Three specific and highly regrettable instances of Kemi Badenoch being dumb as fuck

On three separate occasions this week, Kemi Badenoch proved herself to be of insufficient stature for the era in which she operates. Perhaps, in some other distant time, when circumstances were more benign, she would have been a tolerable continuation of the conservative political heritage. But then, if times were really more benign, I doubt she would ever have become Tory leader in the first place. Her presence in our political culture is suggestive of a deep national malaise.

These three occasions each represent different kinds of failure - of management, comprehension and policy-making. But fundamentally they are all basically about being a halfwit. If Badenoch was smarter, and if British conservatives in general were more astute, none of these events would have occurred.

Badenoch behaves like a woman presented with the novel Ulysses after years of watching Paw Patrol. Maybe she would have been able to decipher it once, but that period has long since passed. She has muddled her brain terribly. What was once solid has been turned to mush and now she can only blink, mute and uncomprehending, at the front cover.

It’s been so long since British right-wingers thought clearly and specifically about economic policy that they have literally forgotten how to do it. So instead they cross their fingers and hope for financial armageddon - a swift transfer into power on the back of the country’s ruin. Or they hand senior roles to people with a proven track record of failure because they’re good on X. Or they put together fictitious bric-a-brac economic policy, composed of units which they know have no true mathematical bearing, in a furtive demonstration which they hope will convince the public of their rectitude.

A fucking embarrassment really. A humiliation. And a particularly pernicious one, because this Labour administration, like the last, shows signs of crucifying itself on the gap between what is politically sayable and what is objectively required. We really do need an official opposition which can be surgical, pragmatic, and reality-based. But that is not the opposition we have. We have a moron and her little moron circus.

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On Monday, Badenoch reshuffled her top team. Some choices were welcome - it’s good to see Tom Tugendhat in a front bench role, I suppose, although at this point it is impossible to raise any excitement for supposed Tory moderates. They are so morally lethargic that an expression of hope would be an exercise in faith rather than optimism.

Most choices were terrible. Badenoch replaced Mel Stride, a perfectly competent fiscal conservative who largely avoided culture war attacks, with Andrew Griffiths, who was a junior Treasury minister during the Liz Truss mini-Budget debacle.

Most of the commentary around this appointment - mine included - centred on the presentational incompetence. Badenoch has effectively handed a Labour minister a no-effort-required victory every time they debate her chancellor. It really doesn’t matter what they do. They could burn kittens on Whitehall but they’ll still beat him in the ensuing Newsnight debate. All they have to say is that they’ll ‘take no lectures’ about economics from the man who broke the British economy. Job done.

Griffith’s role was not coincidental, as Badenoch tried to imply. The Budget was the consequence of the ideology he has promoted throughout his adult life. Before becoming a minister, Griffith was chairman of the advisory board at the Centre for Policy Studies, a free market think tank. He made the case for shrinking the state, aggressive tax cuts and supply-side growth. This was precisely what the Budget aimed to achieve. He has never disavowed this economic philosophy

Sure, you can say that the ensuing gilt crisis was less the result of ideology than it was of methodology, and perhaps you’d be right. The mini-Budget was implemented through a series of maneuvers which seemed almost calculated to remove market confidence: sacking the permanent secretary to the Treasury, excluding the Office for Budget Responsibility from preparation, and cutting taxes at scale without a credible funding plan.

The trouble is that Griffith has never offered a single procedural lesson from what went wrong. There is no single piece of writing or spoken commentary I can find in which he shows a lesson learned from those torrid days in 2022. There is not one admission of failure or suggestion on what to improve next time. In fact, if anything, his commentary has become more aggressively laissez faire. The man fucked us all, learned nothing, apologised for nothing, changed nothing, and has now been invited right back into the shadow Cabinet to hopefully do it again.

This is the Badenoch approach further down the ministerial pecking order. Her only motivating force seems to be the promotion of anyone who proves popular with right-wingers online. That, after all, was how she secured her own position. It is now how she has structured the party’s incentive structure, from the top to the bottom. It’s how she ended up defending a former neo-Nazi as a Tory councillor - because he made popular right-wing AI slop videos online. And it’s how she made Katie Lam shadow housing minister.

Lam is another hero to the online right, because she makes unconscionably tedious videos about immigration using beans in jars, like some sort of wehrmacht primary school teacher. You’ll notice that the online right is no longer even any good at spotting what makes a good video. The deadened quality of her voice is matched only by the soulless gaze of her eyes, like someone trying to gaze out through a brick wall.

