Kemi Badenoch hit with bad news as serial killer confirmed as proud Tory

Fred West's evil brother: How John robbed his victims of justice too

It's not been the best of times for Kemi Badenoch's Conservatives - MPs have been jumping ship to Nigel Farage's Reform UK, they lost control of 16 councils in May's local elections and Prime Minister Keir Starmer has accused the whole party of "sliding into the abyss”.

So you'd think the news that a well-known face has been unearthed as a secret Tory, should be good news. Except, of course, when said face is only well known for being one thing: being one half of....he UK’s most notorious serial killer couple.

For, newly-seen transcripts of a 1994 police interrogation have today confirmed what many a Conservative may long have feared: Fred West was a fully-fledged, out-and-proud, number one Tory voter.

It had previously been suspected that Fred was a Margaret Thatcher fan after he and his wife Rose were found to have a Tory car sticker on the grey Ford Poplar they used to prowl Gloucester’s bus stops, preying on young girls.

However some experts queried whether Fred’s blood really did run blue or whether the sticker was all part of his and Rose’s “safe” and “respectable” act. For it was also believed the couple often took baby son Steve along on their ‘hunting’ trips, presumably because young women were more likely to accept a lift from a young, unthreatening family than a single man.

But, today, according to one newly-seen exchange unearthed by author, TV producer and former Mirror journalist Howard Sounes, Fred - and presumably Rose - really was Tory through and through. Howard, who was a senior producer on this year’s hit Netflix documentary Fred and Rose West: A British Horror Story, recently gained access to the more than 100 hours of West’s police interviews for his new book The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation , which was serialised in Mirror this week.

And one particular exchange caught his attention. “The detectives made it plain that they feared that Fred was capable of almost any atrocity, with a final round of questions,” Howard explains in the book. “Were the Wests into witchcraft and witches’ covens, for instance? Did Fred perform abortions, as more than one witness claimed, describing his dirty abortion kit including a nasty implement with a corkscrew end? He denied it, though it was almost certainly true. Did the Wests collect videos of humans having sex with animals? Fred refused to answer that, which was also probably true....”

And then came the clanger which Tory leader Kemi Badenoch may wish had stayed buried. “[Police asked] Did the Wests have a kink about fascists and domination?,” Howard writes. “‘What’s fascists?’ asked a bewildered Fred. Told that fascists were like Nazis, he said: ‘I’m Conservative and I vote Conservative’.”

As endorsements go it’s certainly not the best. West admitted to 12 murders between 1967 and 1987 before he hanged himself in his jail cell on January 1, 1995, ahead of any trial. Rose, now 71, was convicted of 10 murders and is serving a whole life order at Wakefield's women’s prison HMP New Hall.

In the 27 years between West’s first murder in 1967 and the 1994 investigation, the Tories were in number 10 for all but eight years - with Edward Heath, Thatcher and John Major all prime ministers at some point.

In West’s stomping ground of Gloucester, the Tories’ took the Labour seat in 1970, three years after his first murder. It remained Tory until two years’ after West’s death. It’s now Labour.

The Fred West Tapes: Secrets of the Fred & Rose West Murder Investigation, By Howard Sounes (Blink Publishing) is out now. You can pre-order a copy here. Click below to read Day One of the Mirror's exclusive serialisation.