One of the most annoying things about the Conservatives is how they just don’t learn. It’s like having a friend who thinks that they can get rich gambling. You can sit them down and patiently explain the slim potential for success, and their history of financial ruin, and even on the brink of bankruptcy they will frown, nod and say, “But what if I just tried one more time?”

A few months ago, I attacked Conservative attempts to reverse the left’s identitarian accusations. For example, Conservative MPs were suggesting that Kemi Badenoch was only being criticised because she was a woman. 

“Conservatives must drop this kind of flaccid victimology,” I wrote:

At best it is clever-clever and at worst it is pathetic. If there is a single person who is going to vote Conservative and not Labour because they think that Keir Starmer is a racist and Labour are a bunch of woman haters I will eat my hat, regurgitate it and eat it again. Yet it also makes the Tories far less able to defend themselves against such disingenuous attacks. And they will come. Oh, boy, they will come.

Kemi Badenoch herself, I was glad to observe, was not engaging in this discourse. Now, alas, she is. 

Last night, in an acceptance speech at the British LGBT Awards ceremony, David Tennant imagined a world where Mrs Badenoch, Minister for Women and Equalities, “doesn’t exist anymore”. “I don’t wish ill of her,” Tennant clarified, “I just wish her to shut up.”

Yes, it’s good that actors tend to read from other people’s scripts.

I can of course understand Mrs Badenoch being annoyed by Tennant’s hostile reaction to her mild and tolerant concern about the self-entitled and exploitative irrationality of genderism. It merited a response. Unfortunately, she chose perhaps the worst form of response. 

Badenoch tweeted:

I will not shut up. I will not be silenced by men who prioritise applause from Stonewall over the safety of women and girls. 

A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end …

The first two sentences? Not great. The use of “men” obscures the fact that women are likelier than men to support expanding trans rights. Boys, as well as girls, meanwhile, also suffer as a result of genderism.

But my real problem is with the third sentence. “Rich, lefty, white male celebrity”? “The only black woman in government”? This is pure unfiltered identity politics. What difference does it make that Tennant is white? Would it have been more acceptable if he had been black? And what difference does it make that Badenoch is black? Would it have been acceptable if she had been white? Why is “optics” the problem rather than his aggressive and intolerant support for a damaging cause?

The generous interpretation of Badenoch’s statement is that she is trying to invert left-wing rhetoric. Leftists wring their hands when people criticise Diane Abbott, for example, so perhaps Badenoch was trying to illustrate that she could play that game as well. The problem is that leftists are, in general, not trying to be consistent. The standards they uphold for their ingroup are not the same as the standards they uphold for their outgroup. That’s a feature, not a bug.

Besides, as I scribbled earlier, “I appreciate that this kind of charge might be being thrown to give our friends on the left a taste of their own medicine. But that simply implies that the medicine works.”

The ungenerous interpretation of Badenoch’s statement is that she actually thinks that white men should be exceptionally careful with their words, and that she actually thinks that public figures from ethnic minority backgrounds deserve unusually sensitive treatment. Those are solid and predictable beliefs for a left-wing politician. For a Conservative who has positioned herself as an anti-woke iconoclast, on the other hand, it would be very strange — or very opportunistic — messaging. I’m not saying that this is what she thinks. But it is hardly a groundless interpretation.

In an earlier piece about Badenoch’s difficulties with her critics, I wrote:

One imagines Margaret Thatcher would have positively basked in being hated by slur-spewing leftists … It would have proved to her that she was doing something right. You have to mock that kind of person, if you acknowledge them at all — not complain about them being big meanies.

Well, complaining about them being problematic, even if it’s with an element of irony, seems worse — neglecting the more important issues and affirming leftist tropes. If that is representative of the direction that the Conservative Party will take after July 4th — and last week the Telegraph was calling Badenoch “the future of the Tory Party” — its irrelevance could be even more comprehensive than I had assumed.