Let it go

On Kemi Badenoch, and picking your battles

It’s hard to think of a more irritating political complaint than “imagine if someone on my side said or did this thing that someone on your side has just said or done”. It’s a claim about double standards that has the benefit of being entirely impossible to disprove. It’s an appeal to people on your own side who feel hard done by, because people on your own side always feel hard done by, because everyone always feels hard done by, because it’s more fun to think of yourself as a victim of unfairness than as a beneficiary of it, or as someone who is operating on a level playing field but is just not very good. And while it’s not wholly without merit on every occasion, what it amounts to is a weaponisation of the boring fact that nobody who is remotely partisan, whether politician or media outlet, is completely fair-minded, combined with a lack of self-awareness (the complaint never, you should notice, comes from the politically neutral).

It’s also pretty common, on both left and right. “Imagine if Labour had failed to keep their promises on immigration as badly as the Tories have” (OK I’m imagining it - maybe they’d have lost an election by a landslide). “Imagine if a Tory minister had declared clothing donations as general office support” (OK I’m imagining it - maybe it would have dominated an entire news cycle). “Imagine if a Tory MP had posed in a ‘Never kissed a Labour voter’ T-shirt on a pride march” (OK I’m imagining it - maybe I wouldn’t have given even the tiniest shit about it).

New Tory leader Kemi Badenoch has come up with what would be a classic of the genre if it weren’t so confusing. It’s annoyingly complicated to explain, and when you’ve explained it it doesn’t make sense. It’s about McDonald’s, where she worked as a teenager.¹

In brief: during the Conservative leadership election Badenoch made the very funny claim that “I grew up in a middle class family, but I became working class when I was 16 working at McDonald’s”. She was mocked for this, as well she might have been, most recently by Keir Starmer who made a joke about it. Speaking at Pinewood Studios, he said “You know, the leader of the Opposition thinks if you do a couple of shifts in McDonald's, you become working class. So by that logic, if I keep coming back here - I could yet be the next James Bond”. This is a decent, not side-splitting, gag, but it provoked a reaction from its target.

In a speech on Thursday evening, Ms Badenoch said Sir Keir would “never have dared” to joke about working in McDonalds if she was a “left-wing activist”.

“The truth is that the left are not that interested in ethnic minorities except as a tool to fight their battles against the right,” she said.

“In fact, just this morning the British prime minister made a joke about how I worked at McDonald’s.

“He would never have dared to do that, if I was a left-wing activist.

“And if a Conservative prime minister had made those comments about a black party leader, they would have been called a racist and asked to resign.”

It is in the nature of complaints of this type - and one of the reasons they are so irritating whoever is making them - that they are completely unfalsifiable. But to take Badenoch’s two complaints in turn: on the first, her assertion that Starmer or someone from the Labour Party would not make a joke about the inauthenticity of some left-wing activists is evidence of having paid no attention whatsoever to the Labour Party, how it operates and how its factions talk about each other, which is a problem for someone whose job includes mounting a coherent critique of her opponents. And on the second… eh? There has not been a black Labour leader, but it isn’t anybody’s fault but Kemi Badenoch’s if she is incapable of imagining, or indeed remembering, a Labour politician (Chuka Umunna, say) being criticised by his Tory opponents as inauthentic without anyone calling for resignations.

As Jim Pickard of the Financial Times pointed out, it’s difficult to square this complaint with Badenoch’s self-declared status as a champion of free speech.² But it is evidence of a significant weakness on the part of the new Tory leader: she will not let things go.

I mentioned in a previous post on this Substack that Badenoch had fallen head first at a recent PMQs into a trap set for her party by Labour, when she said that she was not against any of the additional public spending paid for by the tax rises announced at the Budget. It’s worth emphasising that this was a trap she did not have to fall into. When Keir Starmer challenged her to say whether she was against additional investment in the NHS, schools and housing, Badenoch was perfectly within her rights to ignore the question, as all Leaders of the Opposition always are at PMQs: it’s called Prime Minister’s Questions for a reason. But she didn’t: she fell for the bait, and answered the question, and gave Starmer a line he can - and will - now use again and again.

At the most recent PMQs, Badenoch managed to get baited twice, in two different ways. First, she failed to ignore the question that immediately preceded hers. Leaders of the Opposition always ask their first question at PMQs immediately after a question from a government backbencher. This means that that government backbencher has an incentive - perhaps in collusion with No10 - to try to ask something that enables the Prime Minister to put the Leader of the Opposition on the back foot.

On Wednesday Labour’s Olivia Bailey did just that, attacking the Conservatives’ record on immigration and allowing Keir Starmer to do the same. Badenoch should have ignored this, but she didn’t. Instead of asking a single, short question about the resignation of Louise Haigh as Transport Secretary, as she had presumably intended, she criticised Labour on immigration first and turned to Haigh second. That meant that Starmer could give a perfunctory answer on Haigh and attack her on immigration at greater length.

