One week in the life of Kemi Badenoch

She might be the single worst opposition leader we've seen in our lifetime. She makes Michael Foot look like Barack Obama.

©House of Commons

It's a difficult period, right after Christmas. Nothing to look forward to, no holidays anytime soon, and spring still a long way away. The days are cold and dark. Most of the time, the weather doesn't even seem to switch on: just a lifeless monochrome grey sludge above you, like someone forgot to complete a painting.

I find that the best way to cheer myself up is to follow the career of Kemi Badenoch. The Tory leader recently chose to jump on Elon Musk's ketamine-induced far-right psychosis bus by insisting that we urgently need a national inquiry on grooming gangs. There was an obvious problem with this decision. It was that Badenoch had only just left government. During that time she hadn't shown any meaningful interest in this issue. It was as if she woke up one morning and knew with total certainty that a punch would take place four hours from now, at a specified location, and then spent the rest of the morning getting all her arrangements in order so that she could be in the exact right place and time to be hit by it.

"The leader of the opposition has been an MP I think for eight years," Keir Starmer told her at last week's PMQs. "Her party have been in government for seven and a half of those eight years. She was the children's minister. She was the womens and equalities minister. I can't recall her once raising this issue in the House, once calling for a national inquiry... Mr Speaker, in fairness, if I am wrong about that and she has raised it - can I invite her to say that now and I will happily withdraw the remark".

Badenoch answered that "the prime minister is being very specific", which, if you're not a student of political language, means that he was entirely correct.

Things got worse when journalists huddled around her spokesperson afterwards. Had Badenoch actually met any of the victims? Er, no. Had any of the victims actually asked to meet her? Nope. On what basis could Badenoch ask for an inquiry to help the victims when the victims were not united on whether they should be one? God knows. But then she probably didn't know there was a disagreement, because she hadn't met them.

This week, the Tory leader did actually manage to meet the victims. But what followed was, if anything, a deterioration in her position. It was one of the most unhinged interviews I've seen from a mainstream British politician in some time.

The perpetrators were often from a particular background, she said. "Very very poor peasant background," she said, "very very rural, almost cut off even from the home origin countries they might have been in." At this point you just sit there blinking. What is happening, you think. What is she saying. She has turned us all into Michael Spicer in the room next door.

Bad as this was, it was the high point of the interview. From this point on, her imagination started to roam wildly, cantering over previously inconceivable intellectual terrain.

"There are some places," she said, the cogs in her brain spluttering into life, "where, when people behave in that way, a mob turns up and burns their homes down, and then they know that they can’t do that sort of thing." What the fuck. What in Christ's name.

If this had been a proper news channel, the host would have picked up on these extraordinary statements. But of course this is GB News, so the little child cyborg they had on opposite her failed to ask a single question about it. On she went. "What for me is most extraordinary about this case is that clearly these people thought that they could get away with it. That is the thing that we should be looking at."

What can we really make of this answer? Is she actually saying that we should burn people's houses down? That does seem to be the natural implication. Or is she suggesting that burning their houses down would be preferable to state inaction? Or that the only way to discourage people burning houses down is to demonstrate robust state action?

I don't know. Perhaps even she doesn't know. Perhaps she long ago lost sight of the very concept of meaning in the haunted corridors of her mind. But we do know one thing: Just a few months ago people really were trying to burn people's houses down. Far-right thugs gathered outside hotels holding asylum seekers and tried to set them on fire. That event, much like this month's grooming gang outrage, was whipped up by fascist accounts online and boosted on a daily basis by Elon Musk. And yet she hasn't learned a goddamned thing. She hasn't accepted a single lesson. She hasn't moderated her behaviour one solitary inch. She's still prepared to take extremely sensitive issues and talk nonsense about them without even a rudimentary assessment of what she's saying or what the consequences might be.

When proper journalists were given a chance to dig into her comments, things obviously fell apart.

"Can Kemi define which community living in the UK she describes as 'peasants'?" reporter Adam Bienkov asked her spokesperson yesterday. "The Leader of the Opposition was speaking after meeting victims and representatives of the Pakistani community," they replied. "She said that the language used around grooming gangs – whether 'Asian grooming gangs' or 'Pakistani grooming gangs' or 'Muslim grooming gangs' – is smearing entire communities, races, and religions with the tarnish of these gangs. She stated there needs to be a closer look at where they come from, which is one reason she wants a national inquiry, as this hasn't been properly examined."

It was a valiant but foolhardy attempt to try and provide some vaguely ethical cover for an inexplicable series of remarks. But there was a problem. Earlier this month shadow justice secretary Robert Jenrick launched a tirade about "people from alien cultures, who possess medieval attitudes towards women" - a clear slur against British Pakistanis. Badenoch could have distanced herself from those comments or better yet sacked him. She did not.

