7 hours ago
9
We hear a lot about the Keminaissance these days. Not least from Kemi herself. She is amazing, the best thing to have happened to the Tories since … Liz Truss. We are fantastically lucky to have her in our lives. She is a miracle worker. All that’s required is a bit of gratitude for her magnificence. We are not worthy.
There’s just one problem. There’s really no evidence to support this analysis. The Tories were in the high 20s in the polls when Badenoch took over as Tory leader and they now bump along consistently around 17. Which is where they have been for the duration of The Great Kemi Revival (TM). The Tories are a mere footnote in the Gorton and Denton byelection. If there is a rebirth of the Tories as a serious political party, no one seems to have told the rest of the country.
Maybe there’s more going on than first appears. That without Kemi the Tories would be in an even worse position. On the edge of extinction. Or it’s just possible that the Kemi cabal are colluding in a collective fantasy. Seeing only what they want to see. All based on a handful of performances at prime minister’s questions in which she got the better of a prime minister who was already on the ropes and was there for the taking by anyone. All Kemi had needed to do was remain standing and stick to a basic script.
It doesn’t help that one of Kemi’s main problems is Kemi herself. Being Kemi gets in the way of Being Kemi. She is a one-woman philosophical dilemma. A dysfunction wrapped up in a tautology. Time and again, Kemi mistakes confidence with competence. Because she imagines she is doing well she believes she is doing well. A victim of too much positive reinforcement. Teachers and parents who told her she could achieve anything when actually she isn’t that bright. There again, she might well have done better if she didn’t also have the concentration span of a gnat. Apologies to those gnats who remain laser-focused.
Wednesday’s PMQs was a case in point. Because Kemi started well enough and it looked as if she was about to have a good day. Now, you might think that student loans repayment was a brave choice of subject. After all, it was the Tories who introduced the current repayment system, Kemi had never previously taken any interest in students, and it was only on Monday that she had her arse handed to her on a plate on the Good Morning Britain sofa when the money-saving expert Martin Lewis explained how her proposal to reform the repayment system would benefit the most well-off graduates.
But even so, student loans are very much a live issue. There are plenty of Labour backbenchers who agree with Kemi that the current system is unfair. So much so that the Treasury is actively looking at ways to do the bare minimum to rectify the system. Just to get everyone off its back. So here was a chance for the Tory leader to drive a wedge between the government benches. And it was all going reasonably well for her as Keir Starmer pointedly refused to answer the question.
Except then it went all pear-shaped for Kemi as she appeared to get bored by her own line of questioning. It was too forensic. Too worthy. So she started throwing in a few insults. Not because she had been provoked. But because she hadn’t. She just couldn’t contain her desire to pick a fight where no pretext had existed. It was how she knew she was alive. First off she gunned for Rachel Reeves. She had worked in customer services at the Bank of England. There’s nothing like a little blatant misogyny to enliven PMQs.
Having lost the support of all the women in the chamber, Kemi then went out to alienate everyone else by calling Labour the “paedo defence” party. It was a deranged tirade. No one thinks it’s true. Not even Kemi. The same Kemi who had again on Monday described the Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor allegations as celebrity tittle-tattle. It seems that criminal investigations are only of interest to Badenoch if there is some political capital to be gained. Otherwise it’s live and let live as far as the royal family are concerned.
This was enough for Starmer. Student loans were long forgotten. “You’re just an irrelevance,” he shouted. And he wasn’t wrong. Even Kemi could see that he had a point. Her normally iron-clad self-confidence was momentarily crushed. She looked almost vulnerable. As if seeing herself for the first time as the rest of the world sees her. There was no coming back. The mystery of PMQs had been exposed. Keir merely does his six rounds with Kemi out of a sense of obligation. He knows his real opponents are Reform and the Greens.
So he quickly took aim at Reform for not apologising for one of its councillors making a death threat. Nigel Farage merely sat and nodded. He can’t bring himself to apologise for anything. It will be his undoing. The more you see of him, the more there is to dislike. Nige asked about the Chagos Islands. It would be interesting to find out when Farage first started taking an interest in the Chagossians. About the time Kemi started caring about student loans.
Earlier in the day, the speaker had taken everyone by surprise with a statement in which he admitted it had been he who had passed on the rumour to the Metropolitan police that Peter Mandelson was planning to do a runner to the British Virgin Islands. It just so happened that Lindsay Hoyle had been on holiday – sorry, on an important delegation – to the BVI last week. It’s such a drag going on all-expenses-paid jaunts to the Caribbean during the February recess. That hot weather is such a drag. We still don’t know where Lindsay heard the rumour. But the business traveller lounge can be a hotbed of gossip.
Mandelson, meanwhile, is still crying foul. We need to remember the real victims in the Jeffrey Epstein fallout. And no one has been more wronged than Mandy. Thoughts and prayers with his lordship. For now, at any rate. Will no one think of Mandelson? He had never been going to the BVI. Why bother going to a country with an extradition treaty? His arrest had been merely a media opportunity. Or maybe not. If he wasn’t being investigated for allegedly handing over confidential documents, there would have been no arrest. Sometimes facts matter.
