07.11.2024
A modern chameleon
Kemi Badenoch is fully on board the global helter skelter to the far right and ‘anti-woke’ national chauvinism. She is, argues Paul Demarty, the perfect match for Donald Trump
It is rather disturbing to think, for those of us pushing middle age (or perhaps watching it recede into the blurry distance), that somebody born the day David Cameron became Conservative Party leader was able to vote in this year’s general election.
Back then, Tory members had a fairly straight choice in front of them - between David Davis, of the ultra-Thatcherite right, and Cameron - a touchy-feely moderniser, whose slick presentation clearly aped that of Tony Blair in his pomp, and who promised to discard the mean-spirited suburban psychosis of his predecessors as leader of the opposition, William Hague, Iain Duncan Smith and Michael Howard.
In 2006, The Guardian published a series of short interviews with the bright young things who were suddenly happy to associate themselves with Cameron’s new-model Tories. There was a Hoxtonite who played in a no-hoper psychedelic indie rock band. There was a British-Asian medical student, who - amusingly in retrospect - cited the introduction of tuition fees as his reason for abandoning his family’s traditional Labour vote.
Under current circumstances, however, one’s eyes turn to a 26-year-old black woman, raised in Nigeria, who we are told was a “systems analyst for a bank” (whatever that is). She was abuzz with the changing nature of her chosen party: “I may not fit the image of a stereotypical Conservative,” she told the paper, “but we really don’t have a one-size-fits-all stereotype. For instance, although the media portrays the party as homophobic, since joining I have met more openly gay people - from councillors to MPs - than ever before.”
Sure, there was some difficult history for Africans like herself: the Tories’ “branding Nelson Mandela and the ANC as terrorists, the party’s hard line on immigration and policing, and, of course, Enoch Powell’s Rivers of Blood speech”. But she opposed Labour’s habit of seeing a police action as the only solution to political conflict, as exemplified in Gordon Brown’s anger that Nick Griffin had not been convicted of racial hatred. “It’s easier to deal with things when they are out in the open, so I would rather know who members of the BNP are, for example, than sit next to one at work unaware that he’d been banned from expressing his real views.”1
The name of this woman was Kemi Adegoke. She later married another Tory activist by the name of Hamish Badenoch; and on November 2, with his surname, she was announced as the new Conservative Party leader.
Sensible option
The gloopy Cameroon of the 2006 interview presents quite a striking contrast to the steely culture warrior who has evidently endeared herself to the Tory mass membership - always wildly to the right of the parliamentary party, although perhaps, under the influence of people like her and her opponent, Robert Jenrick, the MPs are slowly catching up. Badenoch has repeatedly provoked controversy for her interventions on the standard slate of anti-woke bugbears, from gender identification to critical race theory, and strongly backed Tony Sewell’s government-commissioned report on race relations, which more or less found that there was nothing to be worried about after all.
Yet that is not the whole story, really. Her anti-woke interventions, while undeniably robust, have never had the swivel-eyed, spittle-flecked character increasingly typical of the genre. Though her opposition to various trans rights initiatives may seem to conflict with her 26-year-old self’s delight at suddenly having so many gay friends, she is canny enough to couch it in terms of gender transition being a form of conversion therapy for gays, as do many on the leftish feminist wing of the anti-trans-rights coalition - the original ‘trans-exclusionary radical feminists’ or ‘Terfs’, those who actually identified meaningfully with feminism.
She opposes blaming colonialism for the poor state of most of Africa, but not on the basis that it was ‘good actually’ (as do the usual run of Tory revisionists), but on the basis that these societies were radically unfree anyway and colonialism merely reshuffled different factions of the elite. That is nonsense, but nonsense denuded of the pathetic, hysterical grievance-mongering to which we have become accustomed.
A few weeks ago, indeed until the moment that supporters of the official ‘moderate’ candidate, James Cleverly, somehow conspired to tactically vote him out of the running altogether, the idea of Badenoch being the sensible candidate would have seemed risible. But since then, as Jenrick ever more aggressively puffed up his hard-right credentials, Badenoch has discreetly eased her foot off the accelerator. (Indeed, during the summer riots, when Jenrick was going in two-footed on “Two Tier Kier”, she kept an unusually low profile, to her colleagues’ disgruntlement.) Though many Tory ‘centrists’ abstained in the vote, and leading figures like Jeremy Hunt and Cleverly have already ruled themselves out of the running for front-bench positions, she ended up as the lesser evil for many such people. Nigel Farage is already courting frustrated Jenrick voters, on the basis that they will now not be rid of the European Court of Human Rights.