"Was her shadow justice secretary smearing whole communities when he described them as 'people from alien cultures' last week?" Bienkov shot back, quick as a flash. he got no meaningful answer to that, because of course none exists.

Another journalist weighed in. "She also made comments about abusers knowing that they'd done wrong if their houses were burnt down. Does she regret that language?" The spokesperson replied: "She was referring to certain communities abroad that are cut off, not part of the main areas of countries. This comes from her experiences in Nigeria. She was talking about people who think it’s acceptable to rape young girls in this country." You could almost see the hole opening up beneath them, each answer becoming more perilous by virtue of some other catastrophic thing their boss had said, an ever deeper abyss of basic political standards forming beneath their feet. And then finally they found their rock bottom, the place right-wingers go to when there's nowhere else to fall: free speech.

"Quibbling over language is what got us into this mess. We need to end this culture of fear, this fear of being politically incorrect."

Yep, there it is. The bottom of a seemingly endless pit. Saying that the leader of the Conservative party should not talk about burning people's houses down is political correctness gone mad. We always knew we'd get here eventually: the dumbest fucking argument since man first emerged from a cave. And now here it is. What good fortune we've had to be alive at the moment that it finally happened.

If she were any normal politician, this would have been enough fucking-up for a single week. But this is Kemi Badenoch. She is unconstrained by the chains which restrict other politicians.

Yesterday she made a speech which was intended to demonstrate how she was going to bring a fresh approach to political leadership. What followed was a completely bog-standard collection of political truisms, with no diagnosis of the problem nor suggestions for a cure.

Her greatest moment came when she tried to make an argument for why Britain isn't serious anymore. She's right about that, of course, although she seems unaware of the fact that her very presence as opposition leader validates the proposition. Then, in an extraordinary demonstration of self-refutation, she came out with a little factoid to make her point. "Since July," she said, "there has been more discussion in Parliament on Oasis tickets than on our £2.7 trillion debt pile. That has to stop."

Yes, the Oasis parliamentary debates have to stop. Let us raise our armies to vanquish this new imaginary enemy. Except of course it isn't true and is in fact incredibly stupid. A cursory search on Hansard shows that there have been 36 references to 'Oasis' in parliament since July on Hansard and 227 to 'national debt'. As Thomas Roberts said: "In the last five years, there have been 23 mentions of Oasis tickets, 5,899 mentions of debt, 1,634 mentions of national debt, 1,026 to British debt, and 434 to household debt."

Why are we not a serious country? Because we have party leaders who just say stuff, without the slightest thought as to its veracity or the merest effort to ascertain whether it is true.

And then yesterday, to top off a perfect week, she went on LBC and committed news. She committed news with abandon. Every word she spoke seemed to make more news, of the type she would not want and which could only do her harm.

A caller asked about the pensions triple-lock. "Shouldn't we look at that?" they asked. Badenoch was well up for it. "That's exactly the sort of thing which the policy work we're going to be doing will look at. I have always said that we don't do means testing…" At that point, presenter Iain Dale - who, unlike GB News reporters, is aware when news is happening in front of his face - asked quickly: "You're actually going to look at the triple lock?" Badenoch replied: "No, we're going to look at means testing." But she then went on to speak about the triple-lock in the past tense. "The triple lock is a policy that we supported throughout our 14 years in government." There was no other way to interpret what she was saying. It obviously sounded like Tory policy would be to change the triple lock in its current form.

Labour and the Lib Dems naturally attacked her for it. The Tory Twitter account went full Trump in response. "The Conservatives have always protected the triple lock. Ignore the fake news! Read the transcript." The worst crime in this message is obviously the exclamation mark, then the use of the term 'fake news', then the notion that reading the transcript would help rather than hinder us, and then, right at the bottom, the moral quagmire of treating accurate reporting like disinformation. She really is a fucking star isn't she. A human disaster zone, perpetrating more errors per syllable than any previous holder of the job. She makes Michael Foot look like Barack Obama.

This, of course, is why Badenoch's spokesperson says that "we get too caught up in language". It's because, if you actually listen to the language Badenoch uses, she comes across as extreme, opportunistic, uninformed, haphazard, confused, shameless, contradictory, ideological, petty, misleading, vindictive and insane.

This has been just another week in the life of Kemi Badenoch. It's much the same as any other week. On the one hand, she should really quit: it's dangerous for Britain to have such a weak opposition when the government has such a large majority. But on the other hand: this is simply very, very funny. And by God we deserve something to cheer us up.