Kemi Badenoch can’t get her story straight

In the topsy-turvy times of post-Referendum British politics, voter loyalties fluctuated so greatly that Liberal Democrat leader Jo Swinson felt confident enough to launch her 2019 election campaign by declaring that she could be the country’s next prime minister. When the election came, not only did she fail to become PM, she also failed to remain an MP. The campaign flopped due to a rather humiliating factor: the more voters saw of Jo Swinson, the less they liked her, and the lower the Lib Dems polled. This caused a major headache for the party. What do you do when you’re languishing in the polls, but every time voters see your leader they take even more of a disliking to you?

This may well be (and certainly ought to be) the question being pondered by those running the show at CCHQ. They find themselves with a new leader, Kemi Badenoch, who is already a vestige of a political era that no longer exists. She made her reputation as a hard-hitting, straight-talking culture warrior over wars that no-one is fighting anymore. With those on all sides of the political spectrum now focussed on economic growth, and the dire consequences of her party’s migration explosion unravelling for all to see, being good on that trans stuff or being able to call the Left the real racists simply doesn’t cut it. Just a few months into her tenure, senior sources within the party are already calling for her to go.

Badenoch has made a bold commitment to not committing to any policies at all for the next few years. That, she claims, would risk the party rushing into things without having done the requisite thinking. So given her lack of policies, and with her party slipping in the polls despite Labour’s miserable start in office, what exactly can she offer? It turns out, not much beyond some rather underwhelming thoughts.

Perhaps inspired by the success Donald Trump had in reaching new audiences through his podcast appearances, Badenoch appeared on TRIGGERnometry, an online show hosted by anti-Woke comedians-cum-commentators Francis Foster and Konstantin Kisin. The format offered Badenoch the chance to share all the thinking she’s been doing with the public, facing predictable questions from hosts who are broadly in her political sphere. This is no Newsnight grilling; the relaxed approach of the show is intended to allow guests to explain their positions fully, without premature interruptions, giving the viewers a far more profound understanding of their views.

Badenoch starts the interview confidently, being earnest about the failures of her party during their fourteen years in government, but announcing that the party was now under new leadership, and the leadership of an engineer no less. Her background means that she’s all about systems thinking, not just shouting without first having the full solution (hence her lack of policies). Her role now is to examine in detail everything that has gone wrong with the country, apply some of her strong conservative principles, and formulate a bullet-proof plan to actually fix things.

The system covered most at length in the interview is Britain’s broken migration regime. As she acknowledges, immigration is the most important issue for Conservative voters, but also for Reform and Lib Dem voters too. Given the salience of the issue, and its centrality in the downfall of her party at the election, one would assume that immigration has taken up a lot of her thinking. What quickly transpires is that the thinking she has done on the topic is a muddled mess. Such was her incoherence that the usually amicable and agreeable Kisin briefly transformed into prime Paxo — uncharacteristically butting in and insisting that Badenoch actually answer his question. Yet the lady was not for turning, largely ignoring his interjections and not properly understanding what his very plainly worded questions were asking.

Her main pitch to voters worried about immigration is that “the immigration system went wrong for lots of reasons that only we know about”. The Tories created such a labyrinthine mess when creating the post-Brexit points-based migration system that apparently they are the only ones who can properly understand just how bad it is and what parts need binning. Badenoch, unlike her Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel, is open in her disavowal of a system that was designed to take in the best and brightest, but, in her words, led to the country being flooded with “low skilled migrants with dependents”.

Having thought about the issue, Badenoch has concluded “that numbers matter, but culture matters more”. However, she also adds that there should be “a hard cap on visas”. Yet Badenoch refuses, when repeatedly asked, to commit to any ballpark figure for what net migration should be. After all, for her it’s all about the culture of those coming, and throwing out a figure without having properly looked at every facet of the issue is not her style — leave that to the populists at Reform. Instead, she sees it sufficient to state that the net migration number “should be whatever we can sustain for the long term”, and insists that arguing over what exactly that figure should be is “a fake debate”.

Badenoch makes clear her annoyance that so much attention is given to the numbers; what she thinks really matters is the ability and likelihood of those settling in Britain to integrate. She refutes any attempt to make Britain multicultural, arguing that “we have to make sure that everybody who is here buys into what the UK is about, and they’re not trying to turn it into wherever it is they came from”. That means “we shouldn’t be bringing people in who are not interested in integrating, and we can see the pattern of where that lack of integration comes from”. She highlights the Mirpuri “peasants” who have migrated to Britain since the post-War period as the quintessential example of a group who represent “the bad patterns of migration”, creating insular communities in Britain rather than integrating. 