In 2025, Lam told the Sunday Times that “a large number of people in this country who came here legally, but in effect shouldn’t have been able to do so” would “need to go home” and that this would ultimately leave behind “a mostly but not entirely culturally coherent group of people”. Evidently she’d left her dog whistle somewhere in the other room and couldn’t be bothered to find it. It was very clear what she meant, something not much less than a racial mass deportation programme - and one based on retrospective application of the law rather than any kind of orderly legislative process.

Badenoch fell apart. It’s sometimes hard to notice because her every action is so foolish, but here you could see the accident taking place quite vividly right in front of your eyes. First the Tories said Lam’s statements were”broadly in line” with party policy and then that she had spoken “imprecisely”. Badenoch clearly had no idea what her own policy was. Instead of learning from the incident, she committed to it and promoted Lam. It’s hard to imagine what she would have had to do to win a demotion.

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In the background of events this week, bad things were happening. It was barely noticed by most British commentators, but the world had a wobble.

There was a global bond selloff, an international expression of a fundamental lack of confidence. Why was it happening? Not entirely clear. There are fears around the latest round of violence between the US and Iran, with associated concern around the Strait of Hormuz and the impact on energy prices. There are also worries around US financial authority, in particular with Fed Reserve chair Kevin Warsh, and gathering evidence of a more hawkish approach to inflation. Most troublingly of all, in an oh-fuck-we’re-in-the-shit-now-boys kinda way, there seems to be general anxiety around the levels of debt being sustained by developed economies.

It hit a lot of countries: Ten year gilt yields surged in the US, France, Italy, Australia, Germany and particularly Japan. But just because something is global does not mean it hits all countries equally. Each time this sort of thing happens, the UK seems to experience the pain in a particularly acute form.

UK ten-year gilt yields hit nearly 5.2%, the highest level since 2008. Why? Because we remain reliant on foreign energy, we have a wrecked fiscal status-quo as a result of Brexit and Truss, and there is a market recognition that the government’s promises on tax cannot be aligned with its promises on spending.

Certainly it’s a symbol of British governance failure over several decades. But what it isn’t is a response to Andy Burnham walking into parliament. And yet this - madly, inevitably - was how British conservatives tried to present it. They were hoping for a market panic when he entered Downing Street and didn’t get it. Now, they hoped that his return to Westminster after recess would somehow trigger a bond market.

The Telegraph front page headline read: “Bond markets turn on Burnham”. The rest of the article is borderline sensible, although arguably more cynical. It is the product of people who know exactly what they’re doing. Look at how they go to work: “Andy Burnham’s Commons debut as prime minister on Tuesday was overshadowed by a market rout that sent borrowing costs to their highest in decades,” the first paragraph read - carefully associating the bond market moves with Burnham without actually stating that there is a causal relationship.

“Government borrowing costs around the world have climbed sharply in recent weeks, amid concerns about unsustainable debts and persistent inflation,” it admitted, “however, Britain suffered the biggest increase in bond yields in the G7 on Tuesday and economists warned that investors were nervous ahead of Mr Burnham’s first Budget”. Look closely and you can almost see the joins. First, an admission of the global economic reality, then a highlighting of the UK’s uniquely exposed position and finally a surreptitious attempt to suggest culpability by innuendo. Not one word in that piece could possibly justify the headline.

But to get lost in the tortured logic of the copy is to miss the point. The purpose of the article is the headline, in huge letters, to be displayed in supermarkets and newsagents: “Bond markets turn on Burnham”. Doesn’t matter if it’s true. Just slap it on the front of the paper and hope for the best.

The Conservative lept on this. “The markets are clearly worried that we now have a spendthrift prime minister,” Badenoch announced at PMQs. Tory MP Jack Rankin joined in. “Over the summer, the markets were clearly anxious when he failed to articulate the fiscal rules... In his statement yesterday, he waxed lyrical about a decade when we had a three-day week and blackouts - presumably because he liked the music. But we now know what the international capital markets have made of that.” The Tory benches were practically salivating at the possibility of bond market trouble.

There is just no seriousness here at all. No even vaguely sensible commentator - in the press or in parliament - would look at what is happening in the world and conclude that it is the result of Andy Burnham. No even vaguely sensible commentator would be prepared to say so without dying of embarrassment. And yet they do - loudly, unashamedly, and with no sense of risk to their personal reputation.

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Same applies to Badenoch’s ‘costed’ plans on defence, laid out yesterday, which aim to hit three per cent of GDP on defence by cutting welfare.