Kemi Badenoch: The Prime Minister talks about immigration, so it is probably a good time to remind him that he was the one writing letters asking us not to deport foreign criminals. He and his party voted against every single measure we put in place to try to limit immigration. The question today is what has been on the lips of all Labour MPs, including, I believe, the Health Secretary yesterday. The Prime Minister knowingly appointed a convicted fraudster to be his Transport Secretary. What was he thinking?

Keir Starmer: The previous Transport Secretary was right to resign when further information came forward. What a marked contrast to the behaviour of the last 14 years. The Leader of the Opposition talks about immigration. There were record levels of immigration under the previous Government, with net migration of nearly 1 million, and she was the cheerleader. She was the one urging the removal of the caps on work visas. She thanked the previous Home Secretary for the work that was done. She championed it, she advocated it—record levels of immigration.

The key line in that Starmer reply is: “The Leader of the Opposition talks about immigration”. It’s true. She did. That meant that Starmer was on the front foot throughout the exchange, and by the third question Badenoch was complaining “I am not asking about migration; I am asking about the former Transport Secretary”. She had only herself to blame; she should have let it go.

It was poor judgement to ask about Haigh’s resignation over a historic fraud conviction anyway, because the resignation had already happened. Haigh was not going to resign again, and there was no more political embarrassment to be wrung out of an admittedly politically embarrassing situation - as Badenoch demonstrated by failing to wring any more out. But her questions about Haigh were, as it turned out, there to set up a spectacularly ill-judged line: “The country needs conviction politicians, not politicians with convictions”.

And this provided Starmer with what ended up being - not even on purpose - the second bait of the day that Badenoch fell for. The “conviction politicians” joke was ill-judged not just because it’s a cliché, and not just because Haigh had already resigned, but because Haigh is not the first politician to have got into trouble with the law. Indeed, famously, two of Badenoch’s recent predecessors as Conservative leader got into trouble for breaking lockdown rules, and paid fines as a result. It was too easy for Starmer not to mention this, and so he mentioned it.

“I gently remind the right hon. Lady that two of her predecessors had convictions for breaking the covid rules.”

Now, strictly speaking this is slightly misleading, because of the distinction between accepting that one has broken the law and paying a fine as a result, and being convicted of breaking the law. Boris Johnson, one of the predecessors in question, decided to make this point, for some reason, as reported by Guido Fawkes, a website whose passion has always been graphic design.

Here’s exclusive footage of Boris Johnson providing Guido with this quote:

As arguments against the Labour Government go, “Hi, remember me? I’m the former Prime Minister who broke lockdown rules and was later forced out of office in disgrace and I’m here to remind you all about it” is a poor one. And there was absolutely no need whatsoever for Kemi Badenoch to amplify it. She should have let it go. But… she didn’t. She tweeted about it instead.

She even included a little video about it, a video which someone in CCHQ must have spent some time making, and which some other people in CCHQ must have agreed to put into the public domain, and which you can now watch and make up your own mind about whether this is something CCHQ should be doing.

I would gently suggest to the Conservative Party that relitigating an issue that helped to prompt a huge shift in public opinion away from them, contributing a great deal to the downfall of an election-winning Prime Minister and an eventual landslide defeat, is not the best use of the time of a new leader who is, if she wants to be, fairly well placed to embody a fresh start. Moving on, in these circumstances, is a good plan. But Kemi Badenoch has already demonstrated an unwillingness to do this: just a month ago, she decided that the best response to questions about Partygate was to say that it was “overblown”. She will not let it go.

In principle, this stuff can be learned. When someone tries to provoke you, don’t be provoked. When someone isn’t even trying to provoke you but you feel provoked anyway, don’t be provoked. When your opponents are trying to get you to talk about something, it’s probably because you shouldn’t. You don’t have to respond to everything. You can decide what your agenda is, and what your message is, and do your best to focus on that.

It’s not just about learning, though. It’s about temperament and character. And the early indications are that Badenoch is temperamentally incapable of exhibiting the judgement she’s going to need if she wants to make a success of her leadership. We’ll see. But imagine if a Labour leader had started this badly.

1. She tweeted some quite fun pictures of herself returning to McDonald’s for a photo-op as a minister in 2022.

2. There’s a just-about-possible way of squaring it, which is that Badenoch is not claiming that Starmer’s joke was racist at all, that she thinks it’s fine and would defend Starmer’s right to make it, but that she’s claiming that it would have been seen as racist if a Tory had made it and that that’s a double standard. I’m not sure I can quite make this one work, but you never know.