She rattles off a not-so-subtle list of the type of people “we don’t want”, the kind of thing her left-wing opponents would call a “dog-whistle”. She says we don’t want people who think child marriage is OK, support blasphemy laws, or think that gays and women are not equal human beings and should be stoned to death. And where might such people be coming from? Denmark? Japan? New Zealand?

With her repeated emphasis on culture mattering more, it seemed clear what Badenoch was getting at: for migration to work, Britain must select for those who come from similar cultures that are easier to integrate. To this end, she suggests that “we need to have a policy that is different for different places”, and “we need to look at the places where the pattern of migration and integration is high”. 

Kisin offers Badenoch a chance to boil her ramblings down into a concise summation of her stance: will the country migrants are coming from be a strong factor in the selection process for who is to be let in? Peculiarly, she replies “you can’t tell all of those things [like the values of migrants] at the border. Sometimes it’s after people arrive that you do that”. Apparently, an immigration policy “is not about picking groups of people”. For example, “if you had had a blanket Pakistani veto, you’d miss out on loads of people who are doing great things in the country … it’s about looking deeper than that — these things are not just at national level”.

For somebody who has made her ability to think her USP, she sure seems to struggle with producing coherent thoughts

So to summarise, by far the most important part of migration policy is the culture of those arriving, more so than the numbers. However, in Badenoch’s words, “you can’t test for that at the border”. Therefore we need to look at past migrations to Britain and assess what groups integrated better, basing future migration on those patterns. But also, “what we can’t say is ‘no, we don’t want this list of people’”. So we can’t just disfavour all people from a certain country due to past migrants from there not integrating. The question of values and culture must instead be done on an individual basis, yet we’ve already established that can’t be done at the border. So what Badenoch concludes is that “government can’t do everything”, and that it is the responsibility of society as a whole to “enforce” integration of newcomers — “we need society to do this”. But wasn’t the problem that societal integration wasn’t working due to the type of migrants the government was letting in? For somebody who has made her ability to think her USP, she sure seems to struggle with producing coherent thoughts. Is this a recipe for anything except an ongoing demand for handwringing pieces about multiculturalism from Telegraph columnists?

What Badenoch finally proposes is a points-based system — which is what we had and caused all the problems — but we just need a different one that this time will not cause all these problems, because she will have looked at it, done the work, and engineered a new points-based system that this time will be good. Yet wasn’t the whole point that the points-based system failed to account for culture, which is the most important thing? By ruling out discriminating against whole countries on account of their culture, how exactly will this system account for this most important of factors? This is all to be revealed in due course; “We are working on this, we will get a plan, it’ll be better than what we had before”. Thanks.

Her thoughts on other topics are not much more impressive. She offers the standard talking points that any Tory MP would: taxes are too high, we need to support businesses, socialism is bad, Labour is terrible at governing, and so on and so on. On particular issues she was pinned down on, her answer was invariably that this is something “we need to look into” and often something “we need to talk about more”. With Net Zero, she denounces the setting of the target without any plan on achieving it, saying she both supports Net Zero whilst opposing harmful policies in pursuit of Net Zero. What needs to be done — you’ve guessed it — is to look more into the issue.

Worryingly for the Conservatives, the most coherent part of the interview was when she outlined why her party got such a kicking at the last election. She talked at length about the errors her colleagues made (not her though), how the party talked Right but governed Left, and how they governed by making bold announcements without any plans on how to implement them. The critique of her own party was so strong it may have convinced the few voters who stuck with the Tories at the last election to regret having done so.

If her usual level of thinking is of the same standard displayed on TRIGGERnometry, then there is reason to be worried about the policies such thinking will conjure up. Suggestions that Badenoch is some kind of well-read intellectual grandee seem laughably misplaced, unless she just hides it incredibly well. Nor did she have the charm, affability, or wit that can cover for her intellectual shortcomings. Instead, what we saw was a party leader who struggled to answer the questions of a comedian. She claims to be in no rush, taking her time to look into things and keep thinking before producing any policies or program for governance, which we can expect from 2028 onwards. But with her rivals at Reform surging, her party’s polling crumbling, and the coffers running dry, it seems increasingly likely that the Tories will boot their latest woeful leader before she has the chance.