On the mean streets of Westminster, impressionable young people are hanging around in groups, experimenting with a dangerous new high. Known in the argot of these doomed addicts as “Badenoch” or simply “Kemi”, the substance produces anger, disaffection and a confused listlessness. We should not allow political correctness to prevent us from pointing out that these young people are almost all of the same sex (male) and the same socio-ethnic background (Surrey). Many of these kids are physically still teenagers, but mentally they already have the opinions of a retired colonel. After continued exposure they all develop the same symptoms: a sense that everything is going wrong, and a conviction that it is all someone else’s fault.
On 6 July, in the Westminster hall of the London Scottish regiment, around 100 such people gather to sample the product uncut. Kemi Badenoch herself is arriving to dish out the raw, exhilarating highs of enmity and contempt. On the walls of the beautiful Victorian drill hall, moustachioed colonels and captains glare out from oil paintings. At the back is a monument to the men of the London Scottish who died in the First World War. In front of the memorial a banner has been erected, emblazoned with sponsors’ logos, and in front of that, two chairs on which sit Badenoch and her interlocutor, a journalist from the Daily Mail. Those in the room are not the real audience: the purpose of this interview, like much of Badenoch’s work, is to create content for X. Cameras live stream the interview to an X account called Politics UK, which is run by a young Reform councillor.
Badenoch begins by talking up her own appetite for work. No, she hadn’t been up the previous night watching England defeat Mexico and no, she wouldn’t want the country to have a bank holiday if England won the World Cup. This is someone who views Margaret Thatcher’s claim to have slept four hours a night as an aspirational lifestyle choice, rather than a glimpse of a routine no sane person would attempt to sustain. Of Andy Burnham she says: “It looks like he wants the summer off.” She says Burnham is delaying his arrival in Downing Street “so that he doesn’t have to face me at PMQs”. This is a trick from the Trump playbook, a statement so obviously untrue (does she think Burnham can just become PM as soon as he feels like it?) that there seems to be little point in refuting it.
Like Trump she never describes a situation without making herself the main character, and like Trump she has a coarse turn of phrase. She characterises the following day’s debate on the early release of prisoners as being about “all these rapists and paedos that Labour is letting loose” (what she doesn’t say is that this is happening because the prisons are overflowing after her party defunded them). In recent weeks, she has compared Ed Miliband to a Nigerian military dictator and Bridget Phillipson to a Gestapo officer. She says her targets decry such insults because they are incapable of dealing with “hurty words”. When she described the Education Secretary last week as a “spiteful class warrior”, she was accused – by the Speaker and the Lib Dem leader, among others – of using PMQs as a place simply to hurl cheap insults. Given the chance to show a little more class, Badenoch clarifies her comments about Phillipson by adding: “She’s a disgrace to people who grew up on a council estate.”
She has almost as much contempt for her own predecessors. Liz Truss, she says, fell prey to “wanting to be popular”. No danger of that for Badenoch’s Tories, who last year dipped to fourth place in the polls, and who this year recorded their worst ever performance in a parliamentary by-election, in Gorton and Denton (54 fewer votes would have placed the Tory candidate one spot above Sir Oink-a-Lot, a man dressed up as a hatted pig). She says of her own party’s record on immigration that “mistakes were made… and some people made more mistakes than others”, although she doesn’t specify that one of the people who was at the centre of all this mistake-making was the former immigration minister Chris Philp, who is now her shadow home secretary. “We have the toughest immigration policy that’s out there now,” she says, ignoring Reform’s plan to deport a million people and Restore’s plan to deport basically everyone.
When listening to Badenoch speak, it is important to take a moment to appreciate the scale of the delusion she has constructed around herself. The 2024 general election, in her mind, was not the wholesale rejection of the Conservative Party by voters. It was Nigel Farage’s fault: “Reform split the vote and let hundreds more Labour MPs in than there should have been.” She says it is “because of Reform” that “we have now the smallest opposition ever”. She genuinely believes – in a country that would have nailed itself to a burning, shit-filled cactus before it voted for another five years of Tory rule – that had it not been for Reform “we would probably have had a hung parliament”.
But then, once you start saying things so implausible, you can say anything. You can describe yourself, as Badenoch does, as “one of the most qualified people” to be prime minister. You can say, without a shred of irony, that the MPs defecting from your party are “drama queens” obsessed with “their dwindling Twitter followers”. And then, most impressively of all, she said this: “There are some people… they’re always complaining. It’s always someone else’s fault, and it’s never them. Everybody has someone like that.” Oh, do they? Is there someone like that in the Conservative Party? Who could it be!
But why stop there? Why not compare yourself to your party’s most successful leader? “Fifty years ago,” Badenoch says of Margaret Thatcher, “she was doing the job I’m doing now… and people had written her off in her first two years. They thought she was a placeholder. They laughed at her.” This is true, but the similarities end there. Thatcher had a theory of power. She had been thinking about the state and the economy since she was an undergraduate. She had convictions about the money supply and Britain’s place in the world. Her policies were, whatever you think of them, consistent with a worldview. Can you imagine Badenoch telling her staff “this is what we believe” and pointing to anything other than a tweet? “She wasn’t trying to be popular,” she says of Thatcher, wilfully misunderstanding Thatcher’s success in building a coalition of voters. Badenoch, on the other hand, finds centrists repugnant. In January she instructed those not dedicated to her party’s rightward lurch to “get out of the way”. To this audience she opines: “I don’t think Reform are to the right of us.”
On her way out, Badenoch pauses to shake a few hands. A young man requests a picture with her. I ask him what he thinks of her leadership, and he shrugs. “I’m not really a Kemi fan,” he says, before adding: “I’m more into Boris Johnson.” How quickly history rotates. Badenoch is courting the young with her vituperative online persona, the barbs she throws across the Commons in the hope they’ll be shared across X, but the young have already resumed their interest in yesterday’s clown. Perhaps they’ll learn to find her amusing, one day. But not yet.
[Further reading: You can’t blame Brexit anymore]