“Mr Speaker, does the prime minister believe that when an organisation descends into total shambles, the person at the top should resign?” It was a good question, both pointy and double-edged, with one slight flaw: the person asking it would not, ideally, be leading a party that is currently third in the polls and plummeting.
Labour MPs, who don’t get much to cheer about these days, all laughed and pointed at Kemi Badenoch, for it was of course she. It feels unlikely that Keir Starmer will lead Labour into the next election, but it would also be a surprise if Badenoch is still in charge of the Conservatives next Christmas.
This is not, let us be absolutely clear, because she is outshone by the prime minister’s megawatt charisma or stumped by his sparkling wit. This is a man who would, in the coming minutes, use the word “notwithstanding” as a rhetorical device, repeating it three times in a single answer. But if his feet are made of the dullest clay, they are at least planted on Planet Earth.
Are Badenoch’s? If we still had juries, they’d be out on this question. “We now know,” she announced, in the tones of someone who has spent rather too long Doing Their Own Research on the internet, “that the head of the OBR was forced out for telling the truth!” About the JFK assassination? The Loch Ness Monster? We held our breath. “The chancellor did not need to raise taxes on working people,” she announced. Yes, Badenoch had gone full Budget Truther.
“We also know,” Badenoch went on, somehow managing to speak in green ink, “that the Chancellor was briefing the media.” Not briefing the media! Whatever next, I asked, clutching my pearls. “If she were a CEO, she would have been fired!” the Tory leader declared. “She might even have been prosecuted for market abuse!”
It is not exactly clear what form this market abuse it supposed to have taken. We pictured Reeves engaged in an elaborate Trading Places-style fraud, pumping shares in His Majesty’s Government only to sell them in the final reel at a vast profit. But it turned out Badenoch was deadly serious. “We have written to the Financial Conduct Authority,” she said, full of portent. “Will the prime minister ensure the Chancellor fully co-operates with any investigation?”
I should apologise at this point, both to my editors and any remaining readers, because this is the third day running I’ve written about this, but I have simply never heard an opposition arguing that the economy is in better shape than the government says it is. Let me offer an axiom: if a Chancellor raises taxes, the simplest explanation is that she thinks she needs to.
Badenoch went on, somehow managing to speak in green ink
But one of the many fascinating things about Badenoch is that she seems unable to accept “incompetence” as the answer to the question “why did the government do that thing?” This refusal is all the more surprising when you remember that she was a minister in Boris Johnson’s government. She has seen incompetence up close. Perhaps that’s the problem: when you’ve lived through the technicolour widescreen shambles that was the last Conservative administration, Starmer’s dreary disasters simply can’t compare.
She’s not alone in this. On Wednesday several newspapers had covered the astonishing revelation that when Reeves has claimed to have been a girls’ under-14 chess champion, when she had in reality been a champion in girls’ under-14 chess. In a story that I honestly cannot believe I am reading, yet alone repeating, Alex Edmans, a professor of finance at the London Business School and apparently a grown man, told The Times, one of Britain’s great newspapers, that although the Chancellor had won the under-14 title in the British Women’s Chess Association Girls Championship, “that is not the British girls’ championship”. Though it really does sound like a British girls’ championship. It will probably not astonish you to learn that Badenoch, a person who wants to be taken seriously as a possible British prime minister, raised this huge scandal in the House of Commons.
How would Starmer respond to all this? Knowing that the Financial Conduct Authority and the English Chess Federation might at any moment charge into the chamber, waving guns and yelling at everyone to freeze until they had found out exactly which MP had briefed journalists and whether Reeves could explain the Sicilian Defence, would he try to make a getaway, leaping onto a speedboat in the Thames? Would he, confronted with his opposite number’s brilliant questioning, burst into tears and confess all, admitting that he’d never had a chance of getting away with his plan to manipulate the markets once Badenoch was on the case?
Neither, as it turns out. It’s entirely possible that he couldn’t believe his luck that he wasn’t being challenged about the stuttering economy and the breach of the election promise not to raise taxes, the lack of any plausible plan to actually improve the way the country works. With a bemused expression on his face, he looked at Badenoch and delivered a put-down that, while hardly Wildean, was at least accurate: “She’s completely losing the plot.”
