You can only step back and applaud. The audacity. The vision. Never before has political nihilism been so wholeheartedly embraced. This was mainlined futility. Well, through any normal looking-glass. A new genre of postmodernism that would have left Derrida and Deleuze breathless and baffled. Four minutes and 40 seconds of YouTube video that will have had Conservative supporters reaching for the fentanyl.
The received wisdom of party political broadcasts is that they must have a purpose. A message that is easily understood. Generally a simple story of why opponents have got it wrong and why – and how – you will put things right. It’s not complicated. It’s not sophisticated. Just PR 101. Political Ronseal. Only for Kemi Badenoch’s first broadcast as Conservative leader, which was released overnight, she chose to break with all convention. What followed was more a career suicide note than a message of hope. Even her fans were in despair.
We opened with the exit poll on election night predicting a Labour landslide, before cutting to Kemi drinking coffee in what may have been her kitchen. “OK,” she began. “The British public kicked us out. And they were right to do so. We had let them down.” She said this in a tone that suggested she wasn’t much bothered. It was just one of those things.
You felt that this must be the warm up for the word “sorry”. Only the word never escaped her lips once over the next few minutes. Not even the weaselly politician’s non-apology of “If I caused any offence then of course I am sorry”. KemiKaze clearly doesn’t do sorry. Or maybe she just isn’t sorry. Thinks she and her party got all the big calls right and that it was the country who let her down.
“There’s a lot that needs fixing,” she continued. No shit. “The economy. The NHS. Immigration.” And who broke it? Kemi didn’t care to join the dots. That it was the Tories who had been in power for much of the last 14 years. That this was on them. On her, even.
She had been a junior minister under Boris Johnson and a cabinet minister under Liz Truss and Rishi Sunak. She had been one of the most vocal advocates for their governments. But no. She wasn’t to blame for anything. Rather it was the fault of the political class in general. Because all politicians let you down.
We moved on to a bit of personal backstory – she really was working-class because she had once worked in McDonald’s for a while – and then on to the present day. Everything was still a bit rubbish and Keir Starmer was too much of a lawyer to be competent. The idea that the endemic problems in the country might take longer than six months to fix hadn’t occurred to her. Next some Faragist flag waving about immigration. Again, no responsibility taken.
Then the denouement. She would promise to tell the truth. Even though she had already told a number of lies in the broadcast. She would say what was right. Not what was easy. She would do things differently. Really?
By now, all contact with reality had been lost. Her shadow ministerial team were all men and women tainted with the recent Tory past. How was this making a fresh start? Honest Bob Jenrick, who had pushed through a planning permission for a pornographer and Tory donor. Priti Patel, who had twice viewed the ministerial code as inconvenient rules to be broken. The brown-nosing Chris Philp, who had been one of Liz Truss’s loudest cheerleaders.
But that was that. Time was up. There had been nothing on what Kemi might do to change anything. Just five minutes of vibes. Mainly bad vibes. She longs to distance herself from Boris, Liz and Rishi, yet she is inescapably compromised. Their failures are her failures. There is no reason for anyone to trust her. Nor does she even try that hard to convince anyone.
It’s as if she has given up already. Knows it’s her bad luck to have inherited the leadership of the Tories at the height of their unpopularity and that she will be removed long before the party gets near to government again. The timing could not have been worse for her. So rather than going through the motions she actively participates in her own self-destruction as well as that of her party. If she is going down then she’s going to take the whole apparatus with her. Give it time and this party political broadcast will become a collector’s item. We may not see its like again.
Still, KemiKaze can take comfort from one thing. The Tories had done such an exceptional job of knackering the UK economy that it’s proving trickier than Labour expected to put it right. So much for Badenoch’s protestations that she wanted the incoming government to do well. She doesn’t. She will be gutted if Rachel Reeves manages to turn things round in the next year or so.
As for Rachel, she could be found hanging out with the billionaires and global elite in Davos, shouting from the rooftops that growth was the government’s primary purpose. Without it the economy will continue to flatline. Now almost everything is up for grabs. Net zero? Don’t worry yourself too much about the details. As for newts and bats, they are history. Nothing must stop the building of a third runway at Heathrow and other critical infrastructure. Hey, by the time the runway is built we may even have planes that are less polluting.
Though it turns out there are some limits to growth. Even though business is desperate for closer ties with the EU, any invitation to join the Pan-European Movement, a customs union within the customs union, must be resisted. The housing minister, Matthew Pennycook, couldn’t have made that clearer on the morning media round. When it comes to a choice between growth and an ideologically pure Brexit, Brexit wins hands down. As it happens, that’s a government policy with which the Tories agree. Two parties that want the worst for the UK. Go figure.
