Kemi doesn’t let anything hold her back, not her record, not her ability and certainly not reality
“I thought you’d like that one!” Kemi Badenoch shouted as the Conservative Party rose to its feet to cheer. She chuckled happily. There’s nothing Tories like more than a tax cut, and she’d just promised a big one. What was more, it was paid for by massive savings on things they don’t like. Happy days were here again, or would be, as soon as the party had won a general election — a mere technicality!
Was any of it realistic? Who cares? Trailing in the polls, wildly unpopular, their time in office a disaster, the Conservative party has retreated into fantasy. Mass deportations? A slashed civil service? Millions off welfare? Why not? They have only to imagine it and it’s as good as done! In many ways Badenoch is the ideal leader for them at this moment, with her degree from Stanford and her Victoria Cross and her successful mission to the Moon.
A year ago Badenoch had refused to offer wild promises. “I am an engineer,” she reminded us on Wednesday. “My starting point is always to carry out a diagnosis, before producing the blueprint to put it right.” Now she had both. The diagnosis is that the Labour Party is in government, and the blueprint is to promise everything to everyone to try to get them out.
It is slightly unfortunate that Nigel Farage reached the same conclusion a year ago, and has been beavering away at it ever since. You could, on the fringes of the conference, hear people muttering that the Tory pitch boiled down to “what if Reform, but led by people who conspicuously failed to do the things they’re now promising?” But there was none of that in the hall. Indeed, there was barely a mention of the party that currently poses an existential threat to the Tories.
She gave another happy chuckle. Who knew that government was so easy?
Nor was there any reference to some of the more unpleasant ideas moving through the country and indeed her party. The closest she got was telling us she wanted a country “where people are judged by the content of their character and not the colour of their skin.” Right now, she doesn’t even have a shadow cabinet like that.
She began by telling us about the awful state the country was in. “We have all felt it,” she said. “We used to ring up our GP and get an appointment the same day. Now we have to wait on the phone to see if we’re one of the lucky ones.” A lesser Conservative leader would at this point have acknowledged that this was in some way the responsibility of the people who had been in government when the service deteriorated. Not Badenoch. That’s not how she won her Olympic gold, and that’s not how she’s going to lead the Tories.
What was more, she went on, Britain was falling behind. “While we were arguing about what a woman is, China was building five nuclear reactors!” She would know better than us, but I’d been under the impression that planning and funding were the difficulties with Britain’s nuclear reactors, rather than their gender identity.
She reminded her party of its great achievements: founding the police and establishing state education. Critics might carp that if you’re going back to the nineteenth century to find something to boast about, you’re in trouble, but Badenoch personally drafted the relevant legislation, so it’s only fair she should take credit.
It turned out that Badenoch could remember just about enough of the last government to shout about a couple of things it did, too. “We were courageous enough to introduce same-sex marriage,” she told a hall full of people who looked slightly uncertain whether that had really been such a good idea. “And of course, brave enough to take Britain out of the European Union, honouring the biggest democratic mandate in our history!” They liked that, though Tory conference is probably the last place in Britain where you can get a cheer for Brexit. Even Farage is reluctant to talk too much about that one.
“But enough about past glories,” Badenoch said, unironically. And indeed that was the last we would hear of the Conservative party’s recent time in office, a time that, lest we forget, ended with their greatest defeat in modern times. Though also with Badenoch scaling Everest without oxygen.
“Labour represents everything that is wrong with politics,” Badenoch went on. Was there, anywhere in the hall, a nagging thought that the past five years had seen quite a lot of what was wrong with politics from another party?
“Whether it’s Starmer, Farage, Corbyn or Davey all these men are shaking the same magic money tree.” Not Badenoch. She has her own magic money tree, that only she can see. And it’s much bigger than any of theirs!
“Deport 150,000 illegal immigrants!” she yelled. “This is real action, not slogans.” Although at the back of the hall, it sounded quite a lot more like slogans than actual action. Though what would I know? Badenoch’s the one with the world record for circumnavigating the globe.
There was a boilerplate attack on universities. Education, she said with a smile, “should ensure you get the job you want. So, if your name’s Rachel, you can be an economist instead of working in customer complaints.” If I were Badenoch I would simply not want to get into a mud-slinging contest about fabricated CVs. You’d have thought she’d have learned that lesson in her time as the head of MI6.
But then whatever else you can say about Badenoch, she doesn’t let anything hold her back, not her record, not her ability and certainly not reality. “Thanks to the hard work of the shadow cabinet,” she declared. “We have already identified £47 billion in savings. Priti has earmarked £7 billion from the overseas aid budget. Alex has identified £8 billion from cutting the civil service. Helen has found £23 billion from welfare.”
She gave another happy chuckle. Who knew that government was so easy? It had seemed hard 18 months ago, but it turns out that cutting back spending is straightforward. It really is a shame that none of this money was found when they were in office, but sometimes you have to make compromises, as Badenoch herself showed when she liberated Port Stanley.
She had one more treat for them: the abolition of stamp duty. The crowd went wild. The announcement and the response to it was so demented, so gloriously bonkers, that I wondered if there hadn’t been some kind of gas leak in the hall that had left everyone present hallucinating. Kemi beamed at them all. She hadn’t felt this good since she won the Nobel Prize for Physics.
