“The Rt Hon Kemi Badenoch MP,” the sign on the stage said. “Leader of HM Opposition.” It was useful to have the reminder. With a few dishonourable exceptions, the Conservatives seem to have decided to take the summer off, with the result that the job of opposing the government was done by a collection of people with the time on their hands to stand outside hotels yelling at foreigners.
For some reason, as we waited for the event to begin, the sound system was playing what sounded like the opening drum loop from Shaft. We just needed Mel Stride to come on stage with an electric guitar and jam his foot down on the wah pedal.
Who’s the Tory MP who’s a fight machine for online clicks?
(Kemi!)
Ya damn right
They say this Kemi is a bad leader…
(Shut your mouth!)
I’m talkin’ ’bout Kemi!
(Then fair enough)
She’s a complicated woman, and no one understands her but the Speccy!
Sadly, it was not to be. Instead we got what you might think of as the boilerplate Badenoch speech: Britain is a mess and it’s Rachel Reeves’s fault. All the usual bits were there: bond markets, the nation’s credit card, tax doom loops. You know the score.
The new part of the speech was a “serious offer” to Keir Starmer that if he would just sit down with Badenoch and agree welfare cuts with her, she would order her 120-odd MPs to vote for them. This is a serious offer in the sense that the Tories couldn’t even agree welfare cuts when they were in government, and a Labour prime minister letting them set terms now would be out of a job.
It was easy to tell that the room was packed with supporters, because they can never calibrate their enthusiasm, clapping and cheering fairly mundane points in an effort to convince everyone else that they’re listening to Cato the Elder set out his thoughts on the future of Carthage. At the end, there was an attempt to get a standing ovation going, which to older hands evoked the final days of Iain Duncan Smith, when an aide led so many standers that he was christened “Zebedee”.
The problem with all this was that while the critique is fine as far as it goes, it doesn’t go very far. Are we really supposed to believe that the welfare bill was completely affordable on 3 July of last year, and utterly out of control on 5 July?
“It is not government that creates growth,” Badenoch said, and certainly that is true of her experience as a minister. At that point the government’s main economic policy was to stop exports at all costs.
Labour “are finding governing harder than they thought,” she said, as she often does. “I could have told them that.” Although she seems to be finding opposition trickier than she imagined it would be this time last year.
The whole event highlighted her party’s irrelevance: the MPs that Starmer will be negotiating with are his own. Meanwhile even the sections of the press that traditionally treat every word that droppeth from the mouth of a Conservative leader as heaven-sent can no longer be relied on. As the autocue flashed up the names of reporters from supportive papers — two from the Telegraph, none from the Mirror — Badenoch instead faced questions about whether she’d been sidelined by Nigel Farage and Reform.
“I’m not saying we did everything we did was perfect,” she said, going on to acknowledgewith masterly understatement that the last general election had not necessarily turned to the Conservatives’ advantage.
Starmer and Badenoch both have something in common, in that each has an impossible hand, but they’re also playing them badly. It would be hard to know how to advise either of them, although it’s difficult to argue with the “senior Labour figures” who on the weekend urged the prime minister to “stop making mistakes”. But Badenoch could do worse than acknowledge that her party’s record in government is a lot less than “not perfect”.
This week’s Guardian is full of stories about Boris Johnson’s time in office that occupy the interesting space of being at once unsurprising and compelling. Surely a starting point for the Tory return to seriousness is to acknowledge what everyone else knows: that they offered as prime minister a man entirely unfit to run even a parish council.
