2 hours ago
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A minute’s silence for Kemi Badenoch. Thoughts and prayers welcome. The Tory party leader just can’t help herself. Every time you think that, just maybe, she is beginning to get the hang of the job, she comes up with something so deranged, so batshit that you can only sit back and admire the self-destruction. Almost as if she can’t bear any idea of success. Bewilderingly, sabotaging herself seems to be her default coping mechanism. Someone who can only find satisfaction in annihilating her own party. Sometimes you even wonder if she has ever been a Tory.
Like so much of Kemi’s behaviour, this was all totally avoidable. There was no need for her to do or say anything. With Keir Starmer away in China, this was a week off for her from prime minister’s questions. A slot she would delegate to the even more useless Andrew Griffith. Clearly Badenoch does not welcome any competition so Griffith might get the deputy leader job for good.
But Kemi wanted, no, needed attention. Couldn’t let a day go by without some me time on TV. So she couldn’t resist the opportunity to give a speech on the future prospects of the Conservative party. The good news would be that it was understandably short.
Her basic message was that there was no future. No hope. Weirdly the 40 or so Tory MPs in the room – they would, wouldn’t they? – and the 150 or so party activists loved being told they were effectively irrelevant. They could just have been the last Tories in the country. Certainly the last of Kemi’s Tories. Better to die now than face a thousand deaths.
This was a rejection of the one nation, centre-right Tories. They were toast. They could all sod off. Pinko lefties. The only people who were welcome in the party were people who hated immigrants as much as Kemi. It was, by any standards, insane. It might have made some sense if Kemi were polling well. Then you could make a case for expelling all moderates. But she isn’t. She has taken the Tories from the high 20s to the mid-teens. Kemi won’t be happy until she has completely destroyed her party’s credibility.
We need an end to the psychodrama. PSYCHODRAMA had been spelled out in capitals in the advance briefing. Clearly, one that had been written by a keen student of Donald Trump’s media team. Enough was enough. Starmer was in his own leadership crisis, Reform were just doing stunts to distract from the brilliance of the Tories.
Only Kemi was showing the country a way forward. Except she really wasn’t. The Tories are implicated in the psychodrama of British politics every bit as much as the others. She claimed many MPs were only interested in their egos. Desperate for attention. Kemi is not blessed with much personal insight. Half the Tories are on defection watch to Reform. And after today, the other half will be on defection watch to the Lib Dems. It was hard to take anything she said seriously.
The Tories were on a relentless march to the right, Kemi insisted. Anyone who didn’t like the direction of travel could fuck off now. It was her way or the highway. She alone dictated policy. Shadow ministers such as Chris Philp and Mel Stride were just her useful idiots. She got that bit right, I suppose.
In the trail, it had been promised Kemi would say that every day she had been leader of the opposition, the Tories had lurched further to the right. She had meant that as a promise. Dreams can come true. No matter that most people would take this as a threat. If she keeps this up, who knows where the Tories might end up in two or three months. How much further right can they go? At what point does Kemi get a call from Viktor Orbán and Donald Trump saying she has really gone too far this time? Killing civilians is just collateral damage in KemiWorld.
There would be no return to the Tory party of 2006. It’s a view. Though the Tory party of 2006 had just about recovered its reputation after 10 years in opposition and was ahead in the polls. But who wants that kind of success? Winning elections is for losers. Now she took aim at Andy Street and Ruth Davidson who had launched their centre-right movement, Prosper UK, on Monday. They could piss off. There was no place for sedition in Kemi’s Tories. If you haven’t been trained to hate immigrants on sight you are not wanted. Any criticism of Brexit punishable by the death penalty.
“The Tory party looks like Mark Francois,” she said. Francois blushed even more than usual. Either out of pleasure or guilt. He’s been widely tipped to join Reform. “The economy looks like Mel Stride.” Really? Surely now was not the time to put a downer on proceedings. Everyone knows that Mel is a decent enough bloke but a halfwit as shadow chancellor. I wouldn’t trust him with his own finances, let alone the country’s.
There was no sense of repentance. No sign of shame. Yes, the Tories had made one or two minor mistakes, but not anything to worry about. They might have nearly broken Britain but had left the country on life support. So rather than harassing the Tories over their record in government, people should start to show a little gratitude. Labour and Reform were parties of the extreme left. How she could say this with a straight face was beyond most people in the room. Only the Tories could be trusted to go far further to the right than the rest of the country. Onwards and downwards. Defeat is victory.
There was just time for a few questions from almost exclusively rightwing media outlets. “We are a united party,” Kemi repeated, having just told roughly half her MPs they were no longer welcome. She couldn’t even bring herself to totally denounce Matt Goodwin’s views on race. A bit of racism is now allowed. What the country wants. Come the end, 20 or so Tory MPs – mainly men – posed awkwardly for photos. How many of them would be in the party in three months’ time was unclear.
Still, it was all a lot more entertaining than deputy PMQs. Having messed up so badly last time, David Lammy decided to try not answering the questions and instead just reading out rehearsed gags. Though even this was far too much for Griffith. He had nothing to offer and gave Labour their biggest laugh for weeks. And the way things have been going lately, they dearly needed it.