Likewise, her acceptance speech was hardly a matter of fire and brimstone. She went through the usual roll-call of thank-yous - to the administrators of the contest, to her defeated rivals, to the ordinary Tory members “for hosting us in your communities, in your village halls, in your pubs and in your homes”. Then, down to business:
Our first responsibility as his majesty’s loyal opposition is to hold this Labour government to account. Our second is no less important. It is to prepare over the course of the next few years for government, to ensure that by the time of the next election we have not just a clear set of Conservative pledges that appeal to the British people, but a clear plan for how to implement them, a clear plan to change this country by changing the way that government works. The prime minister is discovering all too late the perils of not having such a plan.
Finally, a gesture to the challenges ahead, which frankly could have been plagiarised straight from any speech made by Cameron in the days when he was the apple of her eye:
Our party is critical to the success of our country, but to be heard we have to be honest - honest about the fact that we made mistakes, honest about the fact that we let standards slip … The time has come to tell the truth, to stand up for our principles, to plan for our future, to reset our politics and our thinking, and to give our party, and our country, the new start that they deserve … it is time to renew.
Note that, if you think about it for five seconds, this is gibberish. It is time to “stand up for our principles”, but also to “reset our politics and our thinking” - well, which is it? “We made mistakes”: which mistakes, and how are they to be corrected? (Not Partygate, which she claimed was “overblown” the next day.) Yet this is a kind of speech where such inconsistency and vagueness are features rather than bugs - a ‘new leader speech’ from the same template as all the others. Though thought of as some kind of maverick, Badenoch so far is sticking to the script.
Operator
Her distinctiveness as a politician may ultimately be a matter not of her being out on an ideological limb, but something like the opposite. My working theory is that she is, in fact, like the other Tories of her generation a political opportunist; but among the shower of clownish idiots that staffed the front benches in the Boris Johnson-Rishi Sunak era, she is marked out by being good at it. She will turn up the heat on the culture war stuff at one moment, and walk it back the next, when it advances her cause. In clumsier hands, such manoeuvres seem shifty and cynical, as in fact they are. Our prevailing bourgeois political culture, however, is remarkable for its stupidity and short attention span, and so a truly canny operator can get away with it.
None of this is to predict a reversion to hug-a-hoodie Cameronism, now the leadership is in the bag. If I am right, Badenoch is an expert at blowing in the wind, and, especially with Donald Trump being president elect, the wind is decidedly blowing her to the right. Where Sir Keir promised, through gritted teeth, to “stand shoulder to shoulder” with Trump, she will go the whole way.
If the Labour government had managed to get its feet under the table in good order, then perhaps those ‘moderate’ Tory voices plaintively pointing out that the party lost as many votes to the Liberal Democrats as to Reform might provide some countervailing pressure.
However, with Labour already battling a new corruption scandal every week and failing consistently to get ahead of the media cycle, there is more to be gained by going in for the kill; and we certainly know she has that in her locker. The spectacularly apolitical governing practice of Sir Kier’s Labour - at one moment drenched in patriotic gloop, at another reciting every cliché of professional-class, liberal identitarianism - is especially vulnerable to the attacks of an even more voraciously chauvinist opponent - who is nevertheless a black woman, and the first such to lead any major political party in this country, put there on the votes of Enoch Powell-worshipping suburban reactionaries.
We expect a series of Labour scandals to be amplified or confected by the yellow press, followed by some vicious Badenoch performances in PMQs, and disorderly retreat by an already directionless government (as cruelly noted by Badenoch in her acceptance speech, the only remotely barbed phrase in the whole thing). It is the form taken, in this country, with its media and its constitutional particularities, of the slow, endless ratchet to the right.
That is not to say she will have an easy time of it. She takes leadership of a battered, demoralised Conservative Party, its parliamentary strength weaker than it has ever been in its entire history. The Labour payroll vote is larger on its own than the Tory parliamentary party. The latter remains rancorous and divided. As someone with a talent for angular public statements, who they say could start a fight in an empty room, she may find the management of all these gigantic wounded egos wearisome.
The refusal of the likes of Hunt and Cleverly to serve under her is the most striking instance of the more general problem of staffing an adequate front bench at all with the routed stragglers of July 4, though she has at least managed to bring in former leadership contenders Priti Patel and Mel Stride. (The much larger party that held power between 2019 and 2024 was itself notably riddled with accident-prone lightweights.) Missteps will be met by hostile briefings; anonymous barbs will multiply in the writings of lobby reporters.
Yet the drift of contemporary history is towards large-scale militarisation, mass migration induced by further wars and climate disasters, and the backlash against such migration. Preparation, sometimes open and sometimes discreet, for great-power war entails ideological campaigns against weaknesses on the home front, against traitors (like us … ) and ‘degeneracy’ of various kinds. Badenoch has proven she can sell this stuff even to people who, had things been slightly different, would probably think she should be ‘sent back to her own country’. Her promise to return the Tories to power at the first time of asking, in spite of their near-comical weakness at the present time, should not be thought a vain one.
Like all political chameleons, she shows us the colour of our times, and it is not a pretty sight.