Little things please little minds. And minds don’t come much smaller than some of those in Westminster. If a researcher had come up with a study that showed one element two points higher in value than countless other experiments, it would almost certainly be marked down either as an outlier or “within the margin of error”. At the very least, no conclusions would be drawn until many other experiments had been conducted which had produced similar results. Serious scientific journals would just laugh at you if you asked them to publish your findings.
And yet. In one – just one out of many – recent opinion poll, the Tories have increased their ratings by a couple of points and are now for the first time in years in second place, ahead of Reform. And all of a sudden, Kemi Badenoch is insisting this is incontrovertible proof that the Tories are back in business. All the sins of its 14 years in government have been wiped clean. All hail to Kemi, the new chief. She is the chosen one. And the Conservatives are a government-in-waiting.
You need a certain amount of self-confidence to make it as a party leader. Not to say a touch of the Panglossian. The ability to insist that all is well when it is turning to shit in your fingers. But you can have too much of a good thing. You must at least be within touching distance of reality. And it appears that once again Kemi has jumped the shark. The one good poll has gone to her head and she now believes she is invincible. Nothing can touch her narcissism.
In her early days as Tory leader, Kemi used to crash and burn every week at prime minister’s questions. She considered preparation and research to be beneath her. Instead, she merely peddled the latest conspiracy theories she had seen on X with a series of scattergun questions. She only started to improve when her minders tried to get her to concentrate for 10 minutes of sustained questions on one subject. Yet over the conference break, Kemi has undergone a brain wipe. She is back in her happy space of making it up as she goes along. No one knows better than Kemi.
Sadly for the Tory leader, Kemi’s approach is also Andy Burnham’s happy place. Much more of this and the prime minister is going to look forward to his Wednesday lunchtime encounters in the Commons. Never look an easy win in the eye. Not because he’s word perfect – there are still a lot of unanswered questions about his involvement with the Manchester City owners – but because there’s an engaging openness to him you seldom find in other politicians. A willingness to answer the questions and to appear as if he’s listening. Mr Congeniality.
It’s also a big help to Andy that Kemi is spectacularly wrong about almost everything. Arguments are always so much simpler when your opponents are deluded. Indeed you couldn’t escape the irony of her insisting that it was Burnham who was consistently mistaken about everything. Even the head of MI5, Ken McCallum, had slapped the prime minister down for suggesting hostile actors had interfered with the Brexit referendum. Kemi can’t bear the fact she might have had the backing of the Russian state in 2016.
Burnham chose to respond to Kemi in the most hurtful way. With kindness. No anger. Just a gentle reiteration of the facts. It was incontrovertible that Russia had tried to influence both the 2019 general election and the EU referendum. The evidence was in front of our eyes. Russian bots selling misinformation all over social media. It was a non-story. And far from correcting him, McCallum had gone out of his way to confirm this.
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What the MI5 boss had gone on to say was that it would be better for everyone concerned if we all just dropped the story as it would only give the Russians further encouragement. And who had been keeping the story alive for a third day by bringing it up at PMQs? Take a bow, Kemi. The Tory leader seemingly content to carry on doing the Russians’ dirty work for them. At least Nathan Gill, Reform’s former leader in Wales, had the sense to get paid for this. Kemi was doing it for free. Andy ended by saying he would be delighted to debate whether Brexit had done more harm than good. Kemi shook her head. This isn’t an argument the Tories are keen to have. Their feeling is Brexit is something we all just have to suck up.
After that, Kemi looked a bit lost. Clueless. Scouring her file for something to ask. Instead she just wasted her own and everyone else’s time. First by asking about the budget. As if Burnham was ever going to say: “You know what? Since you’ve asked I might as well give you a heads-up two weeks early.” All Kemi achieved was to make herself look a bit half-witted. She ended up sounding a bit hurt. She had hoped that Andy would have spent more time problem-solving than point-scoring. There are days with Kemi when even giving a straight answer comes across as point-scoring.
Earlier in the day, Dominic Cummings had been giving evidence to a Lords select committee on how to prevent rogue actors from entering No 10. That should have been a very short session. Just stop morons like Boris Johnson from appointing people like Dom as his special adviser. Curiously this hadn’t occurred to Dom. Nor to the dopey peers who were interrogating him.
It was a bizarre hour and a half. The sort that gives you mild PTSD. Your mind goes back to all the damage he did to the country during the Brexit referendum and during his year in No 10 and suddenly the horror floods back. Just when your brain has done its best to forget all about him. To consider him a footnote in history. For the record, Dom is as deluded as ever. His main thesis seemed to be that Boris was right to allow him to do whatever he liked but no one else in No 10 should ever be allowed to do what he did. Some things never change. We are well rid of him.
