In his heyday as editor of The Sun, Kelvin Mackenzie once picked up the phone to hear a reader complaining about a story. His response was to tell them they were banned from reading the paper. Kemi Badenoch, it turns out, takes a similar approach to supporters of the Conservative Party.
It was a Wednesday morning, but Prime Minister’s Questions had been cancelled because Keir Starmer was flying to China. Deprived of her weekly opportunity for parliamentary limelight, Badenoch had summoned us to a speech to accuse other people of wanting attention. This is one of those irregular verbs: He is a narcissist; You have an inflated opinion of yourself; I am the only person who can save the Conservatives and I can only achieve this if I’m never off the television.
“There are people in politics who don’t really know what they are doing, or why,” Badenoch announced, in one of many sections of the speech that a lesser politician would have been unable to deliver without laughing. Or crying. “They want access, attention and advancement, and when they don’t get their way, they create drama.” It was incredible stuff, in pretty much every sense of the word except the positive ones.
What was surprising was that this wasn’t aimed at Robert Jenrick and Suella Braverman, who have so recently defected to Reform. No, as far as we could tell, this was intended to be a description of Andy Street and David Gauke, whose offensive suggestion is that perhaps the Tories should have a message that appeals to far-left enclaves like Oxfordshire.
Well, if that’s what they think, they can get lost. “I won’t apologise to those walking away because they don’t like the new direction,” Badenoch said. “We only want Conservatives.” You’re banned from voting for us! “We’re not trying to recreate 2006,” Badenoch said, rejecting those dark days when the Conservatives were led by a future prime minister.
She now turned her attention to those leaving in the other direction, for the sticky embrace of Nigel Farage. “I’m sorry you didn’t win the leadership contest. I’m sorry you didn’t get a job in the shadow cabinet. I’m sorry you didn’t get into the Lords,” That’s them told. “This is a tantrum dressed up as politics.”
The room, a mix of Tory MPs and supporters, loved all this. Although you couldn’t help but note that it was a much smaller room than Farage regularly packs out. Badenoch was dismissive of the Reform leader’s rallies. “Everyone is fed up with this style of politics,” the Tory leader said, in the face of quite a lot of evidence.
All these people can get lost. “The Conservative Party is going in a new direction!” Badenoch declared. Which is true: who can remember the last time it regularly polled below 20 per cent?
And what is that direction? Marvellously, the party that gave us the arson-attack-on-a-clown-school that was Britain over the last 10 years is going to be campaigning on competence. “We’ve done the work!” she announced. She pointed to Chris Philp’s plan for immigration, though she didn’t say if it still includes a Removals Force modelled on Donald Trump’s vastly successful ICE squads. The Tories were “a party of serious people, not drama queens,” she said. I think we’ll be the judges of that.
Several times, Badenoch said Reform couldn’t be taken seriously because it is a small party. For years, the Tory message has been “Nigel Farage is right; don’t vote for him”. Now they’ve moved to: “Nigel Farage is right, but sadly he doesn’t have enough MPs.” Here, at least, there is a problem that Badenoch has a strategy to solve.
What is mystifying is that there is a good attack line available to Badenoch, only ruled out because it would mean admitting that the weedy centrists have a point. She got close to it only under questioning. A reporter asked about Matt Goodwin, the Reform candidate in the forthcoming Manchester Gorton and Denton by-election, a former academic who studied Farage so hard that one day he became what he beheld. One of his more noteworthy views is that if you have dark skin, you might not be British. There is a word for this, but for some reason Badenoch won’t say it. “It’s all identity politics,” she said, incorrectly. “I do ask people to think what would happen if such people came into government.”
This is almost a good point, but it’s striking that Badenoch won’t make it more forcefully. The problem with Reform is not that they want to right things but they can’t deliver them, it’s that some of the things that some of their people seem to want are very wrong indeed.
But Badenoch won’t say it. Perhaps she hopes that she, a black woman raised in Nigeria, can win round people who don’t believe black people can be British. Frankly, if there’s a group she wants to ban from voting Tory, that one seems like a good place to start.