I’ve come to truly despise the word ‘costed’. This is partly because it suggests an element of gravity which the policy itself rarely deserves. The Conservatives say the £14 billion cost of the plan would be funded through reform of housing benefit, the restoration of the two-child benefit cap and increased investment from the National Wealth Fund. But Badenoch already announced the restoration of the two-child benefit cap back in April and spoke about the National Wealth Fund approach in December. It wasn’t a new announcement, it was just a new press conference.

The policies themselves are obscene. The two-child benefit cap was a morally repugnant piece of financial engineering when it was introduced by the Coalition and it remains so now. It was unjust on a near-Biblical level, penalising children for the sins of their parents - namely the sin of procreating while poor. We might not love the idea of people having children when they are unable to support them, but whatever else that decision entails it is not the child’s fault. No just society could ever be formed by sabotaging the life chances of children in order to change the reproductive behavior of their parents. And of course, as hardly needs saying, this type of policy simply stores up much greater government spending for ten or twenty years time, when the penalised child is either failing in school or failing to find work

The greatest crime here isn’t moral though, or even presentational. It is a basic lack of seriousness. Yes, we need to increase defence spending. There is a necessary debate about how we find that money. But the best way to tell if someone is an outright cunt is if they say: ‘We’ll fund the defence rise by cutting welfare’.

The politics are attractive obviously. People hate welfare, they like defence spending. And that right there is about the sum total of the mathematical calculation the Westminster mind is prepared to engage in. A bright light goes off in the 20-something mind of an adviser in Tory HQ and - boom - they have a policy. ‘I’ve got it,’ he’ll say. ‘We’ll swap the bad thing for the good thing.’ Look at fucking galaxy brain over here, look at the big brains on this cunt.

Politically it is a very dangerous idea, because it turns an issue on which there is some degree of national consensus - the need to rearm in the face of the Russian threat and a rogue US - into a battering ram to attack the left. The more this idea takes hold, the more progressive voters will see defence spending not as a necessary evil but as a way of hurting the poor. It encourages and validates the instinctive leftist disposition towards pacifism.

Also, and it would be nice if people mentioned this occasionally, it would not work. As the Institute for Government reported, OBR estimates put the money required to hit 3.5% of GDP on defence by 2035 at an additional £40 billion. That’s a lot. It’s the Home Office and Ministry of Justice budget combined. It’s two-thirds of the total schools budget. To say the fucking obvious: You are not going to achieve it by restoring the two child benefit cap, no matter how rhetorically appealing it is.

There are two really big pots in the welfare budget that you’d want to use if you were serious about this. The first is the state pension, standing at £146 billion. Then there’s health and disability benefit, standing at £77 billion. Obviously you’d need to take money from both to make it work. Neither the Tories nor Labour have the determination to do so.

It doesn’t really matter, because Badenoch’s plan is not intended to work. It is not even really intended to be implemented. It is intended to give the impression that she has a plan, which corresponds to people’s pre-existing prejudices. It is emblematic of a political culture that values advertising over products, political fixes over practical solutions, and announcements over delivery.

The travesty of this type of announcement is that it infantalises the public. You can see them now, standing by the bar, talking bollocks to their mates, saying that it ‘stands to reason’, that all the government has to do is take the money from those benefit scroungers and use it on defence instead. There you are - problem solved, job done. They’ll never experience the refutation of their argument which a brief contact with reality would entail.

Instead of trying to talk realistically about the trade-offs facing us, Badenoch takes the easier path and reassures voters that all their ignorantly held assumptions are true, as long as they prove useful to her. By doing so, she helps to detach our politics even further from reality. And so our problems continue, unresolved.

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In each one of these instances, you find a British conservatism which has simply given up. It’s not the morality or the ideology really. It’s the basic standards. It’s childlike, utterly simple-minded, transparently self-interested, needy and lacking in any substance.

There is a total lack of productive political ideas coming from the British right. We’re surrounded by genuine problems - bond market volatility, defence instability - and yet there’s no reasonable conservative argument about them, just some piss-stained blather and hyperventilating bullshit. It leaves Labour - whose own economic record frankly leaves a lot to be desired - as the only party with anything halfway interesting to say. But there’s no dialogue, no challenge, no true opposition.

The British right makes plenty of noise. It has no shortage of TV channels and radio stations and magazines and websites and newspapers. But on an intellectual level, it’s fucking AWOL. A space where a body should be. Vacant.

Odds and sods

Sorry, no odds and sods this week - I’m dashing off on a much-needed break, literally writing this sentence on a plane. Also no podcast, apologies. Normal service resumes week after next. Thanks for your understanding. Now fuck off.