“I disagree with the premise of the question.” Kemi Badenoch was answering media questions at the CBI conference. Or rather, being Kemi Badenoch, she was arguing with the questions. 

Have you wondered, noting that the Conservatives are against raising taxes, what they would do instead? You idiot. “We need to stop looking at everything as if it’s just a ledger!” For instance, she non-sequitured, “Do we need a football regulator?” Who knows, but will axing it save £20 billion? That you’re even asking that question shows how you’re trapped in a last century mindset.

A new leader of the opposition faces a series of problems: they need to distance themselves from the things that made their party lose the election, although they were probably personally involved in them; they need to change the way their party is perceived without making policy commitments that will be hung around their neck in four years’ time. And if they’re Badenoch, they need to not say things that make it sound like they want to abolish maternity pay and put civil servants in prison. 

Or, as she put it at the start of her speech: “People want the government to fix everything. And if you ever sound hesitant you are made out to be a cruel, unfeeling person, as I have discovered to my own personal cost.” She had managed a whole two minutes before complaining about the media, which might be a personal record. 

Badenoch’s solution to these challenges is to speak in elliptical terms. Her speech on Monday introduced questions but then veered away before coming close to anything as dangerous as a conclusion. “We Conservatives got things wrong and unless we explain where we got things wrong we will repeat those mistakes,” she said. If you think that sounds like the kind of sentence that might be followed by an example, then you’re in for a disappointment. 

Working out what she’s talking about is like one of those three-dimensional logic puzzles where you have to keep eliminating possibilities in the hope of reaching to truth. A little later, she seemed to endorse the most recent Tory Budget, so whatever things they got wrong, it wasn’t in there. Neither was it anything that she did while she was Business Secretary. Was there a policy to which the last government devoted years whose chief result was to make life harder for exporters? If so, she didn’t mention it. 

Sometimes it’s possible to gain enlightenment by referring to other texts. For instance, “we need to rewire our economy into one where the vast majority of jobs are productive and those that are not change” is probably a reference to Badenoch’s conviction, expressed in the delightfully bonkers document she published last month, that Human Resources staff are dragging Britain into the abyss.

You can’t fault her ambition. “We’re going to rewire the state,” she said, dismissing the footling questions about detail put to her by the intellectual dwarves of the BBC. “We need to start from there and not just adjust little nobs and levers on tax or insurance.”

All this was greeted with polite applause, but little enthusiasm. The same was true of the other political speaker of the afternoon, lever-adjuster-in-chief Rachel Reeves. She didn’t bother with a speech, instead having a sit-down chat with a sympathetic host. This too was light on detail. The chancellor tried to identify with her audience. They too had probably gone into a business only to find “that the sums don’t really add up.” 

Of course, probably not all of them had spent the preceding months insisting that the sums did add up, while everyone warned them this obviously wasn’t true. We can all understand why she did it, but it was a bit much to announce in July that she’d simply had no idea that Jeremy Hunt was pulling the numbers out of thin air. Never mind her CV, if this were really the case then it ought to disqualify her from being an MP, let alone chancellor of the exchequer.

She did her best to suck up to her audience. “There is no policy that can’t be improved upon with direct contact with business,” she said. Though we now know that this wasn’t the approach she took with farming businesses.

And she had a promise: “I’m not coming back with more borrowing and more taxes. We won’t have to do a budget like this ever again.” This was greeted by what I can only describe as the sound of one hand clapping. The audience will believe that when they see it.