Badenoch must go

She’s got to go.

It’s a marker of how badly things are going for the Tories that I have to clarify which of my colleagues I’m talking about. 

Last week, after a disastrous interview with Harry Cole, in which she tried to not only defend the Boriswave but demand an apology from those who criticised her, the calls began for Priti Patel to resign. This was understandable. Priti was a terrible appointment in the first place, one that baffled almost everyone, but her continuing on the front bench after that interview will cause incalculable damage. It’s difficult to imagine anything more contradictory to winning back voters’ trust than the guilty figures of the old regime using their positions on the shadow front bench to justify the most disgraceful aspects of their legacy.

But it’s time to be honest; Priti is not the only one who must go. Kemi Badenoch is ineffectual, irrelevant and out of her depth.

Those in the Inner Ring seem to believe we can conduct a totally conventional rebuild. At a party earlier this month, I spoke to a much longer in the tooth party figure than I. After telling him I thought things were going awfully, and that I suspected Kemi needed to be gone before the next election he told me I didn’t know what opposition was like, that these things took time and that things were a lot worse in the 2000s. I pointed out that there wasn’t really a right wing alternative then, and he didn’t seem to have an answer.

Neither does Kemi. There is a stasis in the party. Many of us seem to believe that Labour is so obviously unfit to govern, so out of sync with realities and so brutally unpopular that the public will inevitably return us to power by default. They also think they can pressure voters with the threat of “vote Reform, get Labour.” 

Anyone who thinks this is dangerously incapable of understanding reality. Reform have now been ahead of us in every single poll for a week, before finally capping it off by finishing top in a YouGov poll — the first time a major national polling company has put them in the lead. The only reason their lack of “ground game” matters is because they can’t put up candidates against us everywhere. If they could, our once-vaunted campaign machine — now reduced, in most safe seats, to four retirees and five paid members of staff posting letters because they’re too afraid to talk to voters — is unlikely to hold them off. 

What are the reasons to stick with Kemi? That people are going to warm to her? She’s had 100 days, and her popularity has fallen by 4 points. I’ve spoken to many other senior Tories who seem convinced that the more voters see of Nigel, the less they will like him. But — unlike our dear leader — he is constantly in the media spotlight, and he is more popular with voters than Kemi. 

And we cannot denounce the public for it. Despite her promises to “not make gaffes”, her leadership has been characterised by a sequence of total irrelevances. The Spectator gave her an interview as soft as a ton of falling feathers, and all that anyone noted was ‘sandwiches’. 

When I was lobbied for her as leader, I relayed concerns I’d heard she was “too online”. I was told that yes, she was social media heavy; but when the rape gangs social media storm erupted, I had to wait days for a milquetoast statement calling for a national inquiry. Thank God for Rob Jenrick; otherwise the average person would think Rupert Lowe was the leader of the opposition. But I could deal with her not sending tweets, were the ones she actually sends not so poorly judged.

We were told that her strength was at the dispatch box. She had star power, they said. She would tear Keir Starmer a new hole every week. I would be happy if you told me it’d been a score draw so far; I’d be shocked if you told me it had moved her polling numbers at all.

This smacks so strongly of an over-promoted middle manager because, at the end of the day, that’s what she is

I was also told that, as an engineer, she would be able to fix the party machinery. CCHQ has been so badly run that they’re incapable of renewing the lease at Matthew Parker Street. This is symbolic of an organisation that has completely collapsed — well before her time, and not something I assign any blame to her for. But keeping the building requires donors, who she is terrible at dealing with; at the latest event she turned up late, left early and forgot to ask for any money. Her answer to getting the operation back on track is an all-staff meeting to say they “must do better”. This is wrong on three levels; first, the hard-working will resent being lumped in with the lazy; secondly, the lazy won’t respond to a pep talk; thirdly, everyone will resent being blamed for your lack of cut-through, particularly given you are so well-known for being lazy.

This smacks so strongly of an over-promoted middle manager because, at the end of the day, that’s what she is. 

Kemi’s aggressive personal style means, I suspect, that she has never been corrected at work by colleagues. She probably believes that she doesn’t make gaffes; she probably believes she is some preternatural talent who simply does politics better because she is better. On both counts, she is wrong. She has been manoeuvred into place by boomers who love hearing their opinions said back to them by a woman of colour to prove they’re not racist, by the last Cameronites desperate to argue the left are the real racists and see if it works this time, by people who would have voted for Jeremy Corbyn rather than let the party go to the right under Robert Jenrick, by people who saw she was a woman and remembered that Mrs Thatcher was too, and by people at the top who calculated — simply, obviously, correctly — that she was the most easily led.

Kemi has promised no changes to the Cabinet for five years, and no major policies for two. Both of these decisions are wrong, not only for their presumption that we have lots of time, but that Kemi will still be in post to make sure either are kept.

If the Tory Party could be saved by blood, I would open up my own veins. But alas, it cannot. It requires hard work and for you to say important things. As James Frayne wrote recently, “Voters care about policies, not archaic institutions.” We cannot labour under the false assumption that the party has any right to exist. If Kemi is our Leader for much longer, we will be disabused of that notion shortly.