too keen to get involved and support a US war that some say has no clear end goal or clear objective?”

Three different outlets. Three different journalists.

Yet the framing was remarkably consistent.

Not one of the opening questions addressed the central theme of Badenoch’s speech: Britain’s integration model, the limits of multiculturalism, or the emergence of parallel societies. Instead, the discussion was immediately redirected toward Iran and international law.

More to the point, the questions could almost have been written by the same person.

That convergence says something about the intellectual framework now dominating parts of the Western media and political class.

All three questions leaned on the same concepts: international law and the so-called “rules-based international order.” They did not engage with Badenoch’s argument. They were clearly pre-prepared. There was almost no daylight between them.

This is groupthink.

The flawed assumption behind these questions is that international law provides a clear and universally applicable framework governing the behaviour of states.

In reality, this narrative has little to do with geopolitical reality. International law was never designed to function as a universal moral code.

Modern international law largely emerged from the trauma of two catastrophic world wars fought primarily among Western states during the first half of the twentieth century. Institutions such as the United Nations and legal frameworks like the UN Charter were created to regulate relations between sovereign states and reduce the risk of another great-power war.

The system assumed that states behaved as rational actors, recognised each other’s sovereignty, and shared an interest in avoiding catastrophic conflict.

Those assumptions do not always hold.

For decades, two nuclear-armed superpowers faced off against each other. Yet the world largely believed those weapons would never actually be used. The doctrine of M.A.D. – mutually assured destruction – assumed that neither side would fire first.

In such a world, international norms are not only understandable; they are necessary.

But when the same legalistic framework is applied to regimes such as the Islamic Republic of Iran – a revolutionary Islamic theocracy whose leadership openly embraces confrontation with the West – the entire paradigm begins to break down.

How does M.A.D. function when one side views death through the lens of religious fulfilment?

Appeasing such a regime, trusting it, or negotiating on the assumption of shared rational interests can become a dangerous strategy.

Decades of passive engagement allowed Iran’s ballistic missile programme to develop largely unhindered.

So when three journalists stand up and parrot nearly identical questions about international law at a press conference, the discussion shifts away from serious analysis and toward something else entirely.

International law becomes a buzzword – a rhetorical framework that restrains those who operate within the system, while having little impact on those who do not.

Seen in that light, the Q&A session was revealing. A speech about domestic integration policy quickly became an interrogation about whether confronting Iran might violate international law.

Is this what our media has been reduced to?

A collection of cloned actors, offering no original thought, aggressively challenging anything that does not fit the narrow assumptions they have been trained to defend.

We deserve much better from our nation’s top journalists.

As Badenoch put it during her response:

“If international law is helping the ayatollahs brutalise their regime and stopping us from doing anything, then perhaps it needs to be looked at again. What we are talking about in the Conservative Party today is common sense. Not ‘it’s written on a piece of paper so we must follow it’ even if it’s clearly stupid.”

She ended by noting that many people struggle to see the difference.

Including, it seems, much of the British media itself.

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