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On days like this, Kemi Badenoch increasingly gives the impression of an over-excitable puppy with a low IQ. Overwhelmed by all the different smells she can pick up on her walkies. Convinced that this is going to be THE BEST DAY EVER. Spoilt for choice as she is surrounded by countless enticing sticks. Yet somehow she always manages to grab the wrong end of every one. I suppose you could call that her special talent.
There were any number of angles on the budget Kemi could have chosen at prime minister’s questions. The chancellor’s promise in last year’s budget that she wouldn’t be coming back with more tax increases this time round would have been a start. Rachel Reeves had even made a commitment not to make further freezes to the tax thresholds. All this might have made for a tricky session for Keir Starmer, who is trying to convince us all that last year’s budget never happened. That we have started from a new ground zero.
And yet. And yet Kemi just can’t help herself. She is a sucker for any conspiracy theory going. The wilder the better. It’s what X was made for. Night after night, scrolling through social media for inspiration. So what we got from the leader of the opposition was clinical insanity. Though, like many people with personality disorders, she assumes it is the rest of the world that is mad. At one point she suggested Reeves was in “la-la land”. Pots and kettles.
Kemi began with the resignation of Richard Hughes as chair of the Office for Budget Responsibility. Dark forces were at work, she suggested. There was more to his departure than met the eye. He had been pushed by men and women in grey suits. Only he hadn’t. It may be true that the Treasury wasn’t Hughes’s biggest supporter, but he left because the organisation he ran had made the biggest cock-up in its 15-year history. The OBR has one job. Not to leak its forecasts before the budget. That’s the “responsibility” bit of the OBR. So building an amateur-hour website that could easily be accessed was not a good look.
No matter. Did the prime minister think the person in charge of a failing organisation should resign, Kemi continued. Dear oh dear. Can we think of an organisation that is failing more badly than the government? Oh yes, the Tory party. Polling at record lows. Haemorrhaging support to Reform by the day. There are now more than 20 Tory MPs and ex-MPs who have signed up to Team Nige.
Much more of this and there won’t be anything left of the Tories. And who is in charge? It sounded very much as if Kemi was making an appeal to Kemi to resign. Her subconscious plays tricks on her sometimes. Demands the truth. Though Kemi herself was oblivious. She was laughing as if she was having the time of her life. As if she was nailing PMQs. There weren’t so many laughs coming from the benches behind her. Many Tory MPs are all too aware of their leader’s limitations.
And needless to say, these demands for resignations – Kemi is now up to two or three a day – were not Conservative policy when they were in government. Otherwise Kemi would have been demanding her own sacking much earlier than today. Not to mention that of many of her colleagues. Starting with Mel Stride, the shadow chancellor. As work and pensions secretary he had presided over record increases in the welfare budget. And Kemi was calling out Labour for a Benefits Street budget. Go figure.
This was all just for starters, though. Because Kemi was also convinced that somehow all the budget briefings – the 2p rise in income tax that never happened – were proof of massive stock market manipulation. All this had been done to game the system. Civil servants in the Treasury had made billions. The chancellor herself should be prosecuted for market abuse.
Literally no one except Kemi believes this. Not even her pet Melster, though he has to go along with her as he gets a bit scared of her when she’s this mad and angry. What actually happened was that the government didn’t know what it was doing. It was chaos, pure and simple. There was no hidden hand at work. Just a Treasury in panic mode as it tried to work out how to land its budget.
For her piece de resistance, Kemi rewrote history. Just to make her present make sense. For the last year she has been trying to persuade us that the country’s finances were in a desperate state. And most of us didn’t need much convincing. We feel it every day, even if we may not entirely agree on the culprit. Labour may be more incompetent than hoped but it was the Tories who did the most damage. Yet for Kemi’s market manipulation conspiracies she is now trying to persuade us that the economy is actually in tip-top shape. That Reeves is raising taxes just for the hell of it. She is not even bothered that this has been contradicted by the OBR. Kemi believes what she wants to believe.
All this left Keir in his happy place. There was just one difficult moment when he ignored the awkwardness of being newly converted to the benefits of lifting the two-child cap, having previously suspended his MPs who had voted in favour of it. But for the most part he could just let Kemi rant on. Embarrassing herself and her backbenchers as time and again she missed the point. This should have been an easy win for her and she messed up. “She’s lost the plot,” Keir observed. It was hard to disagree.
This should have been an end of it. But curiously the speaker had granted the Melster an urgent question on Hughes’s resignation even though we all knew exactly why he had resigned. It gave everyone something to do, I guess. The Melster had been hoping the chancellor might answer for herself but Rachel had done a runner straight after PMQs. She is looking done in. This hasn’t been her best week.
Instead it was left to James Murray, the chief secretary to the Treasury, to deputise, as he had for another budget UQ on Monday. He deadpanned yet again, revealing that the chancellor had been happy for the OBR to reveal its forecasts. The Melster looked downcast. He had been told by Kemi there was another conspiracy to be uncovered. There wasn’t. If it looks like a clusterfuck, the chances are it is a clusterfuck.
