Kemi Badenoch’s war with Stonewall opened up on a new front this evening. Earlier this year, the business secretary incurred the wrath of the LGBTQ+ charity when she told government officials to withdraw from Stonewall’s top 100 employers’ scheme over the charity’s dubious positions on gender rights.

Now, speaking this evening, she has raised the question of whether Stonewall and other charities should be receiving any public money at all. Speaking at an IEA and TaxPayers’ Alliance event at Tory party conference, Badenoch drew attention to the latter’s report on the public subsidies Stonewall receives, and argued that several charities should not be receiving public money to support ‘people’s hobby horses’:

‘We need to get back to a situation where charities raise money privately and don’t take money from the government. This is not what government is there for: to support other people’s personal hobby horses. We are here to make sure the country is run well. We are here to provide support for those who need it – who are the most vulnerable. But I was quite shocked at how much we had been funnelling into an organisation so that they could mark our homework. And we have been working to remove so much of third sector organisations marking government’s homework while we pay them to do so. We are the government, we should be making our own homework, the only people we are accountable to are the electorate, the voters.’

Mr S suspects this one will go down well with the UK’s bloated third sector…