Who is to blame for Badenoch?

Look up the YouTube page of the Conservatives and you will find a limp tribute to old Ben Shapiro compilation videos. “Kemi Badenoch BODIES Keir Starmer”. “Keir Starmer RATTLED by Kemi Badenoch”. “Kemi Badenoch DESTROYS Keir Starmer”. Keir Starmer OWNED with facts and logic! When do the debates with teenagers start?

A common criticism of Kemi Badenoch is that she is “too online”, but this isn’t quite correct. She is too “online circa 2016” — “online” in the sense that a 62-year-old who has just heard the definition of “meme” would understand it.

On Twitter, the Conservatives are posting memes positioning Badenoch as a guardian of “Western civilisation”. Some of us might recall the old “GamerGate”-era cartoon that showed enormous statues of YouTube personalities like “Sargon of Akkad” and Milo Yiannopoulos along with claims that they would be remembered as “great men who helped save Western civilization”. Don’t get me wrong: I love to celebrate the glories of Europe. But British people don’t vote for “Western civilisation”. They vote for Britain.

“If and when it all goes wrong,” I wrote, somewhat presumptuously, when Mrs Badenoch was elected, “No Conservative should be able to argue that they were not warned. We told you it would happen.” This reflected the position of much of the coverage in The Critic.

If anything, Badenoch has been worse than I thought she would be. Reform are beating the Conservatives in the polls. Only 9 per cent more Conservative voters would prefer Badenoch as PM to Nigel Farage. 

Keir Starmer looks like a political giant compared to her

Of course, it is difficult to believe that any leader of the Conservatives could have been a success following the Tories’ miserable years in power. If a mad scientist had somehow fused the genes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher, the product might still be losing in polls. But would a different leader have been aiming bogus accusations of fakery at Reform on Boxing Day? Would a different leader have been reeling off factually misguided questions like a malfunctioning robot? Would a different leader have had such poor timekeeping that their colleagues would have joked that they had their own timezone?

Conservative patience is running thin. “It is simply too early to judge her,” writes a generous-spirited Henry Hill, “[But] Badenoch’s conduct so far has shortened that period of forbearance considerably.”

I am not so generous. She doesn’t have what it takes. Keir Starmer looks like a political giant compared to her, which is almost an impressive achievement on her part. It’s like making Man United look like world beaters.

I don’t want to be too hard on Badenoch here. I don’t have much against her personally. Unlike her predecessors, she has had the luck that her dire failings have not come while she has been in power. But I do want to be hard on her supporters. What offended me about Badenoch was less the candidate herself than the claims being made on her behalf. Her advocates were handing me a glass of dishwater and insisting that it was champagne.

The sad fact is that Badenoch was the boomers’ choice. She was their idea of a modern candidate: youngish, ostentatiously anti-woke, and conveniently female with a black British background. 

That sounds condescending, I know. But it really was how they viewed her. “A black African woman leading the oldest political party in the world would be a sight for sore eyes,” Lord Moore insisted, “The Left’s cant phrase in relation to racism – “lived experience” – would come back to bite them. Sir Keir, never eloquent, would be lost for words.” As Rob Hutton has explored with mounting bemusement, Starmer has had no problems at Prime Minister’s Questions.

Badenoch’s clubbish Conservative admirers were desperate to see her as their perfect candidate — a charismatic, classically liberal anti-woke Atlanticist who, unlike them, was not unfashionably male, white and middle-aged. Niall Ferguson implied that she was some kind of big-brained intellectual because she had read Thomas Sowell and Roger Scruton — the right-wing equivalent of reading Noam Chomsky. (We’ve all done it.) Trying to convince Elon Musk that Badenoch, not Farage, was the radical choice, Ferguson tweeted “@KemiBadenoch ain’t establishment” above a photo of Badenoch smirking at the camera. Why? What was Musk meant to take from this? That she smirks? That she wears a dress? That she’s black? Hold on now! Let’s give the establishment a fighting chance.

“I think Badenoch’s appeal is slightly ethereal,” Ben Riley-Smith of the Telegraph gushed to the News Agents, “In that she has charisma or X Factor.” It’s ethereal, for sure. It’s so ethereal that it barely exists. The often entertaining Tim Stanley knew what her appeal was alright. “Mummy won,” he wrote, emetically, “This woman can give us all a good kick up the backside.” So, that’s her stronghold — Conservative masochists. I’m not sure how many of them there are in Britain.

But to find the people who got Badenoch’s ball rolling, we should go back to her earlier appearances in the press. A Times piece from 2021 asserted that Badenoch was a favourite of Dougie Smith — a shadowy one-time sex party organiser who had an opaque role in the miserable premiership of Boris Johnson. 

Then there is Badenoch’s longtime friend Michael Gove. Gove backed Badenoch as the next Tory leader in 2022, and while they allegedly fell out a year afterwards, Conservative MPs told journalists that the pair still had a working relationship. Badenoch was forced to deny in 2024 that she was a puppet of Gove, and her “I am not a puppet of Michael Gove” shirt had a lot of people asking questions that were already answered by her shirt. Gove, of course, symbolised everything that was wrong about the Conservatives between 2010 and 2024 — slimily unprincipled yet still ubiquitous — and his support for Badenoch is perhaps most charitably explained as being an attempt to make sure that others, too, can fail upwards.

Badenoch, then — promoted by her boomer allies as a radical anti-establishment conservative — was groomed by serial insiders in a hapless and corrupt Conservative Party. The people who had made us sick were selling us the cure. It’s no surprise, then, that her eminently foreseeable limitations have been so vividly exposed. 

Not that the people who backed her will face the consequences. They will keep enjoying their quiet conspiratorial insiderdom, while her windy advocates in the media will move on to huff and puff about something else. 

Will anything be learned? You clearly haven’t met the Conservatives.