This is how she scrolls

How does Kemi Badenoch choose her approach to prime minister’s questions? You’d assume she spent Tuesdays closeted with advisers, mapping out strategy. But maybe she’s just scrolling through Twitter.

To understand Badenoch, you need to know that she’s the most online person ever to lead a British political party. If she could ask her questions in the form of GIFs from classic movies, she would. Last week she focused all her fire on demands for an inquiry into child abuse, which by coincidence was the subject of choice of Social Media Boss Baby Elon Musk. This week she’d forgotten all about the subject. Well, they do say that a week is a long time in tweets.

As she rose in the House of Commons on Wednesday, the Conservative Party social media account bleeped into action. “The economy is in crisis,” it said. “Borrowing costs rising. Pound tumbling. And where, amidst all of this, was Rachel Reeves? On a jet to China … ”

There’s something delightful about the idea that the value of the pound is affected by the chancellor’s presence in the country, as though she were a Mario-like computer game character, bouncing from platform to platform and frantically stopping the currency from falling off the bottom of the screen whilst a giant gorilla hurls barrels full of government debt at her.

People on all sides in Westminster talk about “the markets” as though they are some kind of ponderous all-wise judge, rather than a collection of nerds and chancers playing a high-stakes game of fastest-finger-first, helped along by a mountain of cocaine and an unassailable confidence that they can see patterns in a stream of random numbers. The idea that the chancellor of the exchequer cancelling a long-planned trip at the last minute would have calmed these people down is, politely, eccentric.

However badly you may feel Reeves is doing, it’s not obvious why she was less qualified than, say, Jeremy Hunt

Still, Badenoch started plausibly enough: Treasury policies were making life difficult for businesses. It has the advantage of being true, and ministers don’t even dispute it: the argument is that this will be worth it in the long term. This was pretty much the line that Keir Starmer took in reply: his government had “made difficult cuts and raised taxes to invest”, whilst his opponents had not been “brave enough in government to take those difficult decisions”.

Badenoch continued on the same reasonably promising line: bills were going up, were taxes going to have to rise as well? Starmer too stuck to his guns. But at this point Badenoch scrolled, and a new subject came up on her phone: if the government wanted to save money, why not abandon the Chagos islands deal? “Why does the prime minister think that British people should pay to surrender something that is already ours?”

It would be interesting to hear Starmer’s inner monologue whenever the Chagos islands are raised. They have been discussed more in parliament over the past four months than they had been over the previous four years. To the Conservatives they are a piece of the Indian Ocean that is for ever England, even if 90 per cent of the people living there are in the US military. To Labour, well, it seems likely that Starmer is genuinely baffled about why the UK is even involved in a discussion about an American base on the other side of the world.

Scroll! Badenoch switched back to the economy, accusing Labour of “congratulating itself for having the first female Chancellor, instead of ensuring that the country had someone actually qualified to do the job”.

This too is an online meme, that Reeves got her job as a diversity hire. It’s not clear which white man Badenoch believes was passed over for the role, but however badly you may feel Reeves is doing, it’s not obvious why she’s less qualified for the job than, say, Jeremy Hunt or George Osborne. Or, for that matter, than Badenoch’s candidate for the job (Mel Stride, as you could be forgiven for not knowing). 

“If we all thought that politics was about cheap points,” Starmer began, preparing of course to make a cheap point himself, “I could criticise their chancellors, but I don’t have enough time to go through all the chancellors they had.”

Scroll! Badenoch changed the subject again.

The prime minister, she said, had been “distracted” by the mystery of Tulip Siddiq’s flat, which led to her resignation as City Minister on Tuesday. This was sadly untrue. Because of the Conservatives’ baffling decision to completely ignore the scandal — perhaps they missed it on Facebook — it had been no distraction at all. The past two months have seen two ministerial resignations, and neither of them has involved the main opposition party in any way. It’s as though some international body was conducting a study on the effectiveness of oppositions and has recruited the Conservative Party as the control group, with instructions to do absolutely nothing.

Scroll! Badenoch changed the subject again, sadly leaving unasked the question of why Louise Haigh was chucked overboard within hours when she couldn’t answer questions about her mobile phone, but Siddiq got a week to wrestle with the mystery of a London flat. What about the idea that Gerry Adams might get compensated for his time as a guest of Her Majesty?

Here we got a revealing gear shift from Starmer. “Amongst that barrage of complete nonsense, there is one point that I need to address,” he said, switching into lawyer mode to explain why the law around Northern Ireland was being changed. Tories heckled, and he looked at them like a tetchy headmaster: “This is a serious point.” His contempt for all of Badenoch’s other points couldn’t be clearer.

Not, to be clear, that the prime minister is above non-serious points. “I got a letter this week from a Tory voter in a Labour seat,” he went on, to a deep sigh of pleasure from his own side. “I hope that they do not mind me saying who it was. It was Liz Truss. It was not written in green ink, but it might as well have been.” There are better jokes available on the subject, and we are likely to hear them all. In time, the Truss “cease and desist” letter may become as famous as “there’s no money left”. It’s the kind of thing that does very well online.