Kemi Badenoch becomes Tory leader: Things are about to get very, very weird

Eight thoughts on the Conservative leadership result

Kemi Badenoch was elected leader of the Conservative party this morning, beating Robert Jenrick pretty soundly. Here are some random thoughts.

1. It is objectively very funny that Jenrick failed. Have we ever seen a more vacant cynical campaign - in any contest, from any party, by any individual - than the one he delivered? He is ambition unleashed, undisturbed by any notion of talent or principle. You got the sense by the end of it that he'd lost even the most distant conviction, as if they were no more than childhood memories. He would say anything, anything at all, if he thought it might excite the voters in front of him. He is a bit of loo paper, whipped around by the wind, twirling in the air of a distant back alley. 

2. We're lucky that he didn't win. It's true that he was the worse candidate, but it really doesn't do to strategise in this way. There's no point sitting there doing 4D chess about which candidate you'd rather Labour faced at the next election. Firstly, there's no need to - Badenoch is bad enough that it's unnecessary. And secondly, people can do plenty of damage to our national life without winning power. In Jenrick's case, there was a danger that he would enter into a far-right arms race with Nigel Farage over at Reform. You could easily imagine these two tawdry dimwits working themselves up into a series of ever more despicable propositions, particularly on immigration and climate change. And the whole of the British right would collapse with them into outright horror. It's best, overall, that he lost.

3. Badenoch is better than Jenrick in terms of basic ideas. She did not, for instance, demand we leave the ECHR. She did not paint over children murals in detention centres. But she is also superior simply by having basic ideas which she genuinely believes in. If someone has terrible principles, they will at least try to abide by them. If someone has no principles at all, there is no limit to what they'll do. 

4. We should be able to say, clearly and without caveat, that it is a great thing that a black woman just became leader of a British political party. It matters that these things take place. It's welcome that they do. We should also be able to say that the Conservatives' success rate at doing this - when it comes to women, when it comes to ethnic minorities - is now so persistent, and Labour's so poor, that it points to something meaningful. It's not just a fluke. 

5. We must, however, be clear about her qualities. Badenoch is one of the weirdest candidates to lead a political party in our lifetime. She really is quite distinct from previous Tory leaders. She is hyper-online. Her language is hyper-online. Her concerns are hyper-online. Her instinct is hyper-online. When Keir Starmer became opposition leader, one of his chief instructions to Labour people was to step away from Twitter. Elections in Britain would not be won on whatever had outraged the British hyper-online left that day. It was very good advice. In Badenoch's case, you get the firm sense that it's really her behind that Twitter account, eagerly retweeting people who say nice things about her and furiously attacking those who don't. The line that always stays with me is this: She once talked about "the promotion of a post-modernism that can best be described as joyless decadence". That's the kind of shit that the perennially online posh-right talk about. It's the Peterson-adjacent right: esoteric, abstract, prone to getting terribly cross about Foucault books they've never actually read. Well, that kind of person just became Tory leader. And that is quite the fucking thing indeed.

6. Badenoch's relationship to identity politics is unusual. She hates it. She defines herself against it. And yet she is, at certain key moments, an advocate of it. When the actor David Tennant attacked her for her anti-trans views, she replied in an extremely telling way: "A rich, lefty, white male celebrity so blinded by ideology he can’t see the optics of attacking the only black woman in government by calling publicly for my existence to end." Notice the way in which nearly all of this statement uses left-wing identity politics framing. She treats the word 'white' as a negative. She defends herself by reference to her skin colour and gender. Nor is this the only time she did it - it's a perennial part of how she speaks. In an interview about her university days, she spoke about "stupid lefty white kids". She's the same age as Sunak, but she is so much more online. So whereas you could not imagine him using either of these arguments, it's telling that she went straight to them. I can imagine left-wing identity politics activists looking at her the way Margaret Thatcher looked at Tony Blair. Their cultural worldview has succeeded so comprehensively that even the enemy now speaks their language. 

7. Badenoch is arresting, interesting and unusual. I am very glad about this. Jenrick, Sunak, the others - they've all been so boring. She is not boring. She's actually kind of fascinating. She will secure attention, which is typically the hardest thing for a leader of the opposition to do. The question is what happens after she has secured attention. My hunch is that she will not be able to restrain herself and will say a great many very foolish things over the next few years. If so, the current moment could look like a high water mark for the Conservatives. A poll yesterday put the party above Labour for the first time in three years. But that is partly the product of there being no face to the Tory party, allowing them to therefore become the generic fuck-the-government option. Now the party will have a face, and that face is likely to say some very esoteric hyper-online right wing batshit stuff. Her comments on maternity pay could be the least of their problems. We'll see how that goes down. Maybe she has the skills to present these sorts of ideas to the public in a compelling mainstream way. But if so, she has so far kept them hidden. 

8. The basic truth is the same today as it was weeks ago: James Cleverly was the real threat to Labour. Once the Tories got rid of him - by choice or by cock-up - they were left with two deeply weird individuals, neither of whom looked likely to lead the party into the next election, let alone win it. Chances are, we'll be here again in a couple of years' time.

   Odds and Sods

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