On the mean streets of Westminster, impressionable youth hang out in groups, experimenting with a dangerous new height. Known among these doomed addicts as “Badenoch” or simply “Kemi,” the substance produces anger, resentment, and a confused lethargy. We must not allow political correctness to prevent us from pointing out that these young people are almost all of the same gender (male) and of the same socio-ethnic background (Surrey). Many of these children are physically still teenagers, but mentally they already have the thoughts of a retired colonel. After continued exposure they all develop the same symptoms: a feeling that everything is going wrong and a conviction that it is all someone else’s fault.
On July 6, at the Scottish Regiment’s Westminster Hall in London, around 100 such people gather to sample the raw product. Kemi Badenoch herself is coming to swallow the raw, emotional animosity and contempt. On the walls of the beautiful Victorian training hall, mustachioed colonels and captains glow from oil paintings. At the back is a memorial to the men of London Scots who died in the First World War. In front of the memorial is a banner with the sponsors’ logos, and in front of it are two chairs on which Badenoch and her interlocutor, a journalist from Daily Mail. Those in the room are not the real audience: the purpose of this interview, like much of Badenoch’s work, is to create content for X. The camera streams the interview live to an X account called Politics UK, which is run by a young reform adviser.
Badenoch begins by talking about her appetite for work. No, she hadn’t woken up the night before watching England beat Mexico and no, she wouldn’t want the country to have a bank holiday if England won the World Cup. This is someone who sees Margaret Thatcher’s claim of sleeping four hours a night as an aspirational lifestyle choice, rather than a glimpse of a routine that no sane person would attempt to uphold. Of Andy Burnham she says: “He seems to want the summer off.” She says Burnham is delaying his arrival in Downing Street “so he doesn’t have to face me at PMQs”. This is a trick from Trump’s playbook, a statement so patently false (does she think Burnham can become prime minister at will?) that there seems little point in refuting it.
Like Trump, she never describes a situation without making herself the main character, and like Trump she has a sharp turn of phrase. She characterizes the following day’s debate over early release of prisoners as being about “all these rapists and paedos that Labor is letting go” (what she doesn’t say is that this is happening because prisons are overcrowded after her party devalued them). In recent weeks, she has compared Ed Miliband to a Nigerian military dictator and Bridget Phillipson to a Gestapo officer. She says her targets condemn such insults because they are unable to deal with “violent words”. When she described the Education Secretary last week as a “bad class warrior”, she was accused – by the Speaker and the Lib Dem leader, among others – of using PMQs as a place simply to hurl cheap insults. Given the chance to show a bit more class, Badenoch clarifies her comments about Phillipson by adding: “She’s a disgrace to people who grew up on a council estate.”
She has almost as much contempt for her ancestors. Liz Truss, she says, fell prey to “the desire to be famous”. There is no danger for the Badenoch Tories, who last year slipped to fourth in the polls, and who this year recorded their worst ever performance in a parliamentary by-election, in Gorton and Denton (54 fewer votes would have put the Tory candidate one seat above Sir Oink-a-Lot, a man dressed as a hateful pig). She says of her party’s record on immigration that “mistakes were made… and some people made more mistakes than others”, although she does not specify that one of the people at the center of the whole blunder was former immigration minister Chris Philp, who is now her shadow home secretary. “We have the toughest immigration policy that exists right now,” she says, ignoring Reform’s plan to deport a million people and Restore’s plan to deport essentially everyone.
When you hear Badenoch speak, it’s important to take a moment to appreciate the extent of the illusion she has built around herself. The 2024 general election, in her view, was not the general rejection of the Conservative Party by voters. It was Nigel Farage’s fault: “The reform split the vote and allowed hundreds more Labor MPs in than there should have been.” She says that it is “because of the Reform” that “now we have the smallest opposition ever”. She honestly believes – in a country that would have been nailed to a burning, shit-filled cactus before voting for five more years of Tory rule – that if not for Reform “we’d probably have a hung parliament”.
But then, when you start saying such incredible things, you can say anything. You can describe yourself, as Badenoch does, as “one of the most qualified people” to be prime minister. You can say, without a hint of irony, that the MPs defecting from your party are “drama queens” obsessed with their “dwindling Twitter followers”. And then, most impressively of all, she said this: “There are some people… they’re always complaining. It’s always someone else’s fault, and it’s never them. Everyone has someone like that.” Oh, what about them? Are there any in the Conservative Party? Who could it be!
But why stop here? Why not compare yourself to the most successful leader of your party? “Fifty years ago,” Badenoch says of Margaret Thatcher, “she was doing the job I’m doing now… and people had written her off in the first two years. They thought she was a placeholder. They laughed at her.” This is true, but the similarities end there. Thatcher had a theory of power. She had been thinking about the state and the economy since she was a university student. She had convictions about the money supply and Britain’s place in the world. Her policies were, whatever you think of them, consistent with a worldview. Can you imagine Badenoch telling her staff “this is what we believe” and showing anything other than a tweet? “She wasn’t trying to be popular,” she says of Thatcher, willfully misreading Thatcher’s success in building a coalition of voters. Badenoch, on the other hand, finds centrists repulsive. In January, she instructed those not committed to her party’s right-wing movement to “get off the street”. To this audience she says: “I don’t think the reforms are on our right.”
On her way out, Badenoch stops to shake a few hands. A young man asks for a photo with her. I ask him what he thinks of her leadership and he shrugs. “I’m not really a fan of Kemi,” he says, before adding: “I’m more of Boris Johnson.” How fast history turns. Badenoch is courting young people with her lively online persona, the barbs she throws around the Commons in the hope they will be shared with X, but young people have already rekindled their interest in yesterday’s clown. Maybe they’ll learn to find it amusing, one day. But not yet.
(Further reading: You can’t blame Brexit anymore)
