“I’m thrilled that we’re talking about this,” Kemi Badenoch told Robert Peston, a look of pure horror on her face. The subject was the Conservative Party’s immigration policy, which she may or may not understand.
A regular line from people on the left of British politics is that those on the right do politics on “easy mode”, helped by a supportive press that isn’t constantly trying to catch them out, supported by wealthy donors. If this week is anything to go by, easy mode is still not easy enough.
“The policy is that if people are here who cannot contribute they need to leave,” Badenoch went on. The definition of “contribute” turns out to include “earns a lot” but not, say, “teaches children” or “cares for the sick and dying”.
Unfortunately for Badenoch, over the summer her Shadow Home Secretary Chris Philp had decided to show he was a big boy by publishing not just vague proposals on immigration, but actual draft legislation. You can read it on the Parliament website. People who have read it — a group that seems not to include Badenoch, and may not include Philp — note that its effect would be the deportation of hundreds of thousands of people who came to Britain legally and made lives here: mothers, fathers, husbands, wives and neighbours. Anyone who cut back their hours to bring up children or care for someone would risk being kicked out.
“People speak in a context,” he said, as though he were about to explain some tricky line from an epistle to the Corinthians
The most charitable explanation, and the likeliest, is that this is a gimmick to which no one in the Tory Party gave more than ten minutes’ thought. Nothing in Badenoch’s interview suggested that she knew what she was committed to. She seemed at points to think that she was being asked about amendments to government legislation that her party had tabled. Easy mode simply isn’t easy enough.
Elsewhere in Westminster on Tuesday, there was at least an effort to engage with reality. “Politicians haven’t been honest.” Robert Colvile, the genial director of the Centre for Policy Studies, told a meeting of right-leaning types. “Politicians haven’t felt able to be honest.” The group he was talking to, Fighting For A Free Future, is an assembly of Tories who, now that they’re out of power, have worked out what they ought to have been doing when they had it. Curses! Just too late!
Colvile was thoughtful, as was the man from the Adam Smith Institute, whose main complaint about the current government’s efforts to ease planning restrictions was that they should go further. Others were less impressive. When the man from the Taxpayers’ Alliance started explaining that there were huge easy savings to be made in the welfare budget which somehow no actual government is ever able to find, we knew the meeting had retreated into comforting nonsense.
Just round the corner Danny Kruger was having his own struggle with the game’s settings. Kruger excitingly defected from the Conservatives to Reform last month, a move he seems to have thought would see a lot of highbrow discussions about policy formation, but turns out to mainly involve explaining why his colleagues don’t mean the things they say.
Reform were into Day Three of “is it racist to be horrified by the sight of black people?” Kruger knows the answer to this, of course, but on the Second Day, his new leader Nigel Farage had declared that although MP Sarah Pochin had engaged in a Racism Of The Mouth, it had not been a Racism Of The Heart. Kruger, as a new convert, was obliged to subscribe to this subtle distinction.
“The impression in what she’s said, in just that single sentence, is that she doesn’t like seeing black and Asian people on TV,” Kruger told the BBC. “Obviously she doesn’t actually think that.” Kruger has only been in the party for a few weeks, and it’s possible he hasn’t spent much time with Pochin.
“People speak in a context,” he said, as though he were about to explain some tricky line from an epistle to the Corinthians. “Nigel has forgiven her,” he went on, in tones that suggested that settled the matter. Forgiveness of sins is one of Farage’s powers, along with the healing of leprosy and the ability to appear on Question Time at will.
What Kruger wanted to talk about was the size of the civil service. “It’s gone up hugely since, um … ” He paused. “I’m afraid to say in the last ten years.” Was there an event about ten years ago that might have caused this big structural change in the British government. Anyone? Anyone?
“We’re going to close down many of the sprawling offices that Whitehall currently occupies.” This was the kind of serious announcement that Kruger was brought on board to deliver, and in fairness, he has. In fact his announcement of office closures was so successful that it turned out afterwards the government is already closing the offices on his list. Easy mode: not easy enough.
